Christians are trembling, wavering, doubting. I want this book to be for them. To tell them: do not doubt! Hold fast to doctrine! Hold fast to prayer! I want this book to strengthen faithful Christians and priests. (14)
Prayer must become our innermost respiration. It brings us face to face with God... This is not a matter of multiplying our devotions. It is a matter of being silent and adoring. It is a matter of getting on our knees. It is a matter of entering into a liturgy with fear and respect. It is God's work. It is not a theater. (16)
The modern world, however, refuses to bend the knee to a Godhead and, instead, has lateralized human kind into a solitary and solipsistic existence. As Benedict XVI explained: "Human beings, separated from God, are reduced to a single dimension--the horizontal--and this reductionism itself is one of the fundamental causes of the various forms of totalitarianism that have had tragic consequences in the past century, as well as of the crisis of values that we see in the current situation. By obscuring the reference to God the ethical horizon has also been obscured, to leave room for relativism and for an ambiguous conception of freedom which, instead of being liberating, ends by binding human beings to idols" (November 14, 2012). The cause of our worldly crises is the very absence of God (see Benedict XVI Deus Caritas Est).
In our godless world, we are often held hostage by the "dictatorship of current opinion" (Benedict XVI, Oct. 6, 2006), and yet, as Christians, we are to proclaim the truth regardless of popular trends or the need for applause and acceptance. And, for those of us still practicing our faith, we often replace the first things with secularizing activism and nepotistic projects sure to gain us acclaim: "Prayer is eaten away by activism, true charity turns into humanistic solidarity, the liturgy is handed over to desacralization, theology is transformed into politics, and the very idea of the priesthood comes into crisis..." (89). Instead, Sarah urges us to resist the pulsing frenzy of contemporary politics and communication:
Let us not yield to the pace of the media, which are so quick to talk about changes, turning points, revolutions. The Church's time is a long time, It its he time of contemplated truth that bears all its fruit if we allow it to sprout peacefully in the ground of faith...
Do not let yourselves be troubled! You have in your hands the treasure of the Church's faith. It was passed on to you by centuries of contemplation, by the constant teachings of the popes. You can nourish your faith life on it without fear. (93)
The Church is as a stalwart unchanging vessel in contradistinction to the erratic flimsy dinghy of fashionable theories of deconstruction, identity politics, historical-critical exegeses that become outdated as soon as they are promulgated. Sarah writes, "We live in a pagan system in which gods are born and die depending on our interests. We want nothing to do with the one true God. So we fabricate our own divinities" (131). Two avatars of the heretical systems that dominate today's secular discourse is that of gender ideology and transhumanism. Cardinal Sarah destroys these pagan thought-systems for their errors against Natural Law and Judeo-Christian morality. "We must rediscover the fact that our own nature is not an enemy or a prison. It extends a hand to us so that we might cultivate it" (161). He continues:
It seems that the West, inebriated by the power of its science and technology, can think of itself only as an all-powerful demiurge and that all that it has not authored ultimately appears to it as an affront to its dignity!...
Gender ideology aims to deconstruct the specificity of man and woman, to abolish their anthropological differences. It works relentlessly to fabricate a new unisex global culture, without masculinity, without femininity, which will make possible the coming of age of humanity. But in a world where everything is produced by man, there is nothing human left! Our planet runs the risk of resembling those industrial areas where no room is left for nature, which then become inhuman. The absurdity and the perversity of our own inventions ought to make us dizzy! (161, 162)
From here, Cardinal Sarah targets the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and other western nonprofit organizations that have imposed their godless ideologies (their "ideological colonialism" [162]) on the people of his native continent, Africa. "They sometimes behave like dominating, contemptuous crusaders toward those whom they consider backward. I do not fear, nevertheless, to state that the poor people in Africa, Asia, or South America are profoundly more civilized than the Westerners who dream about fabricating a new man to their own specifications" (ibid.).
