Cardinal Robert Sarah warned that paganism has infiltrated the Catholic Church and that the liturgy has been reduced to “entertainment” in some places.
In a May 4 interview with French magazine La Nef, the former prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments addressed the ills that the Church is facing today.
“When faith is reduced to sociological language, the liturgy to entertainment, morality to constant negotiation, and the Church to an institution that must adapt to the desires of the times, then something of paganism returns – not in ancient forms, but in the modern form of man placing himself at the center,” the African cardinal stated.
“This paganism is recognizable by several signs: the blurring of the sense of sin, discomfort with the affirmation of revealed truth, the trivialization of the liturgy, a fascination with worldly categories, and the forgetting of the Church’s supernatural purpose. When God is no longer first, even within the Church, everything else is corrupted.”
He said this paganism is a “fluid ideology” that appears whenever “we turn away from God’s light to make a decision” and “worldly standards of popularity take precedence over the Beatitudes.”
Sarah observed that many in the Church have become susceptible to the zeitgeist. This tendency “is characterized mainly by the fear of displeasing the world,” Sarah said.
“Consequently, ambiguity is preferred over clarity, accompaniment without conversion over healing mercy, communication over contemplation, and horizontality over adoration,” the cardinal noted. “We end up believing that the Church will be better heard if it speaks like everyone else. Yet the world does not expect the Church to repeat its words; it expects her to open Heaven to it.”
“Permeability to the spirit of the world is the great heresy of our time,” he concluded.
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