Three Cheers For Cardinal Sarah

Blessedly un-PC: Cardinal Robert Sarah.

When it happens – far too seldom, admittedly – it is a joy and a pleasure to be able to report about a Cardinal who really takes his job seriously and is more concerned about the souls of his sheep than about his own popularity or acceptance.

Cardinal Sarah is the man in charge of restructuring the entire apparatus of Church development programs. He obviously has a clear idea of what development aid must not be: a purely secular undertaking indistinguishable from secular organisations of the sort. But our man is also very attentive to the duties of a shepherd to speak clearly.

Try this:

“if we have fear of proclaiming the truth of the Gospel, if we are ashamed of denouncing the grave deviations in the area of morality, if we accommodate ourselves to this world of moral laxity and religious and ethical relativism, if we are afraid to energetically denounce the abominable laws regarding the new global ethos, regarding marriage, the family in all of its forms, abortion, laws in total opposition to the laws of nature and of God, and that the western nations and cultures are promoting and imposing thanks to the mass media and their economic power, then the prophetic words of Ezechiel will fall on us as a grave divine reproach.”

These words, pronounced at a ceremony of ordination to priesthood and diaconate, have all the clarity of purpose so often absent from our bishops, particularly (but not only) the European ones.

Cardinal Sarah again:

“These reproaches are serious, but more important is the offense that we have committed against God when, having received the responsibility of caring for the spiritual good of all, we mistreat souls by depriving them of the true teaching of the doctrine of regarding God, regarding man, and the fundamental values of human existence,”

The clergyman who has received the responsibility of caring for the souls of his sheep, and feeds them with common places and innocuous slogan instead, mistreats the souls entrusted to him, and will be punished accordingly. Archbishop Nichols’ ears must be burning, and our Archbishop Namby-Pamby also has an awful lot to reflect about; though Cardinal Schoenborn must, surely, take the biscuit.

In another show of beautifully shameless and absolutely un-PC orthodoxy, Cardinal Sarah says:

“we no longer know what is evil and what is good. There are a multitude of points of view.  Today, we call white what we once called black, and vice versa.  What is serious, and make no mistake about it, is the transformation of error into a rule of life.

“In this context, as priests, pastors and guides of the People of God, you should be continuously focused on being always loyal to the doctrine of Christ.  It is necessary for you to constantly strive to acquire the sensitivity of conscience, the faithful respect for dogma and morality, which constitute the deposit of faith and the common patrimony of the Church of Christ.”

This man is a steamroller. I hope we will be hearing more from him in the months to come. The Church desperately needs people like him.

Mundabor