Quotes from Robert Cardinal Sarah (2) in “The Day Is Now Far Spent":
“In your opinion, what would be the best way of summarizing the long pontificate of John Paul II? All those very productive years can be traced back to the three pillars of his interior life, which were the Cross, the Eucharist, and the Blessed Virgin, “Crux, Hostia, et Virgo". His extraordinary faith sought the foundations for its strength only in the most ordinary tools of the Christian life.”
Cardinal Sarah explains that “the crisis that the Church is experiencing is much deeper [than problems with a business]; it is like a cancer eating away at the body from within … In large sectors of the Church, we have lost the sense of God’s objectivity. Each individual starts from his subjective experience and creates for himself a religion that suits him.”
Over and against a “veritable cacophony [that] reigns in the teachings of pastors, bishops, and priests” which has led to “confusion, ambiguity, and apostasy,” the Cardinal calls Catholics “to receive the Church’s teaching with a spirit of discipleship, with docility and humility.”
Card. Sarah quotes Pope Benedict XVI that “the renewal of the liturgy is the fundamental prerequisite for the renewal of the Church.” He comments on this passage: “I humbly beg bishops, priests, and the people of God to care more for the sacred liturgy, to put God at the center of it, to ask Jesus Christ once again to teach us to pray. We have desacralized the Eucharistic celebration.” (111)
“If man claims to adapt the liturgy to his era, to transform it to suit the circumstances, divine worship dies. The development of some liturgical symbols is necessary sometimes; however, if man goes so far as to confuse the temporal and the eternal, he turns his back on the essential justification for the liturgy.”
“Priests in particular ought to carry them in their heart when they climb the steps to the altar. They must remember that, at the altar, they are facing God. At Mass, the priest is not a professor who gives a lecture, while using the altar as a podium centered on the microphone instead of the Cross. The altar is the sacred threshold par excellence, the place of the face-to-face encounter with God.”
“We need priests who are men of interior life, ‘God’s watchmen’, and pastors passionately committed to the evangelization of the world, and not social workers or politicians.”
“God is still calling as many men as He did in the past; it is men who do not hear God’s voice as in the past.”
“The only way to win this great combat is union with God. Christians will never succeed in overcoming the challenges of the world by appealing to political tools, human rights, or respect for religious liberty. The only true trick for the baptized is prayer and the encounter with Jesus Christ.”
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