Cardinal Robert Sarah Quotes

We need priests who are men of the interior life, “God’s watchmen” and pastors passionately committed to the evangelization of the world, and not social workers or politicians.

A Godless society, which considers any spiritual questions a dead letter, masks the emptiness of its materialism by killing time so as better to forget eternity.

Today all our freedoms are threatened. Economic, political, and media pressures never cease to diminish the connection between liberty and truth.

Soviet Communism showed how possible it was to lead mankind into misery while promising absolute equality.

Unfortunately, it is easier to destroy a country than to rebuild it.

God is still calling as many men as in the past; it is the men whose hearing is not what it used to be.

Relativism is a widespread evil, and it is not easy to combat it. The task becomes more complex inasmuch as it arbitrarily serves as a sort of charter for a way of communal life. Relativism attempts to complete the process of the social disappearance of God. It guides mankind with an attractive logic that proves to be a perverse totalitarian system.

In our materialistic civilization, man thinks almost exclusively of his own narrow interests. He sees God as the one who ought to provide him with what consumption does not give him. God is utilized to satisfy selfish demands. If he does not answer prayer, they abandon him. Some even go so far as to blaspheme his holy name. The religion that ought to connect heaven and earth then runs the risk of becoming a purely narcissistic space.

Mankind has never been so rich, yet it reaches astounding heights of moral and spiritual destitution because of the poverty of our interpersonal relationships and the globalization of indifference.

History has shown that, when the Church becomes less worldly, her missionary witness shines more brightly.

In large sectors of the Church, we have lost the sense of God’s objectivity. Each individual starts from his subjective experience and creates for himself a religion that suits him.

Man’s dignity is an echo of God’s transcendence. But if we no longer tremble with a joyful, reverential fear before the greatness of God, how could man be for us a mystery worthy of respect? He no longer has this divine nobility. He becomes a piece of merchandise, a laboratory specimen.

African philosophy declares: “Man is nothing without woman, woman is nothing without man, and the two are nothing without a third element, which is the child.” Fundamentally, the African view of man is trinitarian.

and to each Christian they will say, as once to Francis of Assisi: “Go and repair my Church!” Go, repair by your faith, by your hope and your charity. Go and repair by your prayer and your fidelity. Thanks to you, my Church will again become my house.

The spiritual life goes through alternating phases in which God successively shows and hides himself, makes himself heard and is quiet. Prayer teaches us the subtleties of divine speech. Is God being silent, or are we not hearing him because our interior ear and our intellect are not accustomed to his language? The fruit of silence is learning to discern his voice, even though it always keeps its mystery.

Just as when we were children, we were afraid to be alone in the dark and could only be assured by the presence of someone who loved us. Well this is exactly what happened on Holy Saturday, the voice of God resounded in the realm of death. The unimaginable occurred; namely, love penetrated Hell.

Today gender theory seems to be toying with this same illusory battle for equality. The dream, the illusion, and the artificial paradises very quickly turn into a nightmare. Man and woman form a unity in love; the denial of their differences is a destructive utopia, a deadly impulse born in a world cut off from God.

The Church opens herself to the world, not in order to win men for an institution with its own claims to power, but in order to lead them to themselves by leading them to him of whom each person can say with Saint Augustine: he is closer to me than I am to myself (cf. Confessions, III, 6, 11). He who is infinitely above me is yet

Man’s dignity is an echo of God’s transcendence. But if we no longer tremble with a joyful, reverential fear before the greatness of God, how could man be for us a mystery worthy of respect? He no longer has this divine nobility. He becomes a piece of merchandise, a laboratory specimen. Without the sense of the adoration of God, human relations become tinged with vulgarity and aggressiveness. The more deference we show to God at the altar, the more tactful and courteous we will be toward our brethren.

There is no need for particular speech in order to be with God. We have only to be quiet and to contemplate his love. In the silence, we look at God and let him look at us.

Conversion is, in fact, a lifelong task.

Man is great only when he is on his knees before God.

Simplicity, confidence, self-abandonment in God’s hands: that is our path to God. Christian life is a conspiracy of charity.

