To the full

I have come

so that they may have life

and have it to the full.

John 10:10

You may be struck by how sports journalists can spin out so many words about absolutely nothing these days. And it would appear that while some 8 weeks ago no one had even heard of COVID-19 (because it hadn't yet been named), and medical research bodies and epidemiologists around the globe had no idea what they were dealing with, the number of experts now has grown exponentially. The daily briefings by prime ministers, premiers, health ministers, chief medical officers, the political commentators, the stories of the disadvantaged, disenfranchised, disengaged and disappointed confront us on the television, newspapers and electronic media.

Daily we are exposed to the work of Thanatos, Hermes and Charon as the death knells barely pause before the statistics are flashed onto our screens.  And none of it seems to satisfy our need to know the answers to the questions we cannot yet formulate. We are living at the edge. Unsure. Anxious. Worried.

And yet, it is precisely now, at this very moment, that we must remain firm in faith and place our unrestrained trust in the Lord. John (10:1ff) images Jesus as the Good Shepherd - who calls his sheep by name, who leads them out to safe and green pastures through a gate over which he alone has control. And he will lay down his life for his sheep.

Analogously we will come through this. It is not the end of the universe as we know it. There is a context. We are loved, known by name, and called to live our lives to the full. We do not stop. We continue to live the Christian life: we pray, we love, we hope.

Some weeks ago I was in Woolworths buying a few grocery items. Where the toilet paper was shelved (there was very little available) I had a short conversation with a young holiday-maker about the dearth of toilet paper. We both picked up a packet and he offered to pay for mine. I told him I was more than able to pay for my own (maybe I looked indigent). We met again later at the checkout and he came over and once again offered to pay (for my grocery items). I declined, but chuffed that such young people existed. If you're a Facebooker, look up The Kindness Pandemic and you will find hundreds of stories from everyday Australians about the kindness and positivity that flourish in our neighbourhoods. These are small signs of something far greater than all of us. Negativity and pessimism cannot lead us to where we need to be for our loved ones.

Whatever comes our way these coming days, weeks and months - be the person you want to be and are called to be. Take your life in your hands and live it to the full.

Happy Easter!

Peter Douglas

Cardinal Sarah’s parallel magisterium

by Christopher Lamb

Much of the opposition to Pope Francis operates behind the scenes, in private. Some of it comes from officials and bureaucrats who are sitting on their hands waiting for this pontificate to end. They may not overtly oppose Francis, but they don’t really support him either. Like the civil servants in the British television series, Yes Minister, on the surface they will agree. “Yes, of course, Holy Father, we must have a Church for the poor … Only I’m not necessarily sure you should be welcoming refugees into the Vatican.” In Italy this is termed gattopardismo, the strategy of creating an illusion of progress while leaving everything just the same.

A subtle example of this approach is seen with Cardinal Robert Sarah, the Vatican’s liturgy chief, who is one of Francis’ most effective opponents. The Guinean prelate has a loyal following in conservative circles, particularly in the United States. He is widely respected in his home continent. His supporters talk of him as a strong candidate to be the first black pope, a man with a towering spirituality who would make the Church more faithful, more pure. Critics say he is being used by those who wish to keep the old clericalist status quo.

Behind the cardinal are powerful, wealthy supporters. The Knights of Columbus, the multibillion-dollar US Catholic organisation, bought up large numbers of copies of his book, God or Nothing, for distribution in Africa. The Knights said this was “one of several initiatives” to “support members of the Curia and the Pope”, and vehemently deny being part of any opposition to Francis.

Like the court of Benedict XVI and the Catholic media networks, Cardinal Sarah has established himself as a “parallel” authority to Francis, through his books, lectures, and frequent travel to conservative outposts. He does not directly confront or criticise the Pope but obliquely does so by presenting an alternative leadership model for the Church. Privately he listens to the complaints about Francis; he shares some of the concerns, although is very careful in what he says. He doesn’t support the attacks, but neither does he do anything to stop them.

An ascetic who is seemingly always engaged in prayer and fasting, he combines a mystical

Cardinal Sarah spirituality with an unbending defence of traditional Catholic teaching. Were he elected Pope, he would undoubtedly harken back to Pius XII, a neo-traditionalist who would “reign” as pope rather than adopt the style of Francis, who takes risks to take the Church out on to the street. At book signings, his followers greet him on their knees and kiss his episcopal ring.

