21 October 15
Brad Miner reviews the contribution of Robert Sarah to “Eleven Cardinals Speak: On Marriage and the Family.” A great man on true matrimony.This is a review – of a sort – of Eleven Cardinals Speak: On Marriage and the Family. For the record, the eleven cardinals are: Robert Sarah of Guinea, Carlo Caffarra and Camillo Ruini of Italy, Baselios Cleemis of India, Paul Cordes and Joachim Meisner of Germany, Dominik Duka of the Czech Republic, Antonio Varela of Spain, Willem Eijk of the Netherlands, John Onaiyekan of Nigeria, and Jorge Urosa of Venezuela. (The book is edited by Fr. Winfried Aymans, a German canonist.)Although Eleven Cardinals Speak is a short book – just 128 pages – it is, in my opinion, impossible to deal with each of the cardinals’ contributions in a review of under 1,000 words, so I’ll focus on just one: “Marriage Preparation in a Secularized World” by Robert Sarah. I do this for two reasons: first, because Cardinal Sarah has emerged as among the most important figures in the Church – especially so at the 2015 Synod – and, second, because his essay defines superbly what has arisen as a key point in discussion at the Synod – one that will surely find its way into whatever final instructions emerge at the end of the month: better marriage preparation.

            Sarah’s importance (and the power of his prose) derives partly from his personality and partly from his position as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, the dicastery devoted to overseeing Catholic practice with regard to just about everything the Synod is considering. As the leading Catholic figure from an African nation that is 85 percent Muslim, Sarah has shown remarkable courage in speaking forthrightly in defense of Catholicism and religious liberty. He is one of those individuals who does not suffer fools gladly, as, for instance, when Ban Ki-moon called upon African nations to repeal all discriminatory laws pertaining to homosexuality. Cardinal Sarah called the U.N. Secretary General’s comments “stupid,” and sounded a theme important to him and all of Africa’s Christians: so-called “progressive” values are pressed upon Africa by coercive Western elites who think nothing of using aid money as extortion.

Sarah’s essay in Eleven Cardinals Speak begins with a quote from Chesterton: “Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.” In Sarah’s amplification: “If Christ alone reveals the truth about man, then in rejecting him we lose the meaning of human nature.”

Click here to read Brad’s one concern and question: How many priests have the wisdom of Robert Sarah and his ability to offer sound counsel?