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The liturgically conservative Guinean cardinal has stoked a rocky relationship with Pope Francis in recent years
Cardinal Robert Sarah. (Photo: AFP)
By Loup Besmond de Senneville (in Rome) and Lucie Sarr (in Abidjan) | Vatican City
Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of the 75-year-old Cardinal Robert Sarah as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments (CDWDS).
He relieved the African of his duties on February 20, but did not immediately name a new head of the worship office.
Sarah, a Guinean who has worked at the Vatican the past two decades, had made no secret these past several months that he wanted to step down from the CDWDS.
He had been the congregation's prefect since 2014.
"He had put himself in an attitude of obedient dissent"
A doctrinal and liturgical conservative, the cardinal was often seen as a strident opponent of Pope Francis.
In fact, in recent years Sarah seemed to actively foment his rocky relationship with the Argentine pope by alternating moments of loyalty with incidents marked by serious tensions.
But the cardinal has not always been perceived this way during his nearly 20 years in Rome. Certainly not in the beginning.
He arrived at the Vatican in October 2001 to be the No. 2 official at the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the bureau that has authority over 1,100 "mission" dioceses around the world.
Then-Archbishop Sarah was welcomed as the heroic resistance fighter from Guinea who had faced down the West African country's Marxist dictator Sékou Touré.
Sarah was barely 34 years old in 1979 when John Paul II named him Archbishop of Conakry, making him the world's youngest bishop.
The youthful prelate clashed regularly with the Marxist regime, blaming its leaders for Guinea's dire poverty and lambasting them for clinging to power.
"Power uses those who do not have the wisdom to share it," he notably told Touré.
The dictator eventually put Sarah at the top of a list of opponents to be eliminated. But the Marxist leader died in 1984 before he could carry out his plans.
During his nine years at the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, Archbishop Sarah was seen as "a man who worked hard, and very spiritual", according to one observer.
But over the years, he made more and more visits to Africa where he took strong public stands against priests -- and even bishops -- who did not always respect their vow of celibacy.
Benedict XVI appointed Sarah president of the now-suppressed Pontifical Council Cor Unum in October 2010 and made him a cardinal a month later.
During his time as head of the organization that once coordinated the pope's charitable activities, Cardinal Sarah emerged as one of the now-retired pope's closest allies.
Many people were surprised in 2014 when Francis picked the Guinean cardinal to head the Worship office at the Vatican.
And, in fact, the two have often been on opposite sides of Church issues.
The situation became particularly tense in early January 2020 when Sarah co-authored a book with Benedict XVI to a strongly-worded defense of clerical celibacy.
The book, From the Depths of Our Hearts (Ignatius Press), caused a media storm and controversy.
It came as Francis was preparing to publish an apostolic exhortation following the Synod of Bishops assembly on the Amazon, during which participants had overwhelmingly endorsed ordaining married men.
"There is an ontological-sacramental link between priesthood and celibacy," Sarah said in the book.
"Any weakening of this link would call into question the magisterium of the (Second Vatican) Council and of Popes Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI," he wrote.
"I humbly beg Pope Francis to protect us definitively from such an eventuality by vetoing any weakening of the law of priestly celibacy, even if it is limited to one region or another," the cardinal pleaded.
"Morbid and villainous temptation to align the Church with the values of Western societies"
Cardinal Sarah also started speaking out more forcefully about the "great crisis" he was seeing in the Church.
In an interview published in 2019 in Valeurs Actuelles, a right-wing weekly news magazine based in Parish, he criticized the "small number" of priests who give in "to the morbid and villainous temptation to align the Church with the values of today's Western societies".
"Above all, they want it to be said that the Church is open, welcoming, attentive, modern," the cardinal charged.
"But the Church is not made to listen, she is made to teach: she is Mater et Magistra, mother and teacher," he insisted.
Cardinal Sarah has always denied being an opponent of Pope Francis.
In his 2019 book, The Day is Now Far Spent (Ignatius Press), he severely chided those who put him in opposition to the Jesuit pope.
"Those who put me in opposition to the pope cannot present a single one of my words, phrases or attitudes that are in support of their absurd and, I would say, diabolical assertions," he wrote.
He then added, "Whoever is against the pope is outside the Church."
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