Sarah’s personal story is extraordinary. He grew up in mud huts in a remote, mountainous bushland region of Guinea in a town that is today made up of just a thousand inhabitants, about 300 miles from Conakry, near the border with Senegal. His family was not originally Christian; his father was baptised two years after the cardinal’s birth, in 1947, with the infant Robert following. He grew up in a tribal group called the Coniaguis, made up almost entirely of farmers and livestock breeders; they are religious people devoted to God, whom they call Ounou, accessible through ancestor worship.

The Coniaguis have initiation rites for young men that begin at around the age of 12 and involve being circumcised and then taken to the woods for a week to learn endurance, self-denial, and respect for elders. Sarah rejects these rituals as a “ruse, a hoax that uses lies, violence, and fear”, although it’s hard not to conclude that his upbringing did teach him lessons in self-discipline and self-denial.

At the age of 11, he left his village with a small bag for the junior seminary. He had been heavily influenced by the spirituality of the Holy Ghost Fathers, the same order that produced Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, excommunicated in 1988 after leading a group of traditionalists who splintered away from the Church following the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. There are reports of connections between the cardinal and the Lefebvrists. Does the cardinal, who has a leaning toward liturgical traditionalism, retain some sympathy for Archbishop Lefebvre and his Society of Saint Pius X?

After ordination, Sarah studied Scripture in Rome and spent a year in Jerusalem, before returning to Guinea where he risked his life travelling by canoe to bring the sacraments to remote villages. In 1979, at the age of 34, he was appointed Archbishop of Conakry under the hostile regimes of Sékou Touré.

Sarah’s predecessor had been imprisoned by Touré and the young archbishop showed tremendous bravery, speaking out against the mismanagement of the country and Touré’s neglect for the poor. After the president’s death, it emerged that Touré had planned to arrest and execute Sarah. “God had been quicker,” Sarah remarked. Unperturbed, Sarah continued to speak out, this time against Toure’s successor, Lansana Conté.

“I have great admiration for Cardinal Sarah,” the former papal ambassador to Guinea, Archbishop Alberto Bottari de Castello, told me. “He is a man of prayer, and of great human and pastoral richness. He worked in Guinea as a pastor concerned with freedom and respect for human rights, publicly intervening with courage, without fear for his safety. This was very consistent with his life of simplicity, poverty, and contact with the people.”

IN 2001 Sarah was called to Rome to serve as secretary to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, known as Propaganda Fide. After nine years, he became president of the old Pontifical Council, Cor Unum, the Vatican body that used to oversee the Church’s humanitarian work. According to a well-placed source, he was “extraordinarily conservative” and very uncomfortable working with women in positions of authority.

In his book God or Nothing, the cardinal says that many demands for women’s rights are “ideological”, describes the idea of women priests as an “aberration”, and the possibility of a female cardinal “as ridiculous as the idea of a priest who wanted to become a nun”. He blocked an attempt by Caritas, the Church’s charitable arm, to put in place a policy that would have given equal opportunities for women and eliminated gender-based discrimination, and was obstructive toward instituting working practices in line with twenty-first-century requirements.

During the cardinal’s private celebrations of Mass, anyone attending is expected to receive Communion on the tongue, rather than the hand. Another of Sarah’s collaborators described him as kind and gracious, although with a “particular understanding” of the Eucharist.

Those who work with him say he’s suffered from loneliness in Rome, leading him to become open to manipulation. Rather than drawing from the African theological tradition and experience, his advisers are European Catholics such as Marguerite Peeters, a culture warrior from Belgium who speaks out against “radical feminism”, homosexuality and gender theory, and Nicolas Diat, the French author, a conservative who is well connected and with whom Sarah writes his books.

God or Nothing is written in a question-and-answer style, and reads much like a campaign manifesto. His second book with Diat on silence was also popular, and timely for a social media-saturated age. His third, The Day is Now Far Spent, published in September last year, argues that the West is opening the way to “new, barbaric civilisations”. Sarah’s language is apocalyptic and, to some, disturbing. His position on migrants runs counter to Francis’, as does his pastoral strategy. During the synod on the family, the cardinal claimed that “Western homosexual and abortion ideologies and Islamic fanaticism” were “almost like two apocalyptic beasts”, comparing them to Nazism and Communism.

Sarah does not want anyone using a mobile phone or tablet to read prayers, saying: “It is not worthy: it desacralises prayer … These apparatuses are not instruments consecrated and reserved to God, but we use them for God and also for profane things!” It is a theology that rejects the world, or takes refuge in a modern-day form of Gnosticism, which Francis describes as seeing faith as “strict and allegedly pure”, and which “can appear to possess a certain harmony or order that encompasses everything”.

