Cardinal Robert Sarah at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC on May 17. (CNS photo)
Cardinal Robert Sarah
urged American Catholics to resist “ideological colonialism,” in his address delivered
yesterday to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC.
“Nowhere is [religious
persecution] clearer than in the threat that societies are visiting on the
family through a demonic ‘gender ideology,’ a deadly impulse that is being
experienced in a world increasingly cut off from God through ideological
colonialism,” Cardinal Sarah said
at the annual gathering, which this year also included addresses from
Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and from Sister Constance Veit of the
Little Sisters of the Poor.
The Guinean cardinal serves as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship.
Below is the full text of Cardinal Sarah’s remarks at the National
Prayer Breakfast, via Catholic News Agency.
***
Opening
Remarks
Thank
you for inviting me to this remarkable gathering, in the company of such a
distinguished audience.
As
you well know, what happens in the United States has repercussions everywhere.
The entire globe looks to you, waiting and praying, to see what America
resolves on the pressing challenges the world faces today. Such is your
influence and responsibility.
I
do not say this lightly, because we find ourselves in such portentous times.
1. The Situation of the World and the Mission of the Church
Rapid
social and economic development in the past half century has not been
accompanied by an equally fervent spiritual progress, as we witness what Pope
Francis calls “globalized indifference.”
It
is the result of giving in to the delusion that we are self-sufficient, that
man is his own measure in a pervasive individualism. It is manifested in the fear
of suffering in our societies, our closing our eyes and hearts to the poor and
vulnerable, and, in a very despicable way, in how we discard the unborn and the
elderly.
When
he prophetically announced the Second Vatican Council in the Apostolic
Constitution Humanae Salutis, Saint John XXIII remarked that the
human community was in “turmoil” as it sought to establish a new world order
where humanity relies entirely on technical and scientific solutions instead of
God.
Today
we are witnessing the next stage – and the consummation – of the efforts to
build a utopian paradise on earth without God. It is the stage of denying sin
and the fall altogether. But the death of God results in the burial of good,
beauty, love and truth. Good becomes evil, beauty is ugly, love becomes the
satisfaction of sexual primal instincts, and truths are all relative.
So
all manner of immorality is not only accepted and tolerated today in advanced
societies, but even promoted as a social good. The result is hostility to
Christians, and, increasingly, religious persecution.
Nowhere
is this clearer than in the threat that societies are visiting on the family
through a demonic “gender ideology,” a deadly impulse that is being experienced
in a world increasingly cut off from God through ideological colonialism.
Saint
Pope John XXIII observed in 1962:
“Tasks of immense gravity and amplitude await the Church, as in
the most tragic periods of her history. The Church must now inject the
vivifying and perennial energies of the gospel into the veins of the human
community.”
This
remains the challenge that the Church is facing presently, more even than in
1962, and it is our task today. This is what I spoke of in my book God or Nothing:
“Today the Church must fight against prevailing trends, with
courage and hope, and not be afraid to raise her voice to denounce the
hypocrites, the manipulators, and the false prophets. For two thousand years,
the Church has faced many contrary winds but at the end of the most difficult
journey, the victory was always won.”
2. The Family
“The
future of the world and the Church passes through the family.” These prophetic
words of Saint John Paul II show how the Church, in our time, must, above all, defend
and promote the beauty of the Christian family in fidelity to God’s design. In
his post-synodal Exhortation on the Family, Amoris
Lætitia (“The Joy of Love”), Pope Francis states clearly: “In no way must
the Church desist from proposing the full ideal of marriage, God’s plan in all
its grandeur … proposing less than what Jesus offers to the human being.” This is why the Holy Father openly and
vigorously defends Church teaching on contraception, abortion, homosexuality,
reproductive technologies, the education of children and much more. In my first
five years as Archbishop of Conakry (Guinea, Africa), I made it my task to
dedicate all of my pastoral letters to the family. Perhaps only the beauty of
the family can reawaken the longing for God in the innermost recesses of the
conscience of our brothers and sisters, and heal the wounds inflicted on our
humanity by sin.