True freedom lies in the battle to agree with the Father’s will and to correspond to it.

In order to accomplish her true task adequately, the Church must constantly renew the effort to detach herself from her tendency towards worldliness and once again to become open towards God.

No! The world that should not be loved is another world, namely, the world as it has become under the dominion of Satan and of sin. The world of ideologies that deny human nature and destroy the family.

He revealed to us the fact that the true priest offers himself as a sacrifice. To be a priest is to enter ontologically into this offering of self to the Father for the Church that Jesus exemplified throughout his life.

The foundation of the liturgy must remain the search for God. We can only be dismayed by the fact that this intention of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, and of the Council Fathers as well, is often obscured and, worse yet, betrayed. . . .

I asked the earth and it answered, “I am not He”; and all things that are in the earth made the same confession. I asked the sea and the deeps and the creeping things, and they answered, “We are not your God, seek higher.” I asked the winds that blow, and the whole air with all that is in it answered, “Anaximenes was wrong; I am not God.” I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they answered, “Neither are we God whom you seek.” And I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: “Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him.” And they cried out in a great voice: “He made us.” My question was my gazing upon them, and their answer was their beauty. Man is a silent, incarnate word of God. The moon, the stars, the sun, the sea, the firmament are the visible proof of the existence and omnipotence of God, who created them out of sheer love. These creatures are the powerful, mysterious voice of God.

For the Church’s mission is a mission of love, and love does not dominate. Love is there to serve and to die, so that man might have life, and have it abundantly. John Paul II was right when he used to say that we are only just starting to evangelize.

Refusing to let God enter into all aspects of human life amounts to condemning man to solitude. He is no longer anything but an isolated individual, without origin or destiny. He finds himself condemned to wander through the world like a nomadic barbarian, without knowing that he is the son and heir of a Father who created him through love and calls him to share his eternal happiness. It is a profound error to think that God came to limit and frustrate our freedom. On the contrary, God comes to free us from solitude and to give meaning to our freedom. Modern man has made himself the prisoner of reason that is so autonomous that it has become solitary and autistic.

would like to quote also words by Paul VI, spoke on June 29, 1972, during a Mass at Saint Peter’s Basilica. The pope did not hide his pain and anguish: “Given the situation in the Church today, we have the impression that through some cracks in the wall the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God: it is doubt, uncertainty, questioning, dissatisfaction, confrontation. There is no confidence in the Church. Instead people put their trust in the first secular prophet who comes along to talk to us about a newspaper editorial or a social movement, and they run after him to ask him whether he has the formula for true life, ignoring the fact that we already have it, that we are the owners of that formula.

Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing. Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet. It holds forth in an unending monologue. Postmodern society rejects the past and looks at the present as a cheap consumer object; it pictures the future in terms of an almost obsessive progress. Its dream, which has become a sad reality, will have been to lock silence away in a damp, dark dungeon. Thus there is a dictatorship of speech, a dictatorship of verbal emphasis. In this theater of shadows, nothing is left but a purulent wound of mechanical words, without perspective, without truth, and without foundation. Quite often “truth” is nothing more than the pure and misleading creation of the media, corroborated by fabricated images and testimonies. When that happens, the word of God fades away, inaccessible and inaudible. Postmodernity is an ongoing offense and aggression against the divine silence. From morning to evening, from evening to morning, silence no longer has any place at all; the noise tries to prevent God himself from speaking. In this hell of noise, man disintegrates and is lost; he is broken up into countless worries, fantasies, and fears. In order to get out of these depressing tunnels, he desperately awaits noise so that it will bring him a few consolations. Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God. 75. Even in the schools, silence has disappeared. And yet how can anyone study in the midst of noise? How can you read in noise? How can you train your intellect in noise? How can you structure your thought and the contours of your interior being in noise? How can you be open to the mystery of God, to spiritual values, and to our human greatness in continual turmoil? Contemplative silence is a fragile little flame in the middle of a raging ocean. The fire of silence is weak because it is bothersome to a busy world.