Sarah remains extremely loyal to Benedict XVI. Controversy exploded on 12 January this year when extracts from a forthcoming book apparently co-authored by Sarah and the Pope Emeritus, From the Depths of Our Hearts: Priesthood, Celibacy, and the Crisis of the Catholic Church, appeared in the French daily newspaper, Le Figaro. In a joint introduction, Sarah and Benedict make the incendiary claim that any opening to the ordination of married men would be a great danger to the Church, just as Benedict’s successor had been considering whether to agree to the request of the bishops of the Amazon to allow married deacons to serve as priests.

The book was seen to be a flagrant attempt to undermine the Amazon synod process by co-opting the authority of a retired pope. Sarah and Diat had secured an essay from Benedict, which he had told them they could use as they saw fit. But it soon emerged that Benedict had not agreed to be the co-author of Sarah’s book. Sarah had to agree to Benedict’s request, relayed through his secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, that he be removed as co-author.

Francis works mainly with the cardinal’s trusted and more centrist second-in-command, the Leeds-born Archbishop Arthur Roche, who has become responsible for much of the dicastery’s day-to-day work. Sarah must offer the Pope his resignation on 15 June, when he will turn 75, and Francis could well accept, given that the cardinal completed a five-year term as prefect last November.

In 2014 Francis appointed Sarah to be prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Rome sources say the appointment was requested by Benedict, and Francis felt duty-bound to respect his wish. Things did not get off to a good start when it took the cardinal’s office more than a year to draw up a 370-word decree allowing for women to be included in the Holy Thursday foot-washing ritual, something Francis had specifically requested.

Stung by the claim that he is opposed to the Pope, Sarah says: “I am calm because I am loyal to the Pope. They cannot quote a word, a phrase, a gesture in which I oppose the Pope, it is ridiculous, ridiculous.” His words profess loyalty, but his actions suggest otherwise. It is also revealing that feeling obliged to remind the world he is not an opponent of Francis suggests built-in deficiencies in his ministry as a cardinal, who has taken an oath of fidelity and obedience to the Roman pontiff.

On Holy Thursday 2013, two weeks after his election, the Pope travelled to the Casal del Marmo youth prison in Rome to wash the feet of 12 inmates, including two women and two Muslims. It was the first time the Pope had washed the feet of either. Sarah would later say that “priests are not obliged” to wash the feet of women on Holy Thursday.

In the past, Cardinal Sarah might have been dispatched on a far-off apostolic mission or sidelined to a non-job in the Curia. Francis, however, has been tolerant. Rather than reacting with hostility to the attempts to undermine him from inside the Vatican, Francis warns against “a punctilious concern for the Church’s liturgy, doctrine, and prestige”, which is another modern-day heresy. Some Christians, the Pope explains, “spend their time and energy on these things, rather than letting themselves be led by the Spirit in the way of love, rather than being passionate about communicating the beauty and the joy of the Gospel and seeking out the lost among the immense crowds that thirst for Christ”.

The cardinal has expressed scepticism about the reforms of the Catholic liturgy that took place during the middle of the twentieth century, claiming that “rather violently we passed without any preparation from one liturgy to another”. By contrast, the Pope has repeatedly stressed that the changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council are irreversible, and has given more responsibility to local Churches to translate prayers from Latin into their own languages.

Francis has publicly rebuked Sarah for suggesting that priests start to celebrate Mass ad orientem, or with their backs to the congregation, and for alleging that the relationship between the Holy See and bishops on liturgical translations is like that of a parent toward a child’s homework or an academic supervisor to a student. The Pope has responded with precise, and clinical, manoeuvres to constrain the cardinal. He corrects him publicly where necessary, and has appointed a raft of new members to the liturgy department who do not share Sarah’s vision. The prestige of an elaborate liturgy focused more on priest than people, and the seduction of political ideology dressed up as theology, are all temptations against which Francis has repeatedly warned. He is not trying to win petty curial feuds. Faced with the competing factions jostling to undermine him, the Pope is more concerned in setting a course for the Church’s future, offering the world the message without which it perishes.

Adapted from The Outsider: Pope Francis and His Battle to Reform the Church, published by Orbis Books at £19.99; Tablet price, £15.99.

This article appears in The Tablet to be published on 2 May 2020.