Will the poor be the last defenders of human nature? I wish to pay homage to them here. All you who, in the eyes of men, are powerless and without influence, you who in the depths of your hearts know what it is to be human: have no fear of those who try to intimidate you! You have a great mission, ' it consists in preventing the world from destroying itself...restablishing...a little of that which constitutes the dignity of life and death', according to the words pronounced by the writer Albert Camus during the speech with which he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1957. Given the powers of money and of the media, given the pressures of the international lobbies, I want to emphasize what an immense value your simple, everyday, quite simply human life has. (162-163)
Moreover, Sarah identifies the family as the locus of regeneration and love--and as a space specifically targeted by the Father of Lies, Satan himself, who hates the trinitarian love modeled in the father, the mother, and the child. It is not coincidental, therefore, that the modern secularists have targeted women and their maternal instincts as a foci of mockery and sterilization. As for his own African heritage, Cardinal Sarah, defends the African emphasis on family and motherhood: "Someone might object that an African woman is conditioned to have children. This way of caricaturing the large African family is contemptuous. I wish to denounce this hypocrisy of making people believe that Western woman is respected and flourishing because she is liberated from the 'burden' of maternity and because she is man's equal from every perspective" (171).
The west has objectified and sexualized and marketed the female body and her offspring to a satanic degree. Women's bodies are exposed and displayed in dehumanizing fashion; promiscuity, out-of-wedlock relationships, pornography, and everything that destroys the body-soul union have rendered human sexuality perverse and vulgar rather than sacred and filled with God's promise of eternal life. Abortion, contraception, onanism, masturbation, and every other kind of sexual deviancy has become normalized. Further, human trafficking and slavery is more common today than at any point in human history.
Further still, the organs of aborted babies are sold for capital profit and medical research; and it is the poor countries that most often become subjugated under the tyranny of rich countries in the name of progress, depopulation, and science:
Mafia bands assassinate children, remove their organs, and sell them to rich patients. Meanwhile, Western societies clamor everywhere for greater respect for human rights.
And how many people know that, in the West, cosmetics have been manufactured with the remains of aborted fetuses? Many scandals related to these practices have affected Planned Parenthood in the United Sates. I sometimes have the feeling that the most amoral, godless societies promote human rights at the top of their lungs in order to cover up their own shame. (174-175)
As for transhumanism, many scientists and their supporters, have eradicated and transgressed all thresholds or limits of ethical and moral behavior. "Beyond the limit, there is nothing but the infinity of the void" (176). In this quest for eternal life through technology and scientific advancements, we have commodified and objectified humans and their organs to a point of blood-chilling horror.
Confronted with this temptation to omnipotence, I wish to proclaim my love and my infinite respect for weakness. You sick persons, you who are weak in body or mind, you who suffer from a handicap or a malformation, you are great! You have a special dignity because you have a singular resemblance to Christ crucified...
The Promethean dream of an unbounded life, of an infinite power, is a lure, a diabolical temptation. Transhumanism promises that we will become gods "concretely". This utopia is one of the most dangerous in all of human history: the creature has never before tried to distance himself definitively from the Father to this extent. (180)
As for our current revolutionary upheavals, Cardinal Sarah lived under the dictatorship of Sékou Touré in his native Guinea--a dictatorship that thrived in irregular laws, false accusations, random imprisonments, torture and death of ordinary citizens. In response to the barbarity that Sarah witnessed in his home country, he realized that love is the only viable response to the revolutionary dictatorship of tyranny and oppression: "We did not have to fear the dictatorship; instead, we had to sow love... Given these diabolical horrors, it was necessary to lead the people of Guinea to love and to forgive as God does. We can oppose violence and hatred only by clinging to God so as to love excessively" (188).
All the believers in my country who suffered under the Marxist dictatorship...can talk about freedom. And, always, they will affirm that freedom is absolutely connected to truth. In Africa they say that freedom and truth are like oil: you may try your best to drown them or to destroy them, but like oil they will always stay at the surface. (225)
In the last half of the book, Cardinal Sarah offers a critique of the Western hostility toward heritage, history, and tradition. "A society that rejects the past cuts itself off from the future. It is a dead society, a society with no memory..." (206). Progress becomes the totem of the western imagination; as such "Postmodern man is a perpetual nomad, a puppet tossed to and fro, at the mercy of all the winds of fashion" (207). The truth does not change. It is eternal. Its name is Jesus Christ, and "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Hebrews 13:8) [209]. Moreover, the lure of globalization is one fraught with paralyzing implications to human identity and mission: "Globalization means cutting man off from his roots, from his religion, from his culture, history, customs, and ancestors...The earth cannot become an ocean without boundaries. This planet could become a nightmare" (242).
