Catholic Corner

[temporal1]

An open-ended thread for general discussion of Catholic news, questions.

Cardinal Sarah

“Pope Francis Removes Conservative African Cardinal From Vatican Post”
Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea is often mentioned as a possible future pontiff
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-franc ... 1613826965

ROME—Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Cardinal Robert Sarah as head of the Vatican’s office for liturgy, removing an outspoken conservative and possible future pope from the ranks of Vatican leadership.

The Holy See Press Office announced Saturday that Cardinal Sarah had stepped down.
No successor has been named.

The cardinal submitted his resignation as required by church law when he turned 75 on June 15 of last year. But the pope frequently lets cardinals serve two or three years past that age, though not past 80. Last June, the cardinal wrote on Twitter: “For my part, I am happy to continue my work” at the Vatican.

In accepting Cardinal Sarah’s resignation, the pope has removed a subordinate out of step with his approach to liturgy, homosexuality and relations with the Muslim world. The cardinal is a hero to many conservative Catholics, some of whom see him as a future pontiff. He will still be able to vote in a conclave to elect a pope until he turns 80. .. ..

i do not have a paid subscription, so cannot read this full report.
i do not trust the WSJ to report without lib bias.

i’m interested in what’s happening with C Sarah.
i’m aware he is a favorite of some to be the next pope.

[Ken]

I do have a WSJ subscription. Here is the entire article if you want to read it. I'm not sure why you would consider the Wall Street Journal a "liberal" source. It's owned by News Corp which also owns Fox News and a bunch of other conservative media outlets around the world:

ROME— Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Cardinal Robert Sarah as head of the Vatican’s office for liturgy, removing an outspoken conservative and possible future pope from the ranks of Vatican leadership.

The Holy See Press Office announced Saturday that Cardinal Sarah had stepped down. No successor has been named.

The cardinal submitted his resignation as required by church law when he turned 75 on June 15 of last year. But the pope frequently lets cardinals serve two or three years past that age, though not past 80. Last June, the cardinal wrote on Twitter: “For my part, I am happy to continue my work” at the Vatican.

In accepting Cardinal Sarah’s resignation, the pope has removed a subordinate out of step with his approach to liturgy, homosexuality and relations with the Muslim world. The cardinal is a hero to many conservative Catholics, some of whom see him as a future pontiff. He will still be able to vote in a conclave to elect a pope until he turns 80.

Last year, the cardinal raised controversy with a book widely interpreted as an attempt to influence Pope Francis’ decision on whether to allow the ordination of married men as priests. The episode led to embarrassment for the cardinal when retired Pope Benedict XVI asked to have his name removed as the book’s co-author.

The Guinean cardinal’s retirement leaves only one African as the head of a Vatican department: Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, which focuses on issues of social justice.

Cardinal Sarah didn’t reply to a request for comment on Saturday. Shortly after the announcement, he tweeted: “I am in God’s hands. The only rock is Christ. We will meet again very soon in Rome and elsewhere.”

The cardinal was born in the small village of Ourous, Guinea, in West Africa, where his father was a farmer and a convert to Catholicism. At the age of 11 he was sent to a seminary in Ivory Coast. Pope John Paul II made him archbishop of the Guinean capital of Conakry at the age of 34, and he was the youngest archbishop in the world at the time.

In 2010, Pope Benedict made him a cardinal and named him to head the Vatican office that coordinates the church’s global charitable activities. Pope Francis appointed him to head the liturgy office in 2014.

The contrast between the cardinal and the new pope was soon clear.

Pope Francis had signaled a new openness to gay people, played down teachings on sexual and medical ethics and made high-profile overtures to Muslim leaders. But Cardinal Sarah told a Vatican meeting of bishops on family issues in 2015 that the modern family faced “two unexpected threats, almost like two apocalyptic beasts, located on opposite poles: on the one hand, the idolatry of Western freedom; on the other, Islamic fundamentalism.”

“What Nazi-fascism and communism were in the 20th century, Western homosexual and abortion ideologies and Islamic fanaticism are today,” he said.