Silence is not an absence. On the contrary, it is the manifestation of a presence, the most intense of all presences. In modern society, silence has come into disrepute; this is a symptom of a serious, worrisome illness. The real questions of life are posed in silence. Our blood flows through our veins without making any noise, and we can hear our heartbeats only in silence.

Priests in particular ought to carry them in their heart when they climb the steps to the altar. They must remember that at the altar they are facing God. At Mass, the priest is not a professor who gives a lecture while using the altar as a podium centered on the microphone instead of the Cross. The altar is the sacred threshold par excellence, the place of the face-to-face encounter with God.

Dear young Christians, if it is permissible for an old man, like Saint John was, to speak to you directly, then I too exhort you, and I tell you: you have overcome the Evil One! Fight any law against nature that they try to impose on you, oppose any law against life, against the family. Be one of those who take the opposite direction! For us Christians, the opposite direction is not a place; it is a Person, it is Jesus Christ, our Friend and our Redeemer.

The silent man is no longer a sign of contradiction; he is just one man too many. Someone who speaks has importance and value, whereas another who keeps quiet gets little consideration. The silent man is reduced to nothingness. The simple act of speaking imparts value. Do the words make no sense? It makes no difference.

166. God's silence can also be a reproach. We often pretend not to want to listen to this language. Conversely, if there is an earthquake or a major natural disaster, associated with immeasurable human tragedies, we accuse God of not speaking. God's silence questions mankind on its ability to enter into the mystery of life and hope at the very heart of suffering and hardships. The more we refuse to understand this silence, the more we move away from him. I am convinced that the problem of contemporary atheism lies first of all in a wrong interpretation of God's silence about catastrophes and human sufferings. If man sees in the divine silence only a form of God's abandonment, indifference, or powerlessness, it will be difficult to enter into his ineffable and inaccessible mystery. The more man rejects the silence of God, the more he will rebel against him.

Without truth, a country walks in darkness and causes the worst of misfortunes to befall its people. The Church must be involved in the daily life of people. No Christian can be cut off from the human condition or from the history of his contemporaries.

the beauty of the Church does not lie in the number of her faithful but in their holiness.

Without a personal connection with God, there is neither constancy nor perspective. Spiritual drifting is also encouraged by the surrounding relativism. In the winds of passing fashions, having no spiritual roots and without the nourishment of prayer, every Christian is in danger. When

Before all else, it is certain that the radical and ultimate cause of the evils which We deplore in modern society is the denial and rejection of a universal norm of morality as well for individual and social life as for international relations; We mean the disregard, so common nowadays, and the forgetfulness of the natural law itself, which has its foundation in God, Almighty Creator and Father of all, supreme and absolute Lawgiver, all-wise and just Judge of human actions. When God is hated, every basis of morality is undermined” (SP 28). Pius XII was already confronted with the beginnings of the problems with which we are familiar: the denial of God and moral relativism.

As Christ’s disciples, we are constantly on an exodus. Christians always remain nomads, in search of God, on a difficult but rewarding pilgrimage.

Often, like Abraham, we do not know where God is leading us. Whereas we would like a stable, perfect universe, the human path is torturous, winding, and muddy, like the one that leads to my poor village of Ourous. However, we must never forget that man is never alone.

Does God speak to the troubled soul or to the peaceful soul? We know perfectly well that

Paul VI did on a pastoral journey to the Philippines, “Jesus Christ teaches us that the love of God is inseparable from love of neighbor.

Indeed, a culture that does not promote the ability to make progress and to be open to other social realities, so as to welcome its own transformation serenely, becomes closed in on itself.

God is love and freedom. He leaves everyone free to love him or not; his love constrains no one. Evil is therefore the opposite of God, whatever is contrary to him. Saint John writes that evil is fundamentally a struggle against God. Our Father is the supreme good, and evil is in every respect what God is not.

We feel that we must disagree with those prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.

