“Africa, and therefore the Church, will save the family.” Cardinal Robert Sarah, 70, of Guinea, is the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. On Sept. 23, he presented a keynote address on the role of families at the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia, and he has challenged efforts to change Church discipline that bars divorced-and-remarried Catholics from receiving the Eucharist. On Sept. 10, Cardinal Sarah discussed key issues before the synod in an email exchange with Register senior editor Joan Frawley Desmond. Read more at NCRegister.com.

 

The 2015 Ordinary Synod of Bishops will address pastoral solutions for divorced-and-remarried Catholics, and some believe the Church will allow them to receive the Eucharist. In your book, you reject that possibility: “No one, not even the pope, can set pastoral ministry in opposition to doctrine.” What does it mean to “set pastoral ministry in opposition to doctrine,” and do you believe most synod delegates agree with your position?

Look, this is not about agreeing with me or with someone else. It is about adhering with one’s words and life to God’s law. If priests, bishops and also the synod fathers consider doctrine as if looking through an antique store’s window and not as a living body, I fear that they are betraying their vocation. Doctrine is not a set of moral precepts. Doctrine is a set of teachings that come to us from sacred Scriptures, the Word of God and Tradition. Doctrine is a person! It is Jesus in his words. How can we think that priests should separate pastoral practice from doctrine as though the Gospel is an expression of something that is detached from reality? Either our faith is founded on the encounter with a Person, who is God made man through his son Jesus and, therefore, on a testimony that must be renewed every day by the death and resurrection of Christ, or our faith is false and is founded upon the idols of modernity.

Many think about getting rid of doctrine because they allegedly do not consider it to be adaptable to the times. ... But Christ did not come to pander to society. He came to save humanity from its fall and to bring Truth and to personally and profoundly change each one of us. The encounter with Christ changes the lives of those who love him. Truth and the dogmas of faith compel us to raise the bar, to aim high and to live every day to become saints. Relativism is easy because nothing in it has value and worth; it leads to a disengagement from life and, in essence, to turning man into a beast.

 

You say, “The Son of God gives the strength and the grace to live a married life in the new dimension of the kingdom of God.” What is this new dimension?

The new dimension of the kingdom of God is communion with God and his Church. Today, the real novelty is an “old” novelty: It is the encounter with Christ through the Gospel. It has the same value today as it had 2,000 years ago. This truth is proclaimed with words and also with works. And the great work that unites a man and a woman is marriage in Christ and with Christ.

Marriage is openness towards life and therefore towards children. No one denies that the family faces difficulties. Perhaps in contemporary society, these challenges are stronger and more poisonous, because the attack on Christianity and the Church is obvious. However, I am convinced that men and women, especially young people, desire great things. We have to accompany them towards a path of holiness, not making them believe that God’s love is impossible and not to give up because the commitment is too great.

Let us remember that Christian marriage between a man and a woman is an institution created directly by God, and the family is a pre-Christian institution. For this reason, gay marriage is a “defeat for humanity,” as Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, pointed out after the referendum in Ireland. Because the family has always existed from the beginning for the transmission of life; but if this transmission is broken, how can that institution be called “family”? A homosexual union is not in Christ and with Christ.

The stakes of the next synod, then, are not the different forms of the family, [though] many would like to see ratified their own weaknesses and sins. The real stake of the synod, which also includes reaffirming the beauty and unity of the family, is: What type of man [do] we want in the present and future? In this debate on the family, God is the center. He is the starting point, and his Word guides us. And this, if anything, we have to go back to. The rest are, like we say in Italian, “farmyard quarrels.”

 

 In your book, you “solemnly state that the Church in Africa is staunchly opposed to any rebellion against the teaching of Jesus and of the magisterium.” What have you heard from African Church leaders and the laity regarding efforts to change Church discipline, and is there anything unique to the African experience that has led to this strong stand?

I have a conviction: It will be Africa, and therefore the Church, who will save the family. Marriage between a man and a woman is also marriage between man and the Church, who is the Bride of Christ. Destroying the first union is destroying also the second. Therefore, Africa will not yield a millimeter on this!

Africa is part of God’s plan from the beginning. Just look at Revelation: When God chose to establish a covenant with man, he began in Egypt. It was Africa that saved Jesus: Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt to escape Herod’s edict against male children and against Jesus himself. And, again, it was an African, Simon of Cyrene, who helped Jesus carry his cross on Calvary.

So, from the beginning, God wanted to involve Africa in the plan of salvation of the world. Africa certainly has many problems, but the Church in Africa is characterized by a vitality and dynamism that is unknown in the West today. In secularized Europe and in all the so-called developed countries, wealth has perverted men to such an extent that they do not think in any other way than to satisfy their physical and carnal desires. They only count on money and material success, and if they are not successful, they fall into depression and sadness.

In Africa, poverty is still very strong in many of her countries, yet Africans exude happiness and joy. God is their wealth and their hope. Obviously, they also aim to combat economic misery, but not to enter into the spiritual poverty of those who have driven God out of their lives. In this deep anthropological crisis, Africa, despite her poverty, and indeed because of this poverty, which is the poverty of Christ in the Gospel, can give to the Church her most precious treasure: fidelity to God and to the Gospel, her love of life and the family.

 

CNA/Paul Badde photo