Cardinal Robert Sarah spoke with La Nef on May 4 about his new interview book. Main quotes.
On Francis: “It would be unjust to attribute to one man alone a crisis that largely preceded him. I had the opportunity to speak privately with Pope Francis to humbly share my concerns that practical ambiguity might blur doctrinal clarity.”
Return of paganism within the Church: “This paganism can be recognized by several signs: the fading sense of sin, embarrassment at affirming revealed truth, the trivialization of liturgy, fascination with worldly categories, the forgetting of the Church’s supernatural purpose. When God is no longer first—even within the Church—everything else deteriorates.”
Susceptibility to the spirit of the age: “One ends up believing that the Church will be better heard if she speaks like everyone else. But the world does not expect the Church to repeat its own words; it expects her to open Heaven to it.”
Signs of renewal? “I believe the Church’s interior reform has already begun. It was not decreed from above. It is stirred by the Holy Spirit within souls.”
Episcopal consecrations of the FSSPX: “Beyond the sanction, this must be said: such an act would wound even more deeply the visible unity of the Church. Fidelity to Tradition cannot be separated from hierarchical communion. […] I believe we must fast and pray so that the irreparable may be avoided.”
Vatican II: “Where certain texts have given rise to divergent or even opposing interpretations, it is legitimate to ask for deeper clarification in order to rule out interpretations of rupture. The Church has nothing to fear from clarity. The areas that often call for more precise work are well known: religious liberty, ecumenism, the relationship between the Church and the modern world, collegiality, and certain pastoral formulations whose use has at times encouraged a hermeneutic of discontinuity.”
Relativism and democracy: “If democracy cuts itself off from the natural moral law, it empties itself of its soul and ends up becoming the fluctuating management of dominant desires.”
Decadent West: “The West is deeply wounded: it doubts itself, it has lost the sense of transmission, it challenges even the most fundamental anthropological truths.”
Signs of hope: “In Europe we are seeing an increase in adult baptisms and returns to the faith. This is not a sociological triumph; it is a spiritual sign. When cultural securities collapse, some souls rediscover that God alone remains.”
Leo XIV: “If this pontificate helps the Church recover greater doctrinal clarity, liturgical depth, interior peace, and a renewed sense of God, then it will have rendered a great service to the faithful people.”
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