Cardinal Sarah has been a prominent spokesman on such issues for Africa’s bishops, who have emerged as a major conservative bloc in the current pontificate.

During his tenure at the liturgy office, the cardinal openly clashed with the pope on questions of worship, twice drawing extraordinary public rebukes.

In 2016, Cardinal Sarah gave a speech encouraging priests to celebrate Mass facing the altar rather than the congregation in the pews, the standard practice until the late 1960s and still the preference of devotees of the traditional Latin Mass. The Vatican issued a statement negating the cardinal’s instruction.

Pope Francis then reduced the cardinal’s influence over his own office, appointing the cardinal’s deputy, British Archbishop Arthur Roche, to lead a review of the norms governing translations of the Mass.

Following the review, the pope decided in 2017 to give national bishops conferences authority over Mass translations, a move opposed by conservatives. That led to more friction with Cardinal Sarah, who said publicly that his office remained the final arbiter of translations, until the Vatican released a letter from the pope ordering the cardinal to retract the claim.

In January of last year, Cardinal Sarah was involved in controversy touching on papal authority when he released a book defending the traditional practice of priestly celibacy, just as Pope Francis was considering relaxing the millennium-old rule to relieve a priest shortage in Latin America’s Amazon region.

“It is urgent, necessary, that everyone, bishops, priests and laypeople, not allow themselves to be impressed by the special pleading, the theatrics, the diabolical lies, the fashionable errors that would devalue priestly celibacy,” the cardinal wrote.

The book initially listed Pope Benedict as co-author, intensifying a debate over the historically unique situation of having two popes living in the Vatican. Some commentators accused the cardinal of exaggerating the role of the retired pope, whom many conservatives see as a champion of tradition under his more liberal successor. Shortly after the news broke, Pope Benedict asked not to be listed as co-author and to be credited only with the contribution of a single chapter.

Pope Francis finally decided against relaxing the rule on priestly celibacy, omitting the topic from a long-awaited document on the Amazon last February.

[temporal1]

Vatican News
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-c ... ivine.html

Pope Francis on Saturday accepted the resignation of Cardinal Robert Sarah from the post of prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

Born in Guinea in 1945, Cardinal Sarah Guinea, turned 75 on 15 June last year. He was ordained a priest on 20 July 1969, and was appointed Archbishop of Conakry by John Paul II in 1979, at the age of 34.

In 2001 he was named secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, and in 2010 Benedict XVI appointed him president of the Pontifical Council "Cor Unum".
The same year he was created Cardinal with the title of the Diaconia of St. John Bosco in Via Tuscolana, Rome.
On 23 November 2014, Pope Francis appointed him Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. He participated in the March 2013 conclave that elected Pope Francis.

Twitter
https://mobile.twitter.com/card_r_sarah

Today, the Pope accepted the resignation of my office as Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship after my seventy-fifth birthday. I am in God's hands. The only rock is Christ. We will meet again very soon in Rome and elsewhere. +RS

(i don’t twitter.)

i’m interested in C Sarah’s future.
his RESIGNATION from this one post does not end his life as Cardinal, or in any other way.
(so far as i understand.)

- - - - -

Cardinal Burke is another interesting example in Catholic leadership.
His website:
https://www.cardinalburke.com/

https://www.cardinalburke.com/presentat ... vil-unions

[Wayne in Maine]

An open-ended thread for general discussion of Catholic news, questions.

Why?

[temporal1]

An open-ended thread for general discussion of Catholic news, questions.

Why?

for me, just because these topics come up here+there, and i appreciate learning about them from an Anabaptist perspective. i arrived on MD as a happy Lutheran. it wasn’t long before i learned there was more to history than i ever knew! and it was difficult. it still is. i’m still learning.

i knew almost zero about Catholicism, less about EO.

but i’m most interested in balanced perspective. i no longer feel i can have that without the Anabaptist experience.

i don’t blame anyone for not wanting to remember negative history. this is human nature.
in families, few care to pass down stories of ancestral criminals. so, history is lost. when churches split, it’s rare for history of what was before to be mentioned.