In the midst of covid, world leaders have announced global economic resets advantageous to their one-world-order government structure that enables the elite and the high-positioned while decimating the ordinary populace. Sarah addresses this luciferian project:
The globalized elites want to create a new world, a new culture, new men, a new ethics. The only things they cannot make are a new sun, a new moon, new mountains, new air, a new world. Rupture is the driving force of their political project. They no longer want to refer to the past. People who continue to identify with the values of the old world have to disappear, whether they like it or not. For the proponents of the new world, those subhumans belong to an inferior race. It is necessary to exclude them and to eliminate them. This desire to break with the past is tragically adolescent. A wise man is aware and proud of being an heir. (212)
Particularly, Sarah identifies the narcissistic impulses of global elites to commandeer the planet for their own personal gain:
The U.N. elites dream of a world government that would rule peoples, cultures, and traditions that were formerly so different. It is a dream that borders on madness and is a sign of the contempt of the peoples for their riches. What will become of Africa, which has experienced so many humiliations over the course of history? Will we still have the right to live? It is enough to witness the large Western philanthropic foundations to understand what African man means in the view of the billionaires who finance them. They are convinced that they know better than we do the best policies for our continent. In reality, this elite has two obsessions: the drastic decrease of the African birthrate and economic development in the service of the objectives of the Western multinational corporations. (261)
While mockery, scorn, and ridicule is waged against the Christian in a modernist, secular, progressivist society, we must be careful as Christians to avoid this same polemical attitude in response to those who hurl derisive insults at us. "We must beware of ridicule. The good advances in silence. Christians and people of goodwill must not enter into a logic of struggle to own the media space. The true battle takes place in our hearts. A conscience that silently respects the Mystery of God and of man effectively thwarts the shouts of the ideologues of the media" (216).
Western nations are on a fast course toward self-annihilation. Sarah argues quite vehemently: "The West's only strength lies in its ferocious desire to self-destruct" (226). Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) observed a "self-hatred in the Western world that is strange and that can be considered pathological" (Europe Today and Tomorrow, 2005). In its self-hating posture, the West has ironically also assumed a pretentious and prideful posture to any criticism or suggestions of humility and self-examination. "Evil and good are confused....The rejection of life, the murder of pre-born children, the murder of the handicapped and the elderly, the demolition of the family and of moral and spiritual values: all this is the first act in the tragedy of the suicide of an entire people" (221). Yet, Sarah identifies seeds of renewal and hope in generous families rooted in Christian faith. To them, Sarah encourages,
Your mission is not to save a dying world. No civilization has the promises of eternal life. Your mission is to live out with fidelity and without compromise the faith you received from Christ. In that way, even without realizing it, you will save the heritage of many centuries of faith. Do not be afraid because of your small numbers! (221-222)
Unlike many other evangelists, Cardinal Sarah advises a certain trepidation with online evangelism: a human-to-human encounter (rather than a digital interface) is the most effective transmission of the Good News of eternal life through Christ's death and resurrection. The lure of technology cannot replace the reality of human relationships.
A prescient voice of the decline of Western civilization, Sarah warns of a "new form of dictatorship and of cultural colonialization" that contributes to inevitable "violence and communitarianism" (284). "Civil wars are breaking on the horizon. Nations are falling apart; their specific traits are evaporating. Their citizens take refuge in artificial ideals. They confuse their feelings with the building of a collective project" (ibid.). As an antidote, Sarah does not prescribe a rose-colored nostalgia but rather for young people to have a clear identity and a strong awareness of history and an appreciation for individual culture. "More profoundly, I think that young Westerners aspire to a world in which each generation will not be overwhelmed by the burdensome duty of rebuilding everything from scratch. It is time to give them back the freedom to receive from their forefathers certitudes and rules based on experience. It is exhausting to have to reinvent everything ceaselessly. Receiving it is a form of freedom" (285).
The suicide of the West is tragic. Its rejections are leading all humanity to a dead end. It has no more strength, no more children, no more morality, no more hope. Its only hope of survival is to rediscover the One who said: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). (286)
A Christian will always be an outsider or a dissident because we were not made for this world. "More often, his words will be disqualified by conformist irony or a media lynching" (293). Despite the ridicule, we remain in prudence (300), temperance (304), fortitude (307), meekness (ibid.), and joyous self-limitation (306). We must
confront fearlessly the contemptuous laughter of the conformists, the media, and the so-called elites. We must rediscover the audacity to brace the secularist inquisition that hands out good conduct certifications to some and stigmatizes others from the heights of its self-proclaimed authority. Our reference point is not in this world! We have nothing to do with society's applause; our city is in the heavens! (308)
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