Cardinal Sarah calls on African theologians to resist Western woke ideology
The esteemed African cardinal praised Pope Benedict XVI’s opposition to moral relativism during a speech in April at a seminary in Cameroon.
Cardinal Robert
SarahJohn-Henry Westen/LifeSiteNews
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Wed Jun 5, 2024 - 9:40 pm EDT
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OBALA, Cameroon (LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Robert Sarah denounced the rejection of objective truth in the West that he said has led the moral relativism manifested in today’s “woke” ideologies, praising Pope Benedict XVI’s opposition to Europe’s open hatred of its Christian roots.
The former head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments made his remarks in a speech delivered in April to the students of the Saint-Cyprien Theological School in the Diocese of Obala, Cameroon. The theme of his speech was “The vocation of a Catholic university in the light of the teaching of Benedict XVI.”
Pointing to the former pope as a guide in the intellectual life, Sarah highlighted Benedict’s critique of moral relativism in the West, quoting the words of the former pontiff: “Without being oriented towards the truth, without an attitude of humble and courageous search for truth, every culture disintegrates, falls into relativism and is lost in the ephemeral.”
Elaborating on the immense social consequences of rejecting objective truth, the cardinal continued, “The sense of Truth is the rock that must be the foundation of every solid culture. Without the search for truth, we cannot rely on anything. Everything becomes liquid.”
Without the objectivity of truth, we are given over to subjective appetites and passions. Without truth, there is no longer a just, objective and intangible order, no one can be protected against capricious selfishness and violence.
Truth is the only solid bulwark that opposes the temptation of omnipotence and arbitrariness. Truth is the foundation of order and justice. His absence leaves us in chaos. Without truth, opinions clash and no one can decide between them.
Without truth, there is no longer any possible unity among men. They are condemned to tear each other apart incessantly. For truth is the only good they have in common and from which they can understand each other.
Benedict XVI knew this well, having seen his country sink into Nazi ideology in his youth. He had seen with his own eyes a country, heir to a refined civilization, sink into barbarism. What for? Because the love of truth had been substituted by doubt. And after doubt came the reign of violence and the will to power.
The cardinal then called on African Christian academics to resist errors of moral relativism embraced by the West, comparing the skepticism of political powers with the pragmatism of Pontius Pilate before Christ.
“The African academic world must be careful not to allow itself to be contaminated by the diseases of the mind that the West would like to impose on it,” Sarah declared. “The West is afraid of the search for truth. For many Westerners, truth has become an unpronounceable term. If you speak of truth, you are accused of dogmatism, of oppression. But in fact behind these deceptive speeches hides the violence of the dictatorship of relativism, which itself is often the mask of unavowed financial and material interests.”
He continued, “So let us not be afraid to love and seek the truth! The West has become skeptical like Pontius Pilate. He repeats incessantly in a disillusioned tone: ‘But what is truth?’ (Jn 18:38). And like Pilate, he puts his trust in pragmatic and often unjust political force because he can no longer rely on the force of truth.”
The longtime friend of Pope Benedict then set before his audience the example and teaching of the scholarly pontiff as the antithesis of the world’s hatred and contempt of truth. Highlighting the persecution the former pontiff garnered for his opposition to the relativism of the world, Sarah decried the attempt to silence Pope Benedict, an attempt he said came from both without and within the Church, likening Pope Benedict to the popes and martyrs of the Roman persecution.
“In a world that abhors the truth and revels in lies and hypocrisy, Pope Benedict XVI has consistently presented himself as the humble servant of truth,” Sarah emphasized. “This is why, as I wrote in La Nef for February 2023, he often found himself alone in a world hostile to ‘all that is true, noble, just and pure’ (Phil 4:8). A prophet of truth who is Christ in the face of the empire of lies, a fragile messenger in the face of calculating and self-interested powers. Faced with the giant Goliath of relativistic dogmatism and all-powerful consumerism, Benedict XVI had no other weapons than words.”
“But lies and compromise did not tolerate it. Outside the Church, but also within it, there has been a rage against Benedict XVI. His words have been caricatured. They have been distorted and ridiculed. The world wanted to silence him because his message was unbearable to him. They wanted to gag him. Benedict XVI has revived in our time the figure of the Popes of Antiquity, martyrs crushed by the dying Roman Empire. The world, like Rome of old, trembled before this old man with the heart of a child. The world is too compromised with lies to dare to hear the voice of its conscience. Benedict XVI was a martyr for the truth, for Christ. Betrayal, dishonesty, sarcasm, nothing was spared him. He will have lived the mystery of iniquity to the end.”
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The cardinal went on to commission African academics with the special task of unashamedly keeping Christ in the university, saying, “You must not, therefore, be ashamed to be enlightened by the light of Christ. Here again, you, African academics, have a special mission. For here again the West, which was once Christian, now looks at its Christian roots with shame. Christ has been expelled from the university in many countries of Europe. We refuse to see in him the light that has come to illuminate the nations, to illuminate our failing reasons.”
Insisting that – contrary to western attempts to establish a culture without God – “worship is the heart of culture,” Sarah highlighted Pope Benedict’s teaching that “European culture was born of the search for God,” and that “the monks, in seeking God, have engendered the architecture of cathedrals as the best musical or poetic works.”
“European academics have forgotten this,” Sarah decried. “And their voluntary amnesia sterilizes their culture, which now revels in the ugliness of a certain contemporary art, or the questioning of the most solid foundations by wokeism.”
“Your generation of African academics must therefore take over!” the African cardinal declared, calling for a renewal of culture ordered according to Christ.
“By seeking the truth, by seeking the Truth made man in Jesus Christ, you will give birth to a new African culture,” he said. “You will fertilize art, letters, philosophy, architecture! You will even create a new way of approaching economics and science by putting them back at the service of man and truth. You will free them from the capitalist obsession with profitability at all costs, even at the cost of human life.”
By studying under the gaze of God, you will put medicine back at the service of the true man by freeing it from the sorcerer’s apprentices who want to fight the fertility of African families. You will put medicine at the service of life by freeing it from the culture of death that makes children die in their mother’s womb and old people useless to economic profitability.
By studying under God’s gaze, you will bring to light the foundations of any authentic civilization: the difference between man and woman, respect for the elders. You will get rid of the dictatorship of the deadly theories of gender and the LGBT lobby which, under the pretext of liberation, try to impose their delirium on us.
Pointing to St. Paul words to Timothy, “A time will come when people will no longer tolerate the teaching of sound doctrine; but, according to their whims, they will go and seek out a crowd of masters to calm their itch to hear something new,” the outspoken cardinal concluded by warning his listeners to “avoid falling under the seduction of relativistic discourses that are constantly fed to us by certain Western academic publications, whose arrogance does not mask the intellectual neo-colonialism that the Holy Father regularly denounces.”
Referencing reactions in the West to Africa’s rejection of the blessing of homosexual “couples,” Sarah insisted that the rejection of such blessings was not because Africa is culturally “allergic to homosexuality” but because the churches in Africa were adhering to objective truth.
“The doctrinal reaction of African theologians to the recent questioning of Catholic teaching on sexuality is exemplary in this respect,” Sarah said. “No, despite what some have claimed, Africans have not reacted because of a cultural particularism that would make them allergic to homosexuality. No! Africans reacted because of their attachment to the universal and timeless truth.”
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- african theologians
- Cardinal Robert Sarah
- Moral Relativism
- Pope Benedict Xvi
- saint-cyprien theological school
- Woke Ideologies