Inasmuch as the prime minister had just bestowed on me the highest honor of the State of Guinea, I could make a long speech. And so I was able to say: “I am worried about Guinean society, which is built on the oppression of the insignificant by the powerful, on contempt for the poor and the weak, on the cleverness of poor stewards of the public good, on the bribery and corruption of the administration and the institutions of the republic. . . I am speaking to you, Mister President of the Republic, even though you are not here. Endowed by the Lord with all sorts of natural and culture resources, Guinea, paradoxically, stagnates in poverty. . . I am concerned about the young people; they have no future because they are paralyzed by chronic unemployment. I am also concerned about national unity, cohesion, and harmony, which are greatly compromised by the lack of political dialogue and the refusal to accept differences. In Guinea, the law, justice, ethics, and human values no longer provide a frame of reference and a safeguard to regulate social, economic, and political life. Democratic freedoms are taken hostage by ideological trends that can lead to intolerance and dictatorship. In the

Only the closeness of God and the experience that he loves us and suffers with us, in us, reveal the mystery of suffering and bring consolation, comfort, and interior peace.

Fifty years later, how right Benedict XVI and Francis are to insist on the tragedy of societies that want to get rid of God so as to live without him! The elimination of God within Western cultures is a tragedy with unsuspected consequences.

Worldwide, in 2014, around one pregnancy out of four was voluntarily interrupted. That means a little more than forty million abortions in just one year. What makes this figure even more ghastly is that the “right to abortion”, that is, legal permission to kill an innocent baby, fortunately remains very limited in three-quarters of the countries

In Africa, when I see the astronomical sums that are promised by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which aims to increase exponentially access to contraception for unmarried girls and women, thus opening up the way for abortion, I can only protest against such a lethal project.

no longer a sort of decadence but, rather, a dictatorship of horror, a programmed genocide of which the Western powers are guilty. This relentless campaign against life is a new, definitive stage in the relentless campaign against God’s plan.

In the first place, the African family is built around a common life. For many people, money has a secondary place. My family was poor, but we were still happy and close-knit. In Guinea, the family has remained the primordial cell of society, the place where we learn to be attentive to others and to serve them unostentatiously.

Finally, I cannot forget the fine, strong words that Francis spoke in September 2014 during his morning meditation: “Satan is subtle: the first page of Genesis says so. . . He presents things as if they were good, but his intention is destruction. . . . The angels defend us: they defend man and they defend God-man, the superior man,

Indeed, when we observe today the many deficiencies of faith, the eclipse of the sense of God and of man, the lack of real familiarity with the teaching of Jesus Christ, the detachment of some countries from their Christian roots, and what John Paul II called a “silent apostasy”, it is urgent to think about a new evangelization. This movement presupposes that we go beyond mere theoretical knowledge of the Word of God; we must rediscover personal contact with Jesus.

I am not the only one critical of the West. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had harsh words for those who perverted the meaning of liberty and set up a lie as a rule of life. In 1980, in his book L’erreur de l’Occident,7 he wrote: “The Western world has arrived at a decisive moment. Over the next few years, it will gamble the existence of the civilization that created it. I think that it is not aware of it. Time has eroded your notion of liberty. You have kept the word and devised a different notion. You have forgotten the meaning of liberty. When Europe acquired it, around the eighteenth century, it was a sacred notion. Liberty led to virtue and heroism. You have forgotten that. This liberty, which for us is still a flame that lights up our night, has become for you a stunted, sometimes disappointing reality, because it is full of imitation jewelry, wealth, and emptiness. For this ghost of the former liberty, you are no longer capable of making sacrifices but only compromises. . . Deep down, you think that liberty is won once and for all, and this is why you can afford the luxury of disdaining it. You are engaged in a formidable battle, and you behave as though it were a ping pong match.” This man who experienced repression in the gulags of the former USSR can use such language. He knows firsthand what true liberty is. Today in Europe, there are

very painful for us to note that reproductive health has become a worldwide political “norm”, containing the most perverse things that the West has to offer to the rest of the world, which is seeking comprehensive development. How can Western heads of state exert such pressure on their counterparts in countries that are often fragile? Gender ideology has become the perverse condition for cooperation and development.

meditation of Paul VI from the year 1963, when the successor of Peter was just starting on his path: “Does God speak to the troubled soul or to the peaceful soul? We know perfectly well that in order to listen to his voice, a bit of calm and tranquility must reign. We must keep ourselves far from all intimidating excitement or nervousness and be ourselves. That is the essential thing: within ourselves! Consequently, the encounter is not outside but within ourselves.

