
CV NEWS FEED // Cardinal Robert Sarah has just issued a round rejection of Fiducia supplicans in solidarity with the growing number of bishops’ conferences in Africa and around the world that have renounced its instructions.
“The peace that Jesus brings us is not a hollow cloud, it is not worldly peace which is often only an ambiguous compromise, negotiated between the interests and lies of each other,” wrote the Guinean-born Cardinal Sarah in a reflection titled “Christmas Message.”
“Confusion, lack of clarity and truth, and division have disturbed and darkened the Christmas party this year,” he stated. “Some media claim that the Catholic Church would encourage the blessing of same-sex unions. They are lying.”
Sarah also rejected the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith’s recent attempt to clarify the document, observing that the Dicastery has been “unable” to correct the confusion and errors that followed the document’s release.
”By its lack of clarity,” Sarah wrote of the followup document, “has only amplified the disorder that reigns in hearts and some have even seized it to support their attempt at manipulation.”
Sarah thanked the bishops’ conferences in Africa who were quick to denounce the document. Their decisions, he wrote, “I share and make my own [in] firm opposition to the Declaration ‘Fiducia supplicans’.”
Quoting Pope Francis, who recently recalled the nature of the Devil as “divider,” Sarah emphasized that those who attempt to justify the Declaration are “doing the work of the divider.”
He continued:
What to do in the face of the confusion that the divider has sown even within the Church?: “We do not argue with the devil!” said Pope Francis. We do not negotiate, we do not dialogue; we do not [defeat] him by negotiating with him. We defeat the devil by asserting the divine Word against him with belief.
Thus, Jesus teaches us to defend unity with God and between us against the attacks of the divider. The divine Word is Jesus’ answer to the devil’s temptation. In the logic of this teaching of Pope Francis, we too do not converse with the divider. Let’s not go into discussion with the ‘Fiducia supplicans’ Declaration, nor with the various reinterpretations that we have seen multiply. Let us simply answer with the Word of God and the Magisterium and the traditional teaching of the Church.
At the end of his message, Sarah encouraged the faithful not to become “afraid if we are not understood and approved of by the world,” adding: “it is not up to us to be agreeable or to make everything agreeable.”
He concluded:
Let us remember Pope Francis’ serious warning on the threshold of his pontificate: “We can walk as we want, we can build many things, but if we do not confess Jesus Christ, it is not right. We will become a humanitarian NGO, but not the Church, the Lord’s Bride…”
