By SHAUN KENNEY
Robert Cardinal Sarah is one of those bright lights in the Catholic firmament, especially for those of us whose consciences are fraught somewhere between faithfulness to Rome, fidelity to the Magisterium, and deep-rooted concerns about the direction of the Amazonian Synod.
For those of you who have not had the chance to read Sarah’s The Day Is Now Far Spent, I cannot encourage you more to read this book. The text is rather deep — it is a translation from French into English and written in the cerebral style of most French theological work — but it has more than a treasure trove of gems.
Specifically, I want to quote two paragraphs at length and then fast forward a bit to Sarah’s role in the Amazonian Synod. To wit:
“What will our world look like in a century? Abortion, the commercialization of the body, sexual excesses, gender theory, the disintegration of marriage, and euthanasia are the many fronts of one and the same battle with the Western elite that knows only three things: money, power, and pleasure. These people dance on the cadavers of hundreds of thousands of fragile human beings whom they have deliberately sacrificed in order to keep their dominance.
“The Church is the last rampart against this macabre, suicidal new world ethic. She must enlighten the consciences of everyone. When the sun of the Church is hidden, men grow cold. It is necessary to rediscover the courage of St. Athanasius and of St. Irenaeus in order to topple these new heresies. John Paul II paved the way.”
Note that Sarah’s target is not so much abortion, commercialization, and so forth. These are all consequences — spiritual diseases rather than causes.
Rather, the root cause is a postmodern Western mentality that we have seen infect every inch of American life over the last four decades or more. Money, power, and pleasure seem to have replaced liberty, fraternity, and equality in the Western canon — not that either of these trinities was ever reflective of Christendom in the slightest degree. Yet just as the French revolutionaries attempted to counterfeit a trinity of brotherhood, so too have the postmoderns attempted to mimic this with a trinity of self-worship rather than social worship.
Thus the mass evacuation from the postmodern West seems to have begun in earnest, starting with Pope John Paul II and the temporary victory over totalitarianism in Eastern Europe only to watch as Western leftists adopted new tactics — ones that swallowed up the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI.
Sadly, it is Pope Francis who must deal with competing secular religions in the West; one of the left who believes they can co-opt the Catholic faith, the other of the right who believes they can restore a sense of temporal power to the glory of the Church.
It is perhaps no secret that Sarah isn’t exactly a fan of the attempts of the “Western elites” to turn the Amazonian Synod into an effort to create married priests and force women’s ordinations. Almost universally these proposals have been condemned as either laughable or extreme. . . . And yet one has to wonder.
Certainly there are forces on the left who see an Anglicanization of the Catholic faith to be to their advantage. Certainly the German bishops believe as such. Certainly there are forces on the right who can only see the glory of the Catholic faith through its ability to impose rather than propose — and profit handsomely by being critical of Holy Mother Church.
For many of us, these are difficult times. We want to be faithful to Christ — all of us do (I hope). To be outside of the Pope and the bishops is to make one a Protestant or worse. To be outside of the Magisterium is to put oneself beyond salvation, and yet we are a hospital for sinners and not a museum of saints. We want to root for Pope Francis and at the same time feel terribly hurt when American concerns are ridiculed by the Holy Father. To what possible end?
For a nation whose fidelity to Pope John Paul II was ironclad, and whose fidelity to Pope Benedict as a defender of truth against the Western elites? An entire generation of Catholics in America begins to wonder, and it is hard not to.
But there is hope, and for that hope I want to turn our attention back to Cardinal Sarah.
Sarah is one of the few voices that — perhaps paradoxically to American ears — equally praises both Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Francis.
Hence there is no confusion when Sarah defends Francis by stating, “The truth is that the Church is represented on Earth by the Vicar of Christ — that is, by the Pope. And whoever is against the Pope is, ipso facto, outside the Church.”
In January, Pope Francis quoted Pope Paul VI in defense of the tradition of celibacy in the Western Rite, when Paul VI said he would give his life before changing the law of celibacy. Francis then said, “I’m not in agreement with allowing optional celibacy. No.” Rather unambiguous language for a man who has been criticized for his ambiguity.
Yet Sarah has also been a vigorous critic of Western secular ideologies using the Amazon Synod to push agendas contrary to the Magisterium. Sarah has called the proposal for viri probati an absurdity, and not just an absurdity but a contradiction of the Second Vatican Council. Alternatively, Sarah remains critical of attempts to “politicize” the Church into camps of progressives and conservatives, stating that such division is more typical of a television talk show or a marketing ploy.
Sarah’s words ring true, not just because most of us instinctively know that the mass media love creating controversy in order to gain readers and sell advertisements. What’s more, nothing the Church does is in a vacuum. These Western elites aren’t Catholics, they have sold out to political religions a long time ago. Their god is that trinity of self that Sarah warns about: power, money, and pleasure — and Democrats and Republicans both play that game.
Of course, I too share the vast concerns many Catholics in America share about the Amazonian Synod, specifically as it relates to married priests and women’s ordination. The latter is a metaphysical impossibility; the former would be a very tragic and sad end to a 1,000 year tradition in the Western Rite of the Catholic Church.
Critics will argue that the Amazon needs more priests. The counterargument? Send more priests! But send priests, not counterfeits and certainly not witches dressed up like priests. Send deacons if you can’t send priests…but do not debase the currency of the faith in order to combat the postmodern disease.
Sarah understands this. Francis, I believe, understands this…or at least, I must believe that the Holy Father understands this. Given the trickling of information coming out of the synod, it appears as if some of the bishops of the Church understand this as well, but it all hinges on the Holy Father.
The synod is not a parliament, after all. Not my words, but the words of Pope Francis. To again quote Sarah, the Catholic Church is the last rampart of freedom against the macabre ethic of the secular elite whose only language is power.
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A very short update. My friend has been five months sober so far. Five whole months! That’s tremendous progress, and it is still progress. But most of all, I attribute this entirely to your prayers here at The Wanderer.
It’s a funny thing about the good that gets done in the world. We don’t actually do anything, but rather we permit God’s grace to operate freely within us. It’s when we try to do it ourselves that we mess things up — akin to grabbing the steering wheel from the passenger side of the car.
I wish I could say that my friend’s agnosticism was being healed as well, but that too is in God’s time and not my own.
All I can say is thank you from the bottom of my heart for your prayers on his behalf . . . you most likely saved his life.
St. Louis de Montfort and Venerable Matt Talbot, pray for us!
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First Teachers warmly encourages readers to submit their thoughts, views, opinions, and insights to the author directly either via e-mail or by mail. Please send any correspondence to Shaun Kenney c/o First Teachers, 5289 Venable Road, Kents Store, VA 23084 or by e-mail to kenneys@cua.edu.
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