Christians know that at the end of time Christ will come again in glory. According to the Bible, he will be escorted by all the angels, and all peoples will assemble before him. He will separate men as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place some on his right, to live with him in eternity, and the rest, who have chosen their position, will remain separated from his light. The earthly city is not our true homeland; it is a transitory moment. We are born to take a great journey toward the city of God and to become “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Eph 2:19).

How are we to understand the fact that the major UN agencies that claim to champion human rights do not fight vigorously against the powerful European and American sex industry?

Morality, love, freedom, technology, and science are nothing without God’s presence. Man can devise the most magnificent works, but they will be mere sand castles and shifting illusions unless they are related to God.

Concerning my continent of origin, I wish to denounce vehemently an attempt to impose false values while using political and financial arguments. In some African countries, ministries dedicated to gender theory have been created in exchange for economic aid! A few African governments, fortunately in the minority, have already given in to pressures in favor of universal access to sexual and reproductive rights.

One of the major difficulties at present is found in ambiguities or personal statements about important doctrinal points, which can lead to erroneous and dangerous opinions. These bad habits disorient many of the faithful. Sometimes contradictory answers to very serious questions are given by the clergy and the theologians.

we are all affected by the sociopolitical and historical context in which we live. God shapes us in a given environment, through happy or unhappy events and through his chosen intermediaries. He knows how to lead us through the trials and tribulations of history.

One must humbly acknowledge that a whole lifetime is necessary to study the Word of God and to acquire the wisdom that leads to love.

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We become avaricious, settled in our ways of comfort and security. This reminds me of what Cardinal Ratzinger prophetically calls “bourgeois Christianity”, that way of reducing Christianity to a philosophy of life from which any love that seemed radical or excessive would be banished.

For some years now there has been a constant onslaught of images, lights, and colors that blind man. His interior dwelling is violated by ... unhealthy, provocative images ... that assault purity of heart and infiltrate through the door of sight. / The faculty of sight, which ought to see and contemplate the essential things, is turned aside to what is artificial. ... Our eyelids remain open incessantly, and our eyes are forced to look at a sort of ongoing spectacle. The dictatorship of the image, which plunges our attention into a perpetual whirlpool, detests silence. Man feels obliged to seek ever new realities that give him an appetite to own things; but his eyes are red, haggard, and sick. The artificial spectacles and the screens glowing uninterruptedly try to bewitch the mind and the soul. In the brightly lit prisons of the modern world, man is separated from himself and from God. He is riveted to ephemeral things, farther and farther away from what is essential.

does not oppose you with obstacles and refusals. I surrender wordlessly to you, O Lord. I want to be docile and malleable like clay in your hands, for you are a skillful, benevolent potter.

Christians are not mistreated, they even enjoy all sorts of freedoms, but is there not a real risk that their faith will be, so to speak, imprisoned by an environment that tends to relegate it to the domain of an individual’s private life?

The Son of God had announced to his disciples that they would never be at peace on this earth.

escaped from education by their parents. Generally speaking, the most important measures taken by revolutionary governments always affect the family. In addition, during the first five years of my episcopate, my pastoral letters were all dedicated to the defense of the Christian family.

For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice’ (Jn 18:37).

Why do you think more and more young people are attracted to traditional liturgy / the extraordinary form? I do not think so. I see it; I am a witness to it. And young people have entrusted me with their absolute preference for the extraordinary form, more educative and more insistent on the primacy and centrality of God, silence and on the meaning of the sacred and divine transcendence. But, above all, how can we understand, how can we not be surprised and deeply shocked that what was the rule yesterday is prohibited today? Is it not true that prohibiting or suspecting the extraordinary form can only be inspired by the demon who desires our suffocation and spiritual death?