Saint
John Paul, the Pope of the new evangelization, describes in Familiaris Consortio how the family is the
first place where the Gospel is welcomed and is also the first herald of the
Gospel. How true this is!
The
generous and responsible love of spouses, made visible through the self-giving
of parents, who welcome and nurture children as a gift of God, makes love
visible in our generation. It makes present the perfect charity of the Trinity.
“If you see charity, you see the Trinity,” wrote Saint Augustine.
From
the beginning of creation, God, who is a communion of persons – Father, Son and
Holy Spirit, three different Persons, yet one – has built a Trinitarian
structure into our very nature. In the continent of my origin, Africa, we
declare: “Man is nothing without woman, woman is nothing without man, and the
two are nothing without a third element, which is the child.” The Triune God
dwells within each of us and imbues our whole being: God’s own image and
likeness.
Every
human being, like the persons of the Trinity, has the capacity to be united
with other persons in communion through the vinculum
caritatis – the bond of charity –
of the Holy Spirit. The family is a natural preparation and anticipation of the
communion that is possible when we are united with God. The family, as it were,
is a natural praeparatio evangelica –
written into our nature.
This
is why the devil is so intent on destroying the family. If the family is
destroyed, we lose our God-given, anthropological foundations and so find it more
difficult to welcome the saving Good News of Jesus Christ: self-giving,
fruitful love.
St.
John Paul explained: if it is true that the family is the place where more than
anywhere else human beings can flourish and truly be themselves, it is also a
place where human beings can be humanly and spiritually wounded.
The
rupture of the foundational relationships of someone’s life – through
separation, divorce or distorted impositions of the family, such as
cohabitation and same sex unions – is a deep wound that closes the heart to self-giving
love unto death, and even leads to cynicism and despair.
These
situations cause damage to little children through inflicting upon them a deep
existential doubt about love. They are a scandal – a stumbling block – that prevents
the most vulnerable from believing in such love, and a crushing burden that can
prevent them from opening to the healing power of the Gospel.
Advanced
societies, including – I regret – this nation have done and continue to do everything
possible to legalize such situations. But this can never be a truthful
solution. It is like putting bandages on an infected wound. It will continue to
poison the body until antibiotics are taken.
Sadly,
the advent of artificial reproductive technologies, surrogacy, so-called
homosexual “marriage”, and other evils of gender ideology, will inflict even
more wounds in the midst of the generations we live with.
This
is why it is so important to fight to protect the family, the first cell of the
life of the Church and every society. This is not about abstract ideas. It is
not an ideological war between competing ideas. This is about defending ourselves,
children and future generations from a demonic ideology that says children do not
need mothers and fathers. It denies human nature and wants to cut off entire
generations from God.
3. Religious Freedom
I
encourage you to truly make use of the freedom willed by your founding fathers,
lest you lose it. In so many other countries, on almost a daily basis, we hear of merciless beheadings, futile bombings
of churches, torching of orphanages and ruthless expulsions of entire families
from homes that religious minorities suffer worldwide simply because of their
beliefs. Even in this yet young twenty-first century of barely 16 years, one
million people have been martyred around the world because of their belief in
Jesus Christ.
Yet the violence against Christians is not just
physical, it is also political, ideological and cultural. This form of
religious persecution is equally damaging, yet more hidden. It does not destroy
physically but spiritually; it demolishes the teaching of Jesus and His Church
and, hence, the foundations of faith by leading souls astray. By this violence,
political leaders, lobby groups and mass media seek to neutralize and
depersonalize the conscience of Christians so as to dissolve them in a fluid
society without religion and without God. This is the will of the Evil One: to close
Heaven … out of envy.
Do we not see signs of this insidious war in this
great nation of the United States? In the name of “tolerance,” the Church’s
teachings on marriage, sexuality and the human person are dismantled. The
legalization of same sex marriage, the obligation to accept contraception
within health care programs, and even “bathroom
bills” that allow men to use the women’s restrooms and locker rooms. Should not
a biological man use the men’s restroom? How simpler can that concept be?
