An African Who Wants The West To Be Itself

In 1875, Jean-Jacques Katty, a Catholic-educated son of King Khoulon Katty, ruler of the Rio Pongo region in what is today the West African country of Guinea, wrote to the Catholic vicar apostolic based in Sierra Leone, requesting the prelate send missionaries to his homeland. Two years later, Alsatian priests from the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, or Spiritans, established the first permanent Catholic mission in the region. Today, less than three percent of the population of Muslim-majority Guinea is Catholic, but one of the products of that early French mission is Robert Cardinal Sarah.

For decades now, scholars of religion have noted how ecclesial leaders such as Sarah represent the Christian (and Catholic) shift to the “Global South,” given that most of the Faith’s growth is occurring south of the equator, and especially in Africa. Today, about 20 percent of the African continent is Catholic, whereas in 1950, that number was about five percent. Yet one of the traits that makes Cardinal Sarah’s perspective so interesting is his constant refrain exhorting the West to reinvigorate our moribund, declining Faith. This is certainly the case in a new, book-length interview, 2050: Prospects for the Church. Far from celebrating an inevitable shift to a predominantly African future, Cardinal Sarah urges the West to be itself.

Given Cardinal Sarah spent much of his education in France and Italy, it’s perhaps unsurprising that 2050 is peppered with quotations from the intellectual giants of 20th-century European Catholicism, among them de Lubac, Maritain, and Rahner. Yet he is also a man of tradition, his reflections portraying a thoroughly patristic pedigree. “Breaking with Tradition is tantamount to breaking with the Church!” he declares. “A society without a memory is a society going to ruin. A child without a father, without heritage, is doomed to wander about tragically. A Church without roots becomes an empty institution, a shell without a soul.”

Thus does Cardinal Sarah direct much of his rhetorical firepower at the West.

The Old Continent seems to want to call itself into question, to redefine itself, down to the very nature of the Church and its organic structure…. European Catholicism espouses in a disturbing way the questioning, the doubts, the trends of the Western world.

He bemoans European Catholics who seem “entirely absorbed in European preoccupations,” criticizing recent ecclesial Synods for “neglect[ing] the universal mission of the Church, which is to proclaim the Gospel to all nations.”

It is one thing to hear such frustrations from the small minority of faithful European Catholics (or even simply conservatives sympathetic to the Church and its ancient teachings). It is another thing to hear it from a West African who lived through the chaos and rupture of decolonization and, rather than expressing a bitter antagonism toward the West, lectures Westerners for forgetting ourselves. Western governments, he laments, have “methodically destroyed the familial institution.” Western Catholics are increasingly “incapable now of becoming indignant when confronted with gender ideology and the very negation of human nature.”

Cardinal Sarah does not want the Church of Europe or North America to be “replaced” by Africans; he wants Westerners to rediscover their traditions and heritage. “It is urgent to make it perfectly clear that every civilization needs a heritage. Europe denied its Christian roots,” he states. “In trying to emancipate itself from its Christian roots, the drunken West is committing suicide.”

This is a crisis of faith, says the Guinean prelate, but it is also “the gradual abandonment of invaluable treasures that helped to found the European identity: the Gospel, of course, but also the heritage of Hellenic culture. This loss is not without its spiritual and civilizational consequences.” This appreciation for the objective value of Western civilization is a welcome rebuke to contemporary academics such as black classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, formerly of Princeton, who has notoriously called the classics “a cheat code for mastering whiteness.”

Moreover, Cardinal Sarah, while urging countries to honor the inherent dignity of immigrants, has also controversially spoken out over the dramatic influx of migrants into the West. In a March 2019 interview, Sarah presented a powerful counterpoint to church leaders who seem to support unrestricted immigration from Africa into Europe: “It is better to help people flourish in their culture than to encourage them to come to a Europe in full decadence,” he asserted. “It is a false exegesis to use the word of God to promote migration.”

He also has strong words for Africans tempted to prioritize their own culture over the transformative power of the Gospel. “If Africa refuses to sit down in the school of the apostles and saints, she runs the risk of celebrating only her folklore, customs, and songs, without entering into the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection,” he warns. “Too often, in Africa, excessive importance is assigned to culture. But our cultures are not what save us: They themselves must be saved. Inculturation is not compromise; it is transfiguration.” This extends to liturgical practices in African churches, which, “must not be an invention, nor a theater.”

This is not to ignore the fact that Cardinal Sarah and other prominent African church leaders, such as Peter Cardinal Turkson and Fridolin Cardinal Besungu, are proud Africans. “We are Africans, certainly, and proud of it,” he notes, before adding that his Africanness is subservient to that of his identity in Christ.

But through Baptism we are, first of all, children of God. Our true birth is spiritual, divine. This is why our priority is to take root in this new identity, and not to seek an “African” Church constructed in the image of a culture. There is no African Gospel. There is only the gospel of Christ.

Perhaps because of his proximity to the pre-Christian animist beliefs of West Africa, Cardinal Sarah is able to offer a stern warning to those in the West who seek its survival or rejuvenation not in Christ but in a pre-Christian, pagan past. He blasts those who, during the infamous Synod on the Pan-Amazon region, brought a statue of the Pachama into St. Peter’s Basilica, a “pagan earth-goddess [who] demands blood sacrifices.” He cites, as an example of the intrinsic evils of paganism, the example of Gobu Yaza, a young Catholic catechist in Sarah’s native Guinea who, in 1927, refused to honor pagan idols and was beaten to death for his faith.

It seems inevitable that much of the future spiritual energy of the Catholic Church will come from Africa. But Cardinal Sarah admonishes us Westerners that however much “the West is going through a dark night of culture that is unprecedented in the history of humanity,” our story isn’t played out. Sarah owes his own faith to the efforts of European missionaries more than a century ago. Perhaps the object of his hope can be the renewal of the West’s faith in this century.