The Prophetic African Voice in Catholicism

It may turn out that the most powerful voice for the Catholic Church today is an African Cardinal named Robert Sarah. A Native of Guinea and a survivor of the dictatorship of Sekou Toure, he is now the head of Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

Reading his latest book, The Day Is Now Far Spent, (Ignatius 2019), I was surprised by his powerful teaching. The reactionary movements in the United States Catholic Church praise him because he embraces traditional morality and demands good Catholic liturgy. It does not take long to see there is much they praise in some flag waving political movements that he finds quite troubling.

As an African, he looks at the United States and Europe not only as an outsider, but like he was on the Carpathia and able to see the Titanic sink below the cold Atlantic. Comparing the current Western Civilization to the final days of Rome, he sees little hope for its future. He resounds the same warning that Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard in 1976.

Unlike the vast majority of bishops in the United States. He sees that Western Catholicism not only lost its bearing but its courage and backbone when it exchanged the truth for a lie — spirituality for materialism. The result is without the prophetic life of the Church to counter them, nations in the west are…