Is Cardinal Sarah the man to save the Church as the next pope?
Gavin Ashenden• May 1, 2025
There are moments in history that act as defining dates determining and reflecting the change of direction in world affairs. We think of 1789 and the French Revolution, and of 1917 with the Russian revolution. If you subscribe to the Great Man of History perspective, then there are moments of election and choice that equally offer similar definition.
Hitler’s appointment of Chancellor in Germany in 1933 represented a point of no return in European affairs. Trump’s re-election of 2025 might represent the high-water mark of Wokism in America, after which followed its exposure and repudiation.
The election of the 267th successor to St Peter has the capacity to be one of equal significance in the history of the Catholic Church. But since the Catholic Church contains the deepest ideological, philosophical and spiritual resources of any organisation, the effect it has in resisting, challenging and converting global or local culture is incalculable.
In the same way that global culture is poised at a hinge moment in history, a version of that crisis is reflected within the Catholic Church and will be given expression to through the election of the next pontiff.
Casual commentators suggest that the choice that lies before the cardinals is placed in one of three categories: going for a conservative, a radical or a compromise moderate. They suggest that a conservative would represent the appointment of a “thin pope after a fat pope”, and that a compromise candidate might offer the solution of eirenic compromise between warring theological factions.
That is a not unreasonable political take on the process. But it misses too much hidden under the surface of the present situation, both theologically and spiritually.
A progressive appointment, a “Francis the Second”, would complete the process that Pope Francis (the First) began more by implication than by action. As Cardinal Tucho pronounced: The Magisterium is dead. Long Live the New Magisterium, the Magisterium of Pope Francis.
In all the argumentation around the extent to which the application of Vatican II represented legitimate continuity with the previous millennia or, rather, a radical discontinuity, the claim that Pope Francis initiated a “new magisterium” is a rather alarming disclosure that the progressive project that he put his weight behind is uncatholic.
And it discloses how a Church that pursues those alternative values – “Who am I to judge” – particularly in relation to sexual ethics, the nature of the family, marriage and celibacy, is so much in breach of the Magisterium that it has had to create a new alternative one (“The Francis magisterium”) as a platform for what would become radical discontinuity.
Can you compromise between Catholic orthodoxy and radical discontinuity?
The question is not very different from asking if you can be a little bit pregnant. There are some compromises that are impossible to give expression to.
Does continuing straight ahead express a compromise between the conflicting choices of going either left or right? If going right is the correct decision, then continuing on ahead is not a compromise between choosing to go left instead. It represents a second directional error, one that will take you to the wrong destination quite as much as the original error.
What we might call orthodox Catholic voices are calling for “a Catholic pope”.
Cardinal Robert Sarah from Guinea in West Africa is being favoured by many, in part because he satisfies some of the more justified criteria of progressive liberal values with a commitment to being a Catholic priest and bishop as it has always and everywhere been understood.
There is a certain irony that a tall, black, dignified African bishop, breaking the mould of white Eurocentric culture as he does, is being presented as a saviour of a Catholic Church that has buckled under Pope Francis from the applied pressure to bless the individual members of gay couples, to watering down the requirements of the teaching on marriage, divorce and access to the sacraments.
When faced with the cultural conflict between the conflicting models of therapy and salvation, Pope Francis deliberately appeared to offer a degree of affirmation to the forces that preferred acceptance and affirmation. His leitmotif of “mercy” implied unconditional acceptance and was recognised as such by a sympathetic press.
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Cardinal Sarah seems to have directly contradicted the therapeutic salve of Pope Francis with classic Catholic teaching when he publicly insisted: “Don’t deceive people with the word ‘mercy’. God forgives sins only if we repent of them.”
On the subject of uncontrolled mass migration, in which Pope Francis adopted the politics of the Left, offering repeated exhortations to “welcome, protect, promote, and integrate” migrants, Cardinal Sarah presented a more coherent Catholic analysis.
It is one rooted in the integrity of the nation and its right to a cohesive self-determining culture. He criticised the progressive assaults promoting mass migration, particularly in relation to its cultural and spiritual impact on Europe:
Cardinal Sarah kneels before the Blessed Sacrament in Toronto, Canada (Image from University of St Michael’s College)
“The Church cannot cooperate with this new form of slavery that mass migration has become. If the West continues in this fatal way, there is a great risk that, for wanting to welcome everyone, it will no longer be able to welcome anyone.”
(—Cardinal Robert Sarah, interview with French magazine Valeurs Actuelles, March 2019)
Pope Francis varied the rules that governed access to the Eucharist for non-Catholic Christians under certain circumstances, particularly in Germany. A controversial proposal by some German bishops in 2018 was aimed to allow Protestant spouses of Catholics to receive Communion. Cardinal Sarah’s response was to respect and promote normative traditional Catholic teaching on the Eucharist:
“Intercommunion is not allowed between Catholics and non-Catholics. It is not a matter left to national episcopal conferences, nor to individual dioceses, nor to individual priests.”
(—Cardinal Robert Sarah, in a letter to the German bishops, 2018)
Pope Francis commonly expressed a preference for the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, including versus populum celebration of the Mass. Cardinal Sarah’s view was the opposite:
“It is very important that we return as soon as possible to a common orientation, of priests and the faithful turned together in the same direction – eastward or at least towards the apse – to the Lord who comes.”
(—Cardinal Robert Sarah, London, July 2016 [Sacra Liturgia conference])
The deeper question which provides the context for the election of the new pope involves a reconsideration of the exercise that was undertaken by the Second Vatican Council in the heady and confusing days of the 1960s.
At the time, it seemed necessary that some kind of accommodation needed to be reached with the secular culture that was emerging in the second half of the 20th century. Those who believe in progress are still convinced that this accommodation between Church and secular culture was and is necessary.
An alternative view is that what has been unleashed by secular culture is not progress but decadence. And not just ethical entropy; but a decadence that has at its heart a hatred of Christianity in general and of Catholicism in particular; and whose main characteristic is the subversion of the Catholic Church, its anthropology and ethics.
Were the cardinals of the Catholic Church to revisit the assessment of the cultural antagonism the Western secular spirit embodies, they might well find both satisfaction and a solution in the choice of Cardinal Sarah.
The combination of being black, being African and being truly and wholeheartedly Catholic might offer just the antidote to the fracture, disorder, ambiguity and discontinuity that the last pontificate has burdened the Church with.
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(Photo by ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images.)