ACI Prensa Staff, Jul 1, 2023 / 07:00 am (CNA).
Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect emeritus of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, gave a keynote address June 26 at La Salle University in Mexico City on being “witnesses to the truth in a world in crisis.”
The African cardinal stressed that “today there is so much confusion, so much ambiguity and uncertainty in doctrinal and moral teaching, both outside and inside the Church, especially regarding the identity of Christ and the salvation brought by him.”
The cardinal offered five ways to deal with the current situation.
1. The word of God
The cardinal invited those present to prepare themselves with the word of God in order to fight evil and be well disposed, citing Matthew 4:1–11, where Jesus was led into the desert and tempted by Satan.
Sarah stressed that “our main weapon in spiritual combat is the Word and, therefore, we must know it very well.”
2. Prayer
“The other fundamental weapon is prayer. Pope Benedict gave us a great lesson in the power of prayer in his last 10 years of life,” he noted.
The cardinal encouraged the faithful to not stop praying, going to Mass, or going to confession: “Today we urgently need to reappropriate these divine gifts,” he emphasized.
Sarah also encouraged prayer, reflection, and dialogue with God in silence.
3. The interior life
“When we withdraw into the desert of the interior life, we discern the truth that creation is at war against man, who claims to care for ecology and defend the environment but at the same time promotes abortion, euthanasia, and homosexuality,” the Guinean prelate said.
4. Silence
“In silence, we enter into the presence of God in our hearts. In the silence, all the noises, the distractions, and even the most legitimate concerns are opportunely relativized, put in relation to the cross, and there the light of the Gospel appears. There, everything is offered to God, including ourselves,” he said.
“It is imperative today to discipline the mind and heart by fixing our gaze on the cross,” he pointed out.
“Modern man has started a terrible war against God and against man: a satanic war. This is why the spiritual battle with evil is part of the Christian life,” he added.
Sarah pointed out that the “man fights to protect nature but at the same time destroys man, marriage, life, and refuses to accept himself in his own identity as a man or a woman.”
“God created us male or female and today we say that everyone can choose to be male or female.”
The African cardinal said “the West has forgotten God and seeks only fleeting pleasure. This has resulted in individuals every day more isolated and with a great existential void.”
5. Inner struggle
“The struggle of today and every day takes place in the heart and is, as St. Paul says, against the spirits of evil. The demons seek my ruin and my estrangement from God at all costs,” Sarah stressed.
The cardinal affirmed that “with transhumanism we want to augment man, make man a machine, a superman, perhaps deceiving ourselves with becoming immortal, invincible, super intelligent, super powerful, making man a god.”
Transhumanism is an intellectual, cultural, and scientific movement that asserts a moral duty to improve the physical and cognitive capacities of humans and to apply new technologies to eliminate unwanted conditions such as fatigue, pain, disease, aging, and death.
Sarah was scheduled to offer a Mass at the National Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe on June 29 and July 3.
He was also scheduled to meet with priests from the Primatial Archdiocese of Mexico at the Conciliar Seminary.
The cardinal will be the main speaker at the International Theology Course, an event for priests organized by the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross, part of Opus Dei.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Today on TWITTER Pope Francis is declaring that “Christian prophecy transforms from within” but I understand that the Modernists hold the very same idea and have some formidable well-developed articulations on how it is done.
Presumably the Modernists know they have been successful and have no intention or inclination of renouncing any of it.
An Italian theologian (Fr.G. Cavalcoli OP, on whose personal Italian website some articles pertaining to the topic are translated into English) describes modernism as follows:
“Modernism can be compared to the Nazi occupation army, which during the Second World War invaded Italy with the expectation that it would remain loyal to Hitler’s Germany, after the Italians, having opened their eyes to the deception of fascism, they didn’t want to know anymore.
The Nazis, convinced instead of having God with them (Gott mit uns) and of being the prophets and supporters of the new European order based on Hegelian pantheistic statism of Lutheran origin, tried to obtain by force what the Italians could no longer accept.
The project for the renewal and advancement of the Church, considered by the modernists to be a development of the Second Vatican Council, and therefore of Christianity, is well summed up in the ideas of Rahner and Schillebeeckx: it is that of creating an international religious syncretism and of suppressing the Christian claim to have primacy over other religions and to be obligatory for all mankind.”
Many features conspire to frustrate human control of the trans-humanistic project.
First, postmodern mind believes in tech automatism.
Second, freedom. Freedom to inquire, to develop, to invest and to profit, to satisfy any and all personal desires.
Third, the supreme value of modern life – biological dimension – in competition with moral goods.
(Our cultural relativism dismisses facilely as religious or sectarian all moral objections in matter of great importance, even for themselves.)
Trans-human or super-human project is deeply entangled with business, either economically or philosophically (nature conceived not as a gift but as a conquest; moral dignity conceived not as bodily related, but in the Nietzschean way bounded to will, as it was for the demons in Heaven before our fall).
Since we live in a democracy, furthermore, we have no experience in trying to slow down the utopian and Promethean technological project.
Finally, and most troubling, our point of view of our humanity have been so reductively transformed by the science-tech approach to the world and to life that we have forgotten what we have lost.
In our Western egalitarian bourgeois countries, regardless of class, work is utterly routine, amusements trivial, human relations almost sterile – you can routinely walk in the cities, in fact, seeing more dogs than children – and life’s most intense satisfactions come from chemical addictions.
In the Brave New World, everyone’s lifestyles are predetermined, all beliefs are conditioned, and conformity is obligatory.
But the lack of freedom is not the central defect.
People can embrace willingly the same shallow relationship and trivial pursuits, willful self-debasement and degradation.
Worst of all, their post-human estate is, as in the cave of Plato, neither regretted nor recognized by anyone. They aspire to nothing humanly richer or higher.
In a word, I would say with C.S Lewis:” for our ancestors the Cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the human soul to objective reality, and the answers included wisdom self-discipline and virtue. To the modern mind, the cardinal problem of human life is how to subdue objective reality through the wishes of man. And the answer is a technique. “
Yesterday on TWITTER the Pope went on to say the prophet is a Christian light.
I find your comments dense, flappy and unhelpful, paolo. You seem to speak negatively about Modernism but it’s more narrative than anything with a comparison to Nazism.
Modernism is a synthesis of all heresies. Post-modernism is a technique inside Modernism. It’s heresy with meta-heresy, ill-conceived, ill-directed, full of lies.
Modernism has a secular dimension that can not be supported in any cause or activity and as well has anti-Catholic strains that are a threat to everyone Catholic or not.
‘ The cardinal noted that as faithful Catholics, those who have expressed doubt or concern over the confusion surrounding “Amoris Laetitia” love the Pope “with complete obedience to the office of Peter.”
Yet at the same time, he said, “they don’t accept these questionable interpretations…of ‘Amoris Laetitia,’ interpretations, which in fact contradict what the Church has always taught and practiced.”
Without clarity on these issues, “people are in a very difficult state,” he said, explaining that this is demonstrated by the fact that bishops conferences have issued conflicting guidelines on how to interpret “Amoris Laetitia.”
In addition to Cardinal Burke, other signatories to the dubia letter were Cardinals Walter Brandmüller, president emeritus of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences; Carlo Caffarra, Archbishop Emeritus of Bologna; and Joachim Meisner, Archbishop Emeritus of Cologne. ‘
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/09/24/cardinal-burke-church-divisions-show-urgent-need-for-clarity/