The Holy See announced on Saturday, Feb. 20 that Pope Francis had accepted the resignation of Cardinal Robert Sarah from his position as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW) and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Canon law requires that Vatican officials tender a letter of resignation on their 75th birthday, but the pope sometimes waits months or years to accept the resignation. The Guinean cardinal, the highest-ranking Black churchman, turned 75 last June.
In his book, God or Nothing, Sarah discusses his upbringing in a remote Coniagui village in the northern mountains near Senegal, where villagers lived in “round, one-room brick huts covered by wattle and daub.” His parents and much of his village converted to Catholicism from animism with guidance from the Holy Ghost Fathers, a French missionary order. When one of the priests recognized Sarah’s devotion and recommended that he study for the priesthood, his parents thought Sarah was crazy, because they thought that the priesthood was only for white men.
Sarah entered seminary in the neighboring Ivory Coast at age 12 and was ordained at 24. He spent his early years at a time where Sékou Touré led Guinea to independence from France and installed a Marxist dictatorship. Touré confiscated all religious properties and imprisoned the Archbishop of Conakry for eight years in the Camp Boiro concentration camp. In 1979, the 34-year-old Sarah was appointed to succeed the imprisoned archbishop. As archbishop, Sarah was a strong vocal critic of the dictatorial regime of Touré. In the face of materialist communism, he prioritized educating and working with young Guineans, and highlighted the importance of the family.
In 2001, Sarah was brought to Rome by Pope St. John Paul II to serve as Secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. Pope Benedict XVI named Sarah a cardinal and appointed him to lead the Pontifical Council Cor Unum for Human and Christian Development in 2010, saying that Sarah would “be most capable of expressing tactfully the Church’s compassion and closeness to those who are poorest.” In his time in the position, Sarah stressed the importance of ministering to both the material and spiritual needs of the poor and suffering.
Pope Francis appointed Sarah as prefect of the CDW in 2014. Sarah’s post put him in charge of overseeing the celebration of the sacraments throughout the world. His advocacy of traditional liturgical practices have at times been controversial. In 2016 Sarah encouraged priests to celebrate the Mass ad orientem (facing liturgical East rather than the congregation), starting at Advent. The Holy See Press Office responded by saying that Sarah’s remarks were “incorrectly interpreted” and that celebrating Mass facing the congregation remained “desirable whenever possible.” At Francis’ direction, Sarah updated the instructions for foot-washing on Holy Thursday, allowing women to participate in the formerly all-male ceremony. Sarah has been a proponent of celebrating the Traditional Latin Mass in line with Benedict XVI’s directive Summorum Pontificum. In 2015, Sarah approved a new order of Mass for Anglican converts to Catholicism, Divine Worship: The Missal, which incorporates Elizabethan language and prayers from the Book of Common Prayer into the Catholic Mass.
He was outspoken on other contemporary debates, arguing in 2015 that “western homosexual and abortion ideologies and Islamic fanaticism” were “two apocalyptic beasts” to the Christian family. He wrote a 2017 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “How Catholics Can Welcome LGBT Believers”, which urged Catholics to “better welcome and accompany our brothers and sisters in authentic pastoral charity” by both affirming the goodness of individuals with same-sex attractions and calling them to Christian chastity. Sarah has been a critic of mass migration.
Cardinal Sarah had been seen by many as a potential candidate in the 2013 conclave that elected Pope Francis, and remains on some Vatican observer’s list of “papabile” candidates. Soon after the Holy See announced his resignation, Sarah tweeted: “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.”
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