today, many young people do not realize divorce is anything to think about! i grieve at how things are normalized, Truth, and truth, are forgotten. Conservative Anabaptists can help.

i believe you were raised Catholic? you know a lot about it and have made decisions.
i don’t have that experience.

i appreciate discussions on this forum from all perspectives. including from Jewish and atheists, and others. i’m most comfortable learning through the Anabaptist lens i find here. i don’t find it elsewhere in the way it’s found here. it’s discussed. i appreciate that.

my preference is to have “a corner” rather than “threads all over the place” .. i’m not sure it will be anything. i’m not good at predicting where topics will go. i’m not a fan of creating numbers of threads when one would do. others prefer more thread “purity.” i guess.

i tried to explain. i would appreciate feedback.

[temporal1]

Some past posts:

i wrote:
Important points, painful tho they are.

i will add, i do see some really good men in the RCC, i hope, gaining voice and influence.
it’s hard to know what is really happening. some names i respect are Cardinals Sarah and Burke, Bishop Paprocki, Father Kalchick.
2019 / Page 11 / http://forum.mennonet.com/viewtopic.php ... cki#p55785

i did not intend this thread (below) to be only about Catholics, but it went that way:
2018 / “Political party - demands?” (General Theology)
http://forum.mennonet.com/viewtopic.php ... t=paprocki

Church history: Where did Protestants/Anabaptists come from?
2020 / “Video: A Lamp in the Dark” (General Theology)
http://forum.mennonet.com/viewtopic.php ... hilit=lamp

[Bootstrap]

An open-ended thread for general discussion of Catholic news, questions.

Why?

I'm guessing most Mennonites and Anabaptists won't really know who the players in these controversies are. I have no idea how to evaluate the Pope's actions here and I don't usually think much about the Pope or the controversies in the Catholic Church.

I'm guessing a Catholic forum would have a lot more people who know these things and think about them.

[Wayne in Maine]

An open-ended thread for general discussion of Catholic news, questions.

Why?

I'm guessing most Mennonites and Anabaptists won't really know who the players in these controversies are. I have no idea how to evaluate the Pope's actions here and I don't usually think much about the Pope or the controversies in the Catholic Church.

I'm guessing a Catholic forum would have a lot more people who know these things and think about them.

My recommendation is that you (temp) should join a Catholic forum rather than treating MennoNet as a general religious chat room. There really is too much of that on here at times.

[Josh]

There are some great Catholic forums including Catholic Answers Forum, where you can find Catholic answers to your questions. You might even find me posting there from time to time.

With that said, there is no thread there called “Mennonite corner” and I doubt there would be much interest in one.

[temporal1]

Wayne:
My recommendation is that you (temp) should join a Catholic forum rather than treating MennoNet as a general religious chat room. There really is too much of that on here at times.

Thank you for replying.
It does not escape me that you and some others would be happy for me and some others to exit.
i respect that. it doesn’t make me feel good to know it, but, it’s reality. i accept it. i try not to bug you too much.

These are the operative words of why i’m present.

i wrote:
but i’m most interested in balanced perspective. i no longer feel i can have that without the Anabaptist experience.

i’ve learned a lot on this forum. i take what i’ve learned to my young family. it’s important to me.
i find others here who actually read scriptures. i believe most who actually read will find an awful lot in common. altho i was a happy Lutheran on arrival, i did actually read scriptures .. which led directly to my original questions for Mennonites (here).

i arrived with a couple of questions. i thought i would be here+gone. sorry about that.

i did not even realize there were conservative Mennos/liberal Mennos. actually, i was just becoming aware of these strifes within Lutherans, Catholics, others. i was “really hoping” Mennonites had some insightful way of avoiding these worldly hurts, but, no. all are human.

i respect admin+mods to do their jobs. they have not asked me to leave. or suggested it.
they guide the ship in various ways. i appreciate their efforts.

i’m aware you would guide differently. i appreciate that. and i admire+support your efforts.
i know this is a one way street. i try not to annoy.

- - - - -

i just never know where any topic will lead.
that’s one of the intriguing things about this open forum. one never knows ..

looks like this one is turning out to be a popularity contest and i’m losing.