How low we are sinking for a nation built on a set of moral
claims about God, the human person, the meaning of life, and the purpose of
society, given by America’s first settlers and founders! God is named in your
founding documents as “Creator” and “Supreme Judge” over individuals and
government. The human person endowed with God-given and therefore inalienable
rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” George Washington
wrote that “the establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the motive
that induced me to the field of battle.”
Today,
we find ourselves before the battle of a sickness that has pervaded our world.
I repeat: the battle of a sickness. That is what we face. I call this sickness
“the liquidation, the eclipse of God.” Pope Francis describes the causes of
this “sickness.” I quote:
“Religious liberty is not only that of thought or private worship.
It is freedom to live according to ethical principles consequent upon the truth
found, be it privately or publicly. This is a great challenge in the globalized
world, where weak thought – which is like a sickness – also lowers the
general ethical level, and in the name of a false concept of tolerance ends up
by persecuting those who defend the truth about man and the ethical
consequences.”
What
are the remedies to this sickness? What should we do to protect the family,
religious freedom, and marriage – as revealed to us by God?
Concluding
Remarks
Before
such a distinguished gathering, I offer three humble suggestions.
1. First: Be prophetic. The Book of Proverbs tells us: “Where there is no vision, discernment, the people perish” (29, 18).
Discern carefully – in your lives, your homes, your workplaces – how, in your
nation, God is being eroded, eclipsed, liquidated. Blessed Paul VI saw that in
1968 when, for the Church, he so courageously wrote Humanae Vitae. What are the threats to Christian identity and the
family today? ISIS, the growing influence of China, the colonization of
ideologies such as gender? How do we react?
2. Be faithful. This is my second suggestion. Specifically for you, as men and
women called to influence even the political sphere you have a mission of
bringing Divine Revelation to bear in the lives of your fellow citizens. Uphold
the wise principles of your founding fathers. Do not be afraid to proclaim the
truth with love, especially about marriage according to God’s plan, just as
courageously as Saint John the Baptist, who risked his life to proclaim the
truth. The battle to preserve the roots of mankind is perhaps the greatest
challenge that our world has faced since its origins. In the words of Saint
Catherine of Siena: “Proclaim the truth
and do not be silent through fear.”
3. Third: Pray. Sometimes, in front of happenings in the world, our nation or
even the Church, the results of our prayer might tempt us to become
discouraged. Like Sisyphus in the Greek myth: condemned to roll a large boulder
uphill, only to see it roll down again as soon as he had reached the top. Pope
Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est
encourages us : “People who pray are not wasting their time,
even though the situation appears desperate and seems to call for action alone.”
Whether
in doctrine or morality or everyday decisions, the heart of prayer is to
discern God’s will. This can only happen in prolonged moments of silence where,
like Elijah before the horrendous threats of Queen Jezebel, we allow the
“gentle breeze” of God to enlighten us and confirm us along our journey to do
God’s will. Such was the virginal silence of the Blessed Mother. At a marriage,
the wedding feast of Cana, when for a new family “they have no wine,” Mary our
Mother trusted in the grace given by Jesus to bestow the joy of love
overflowing – Amoris Lætitia. She pronounced
her very last words, “Do whatever He tells you” (John 2: 1-12). Then she remained
silent.
Be
prophetic. Be faithful. Pray. That is why I came to this prayer breakfast. To
encourage you. Be prophetic. Be faithful. And, above all, pray. These three
suggestions make present that the battle for the soul of America, and the soul
of the world, is primarily spiritual. They show that the battle is fought
firstly with our own conversion to God’s will every day.
And
so I wholly welcome this initiative, and join you in prayer that this great
country may experience a new great “spiritual awakening”, and help stem the
tide of evil that is spreading in the world. I am confident that your efforts
will no doubt contribute to protecting human life, strengthening the family,
and safeguarding religious freedom not only here in these United States, but
everywhere in the world.
For
in the end: it is “God or nothing.”
Thank
you very much.
