Pope Francis accepts the resignation of Cardinal Robert Sarah

Pope Francis accepted the resignation due to Cardinal Robert Sarah’s age limit as Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, a position he had held since November 2014.

This was reported by the Holy See press office on February 20.

Cardinal Robert Sarah was born on June 15, 1945 in the city of Ourous in French Guinea (Africa). In 1957, at the age of 12, he entered the Petit Séminaire Saint Augustin in Bingerville, Côte d’Ivoire, where he studied for three years.

In his book “God or nothing”, Cardinal Sarah tells how his vocation was born: “It is in the context of the daily Eucharist that Father (Marcel) Bracquemond, discovering my ardent desire to know God and perhaps impressed by my love for prayer and my fidelity to the daily Mass, he asked me if I wanted to enter the seminary ”.

“With the surprise and spontaneity that characterize children, I replied that I would love it, without knowing exactly what I was getting into, because I had never left town and I did not know the life of a seminar, ”he says.

El Cardenal cuenta que sus padres no le creyeron y fueron a ver al P. Bracquemond, quien confirmed the noticia: “Mi madre, abriendo los ojos como platos, me dijo que había perdido la cabeza o que no había understands lo que me había dicho the father. For her and for the villagers, all priests were necessarily white. In fact, it seemed impossible to him that a black man could be a priest!

As relations between newly independent Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire became strained in 1960, Robert Sarah returned to study at Dixinn Seminary in Guinea, until the government expropriated Church property in August 1961.

After studying only for a time at home, the Church found a place for him and other seminarians at a public school in Kindia in March 1962. Through negotiations, a seminary was opened where Sarah obtained her baccalaureate. in 1964.

In September of this year, he was sent to the Grand Séminaire de Nancy in France. Also due to strained relations, this time between Guinea and France, he had to interrupt his training. He continued his theological studies in Sébikotane, Senegal, where he studied between October 1967 and June 1969.

Robert Sarah was ordained a priest on July 20, 1969, at the age of 24. He was appointed Archbishop of Conakry on August 13, 1979, when he was only 34 years old. He received episcopal consecration on December 8, Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the same year.

On October 1, 2001, Pope Saint John Paul II appointed him Secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. On October 7, 2010, he was appointed President of the Pontifical Council “Cor Unum”. A month later, Pope Benedict XVI created him cardinal.

On November 23, 2014, he was appointed Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

Cardinal Sarah is one of the most important cardinals in Africa and of the Universal Church. He is an ardent defender of the liturgy, of the right to life, to the family and to religious freedom.

He has criticized gender ideology on numerous occasions, an approach that sees sex as a socio-cultural construct rather than as something natural. In 2016, he declared that this current is “demonic” and a “deadly impulse” that attacks families.

He participated in the Synod of Bishops on Young People in 2018. He stressed that “watering down” Catholic moral doctrine in the area of ​​sexuality would not attract new generations.

He also participated in the Synod of Bishops on the Amazon in October 2019. In an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Cardinal Sarah regretted that some had used “the assembly to advance their projects”. I am thinking in particular of the ordination of married men, the creation of women’s ministries and the jurisdiction of the laity. These points touch on the structure of the universal Church ”.

“To seize the opportunity to introduce ideological plans would be unworthy manipulation, dishonest deception and an insult to God who guides his Church and entrusts to him his plan of salvation. Additionally, I was shocked and outraged that the spiritual anguish of the poor in the Amazon was used as an excuse to support projects typical of bourgeois and worldly Christianity. It is abominable ”, declared the cardinal.

In January 2020, Cardinal Sarah and Benedict XVI published a book on the priesthood and priestly celibacy entitled “From the depths of our hearts(From the bottom of our hearts).

The cardinal was the target of certain attacks, accusing him of lying about the participation of the Pope Emeritus, but he responded by showing the correspondence he had with Benedict XVI on the text which was written with both hands.

In April 2020 and faced with restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic, Cardinal Sarah recalled that “priests must do everything possible to stay close to the faithful” and stressed that “no one has the right to deprive a sick person or to to die from the spiritual assistance of a priest. It is an absolute and inalienable right “.