by George Rasley
Cardinal Robert Sarah, the Vatican’s prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, has issued a stark warning to all inheritors of Europe’s Judeo-Christian culture: The “West will disappear” as a result of mass migration and “Islam will invade the world” and “completely change culture, anthropology, and moral vision” unless we bend the arc of our culture back toward its Judeo-Christian roots.
Cardinal Sarah’s new book, Evening Draws Near and the Day is Nearly Over, is causing controversy because it explicitly identifies Muslim migration as a harbinger of the collapse of the West.
“If the West continues in this fatal way, there is a great risk that, due to a lack of birth, it will disappear, invaded by foreigners, just as Rome has been invaded by barbarians,” said Sarah in a video interview, “My country is predominantly Muslim. I think I know what reality I’m talking about.”
Commentators on the Left have been quick to focus on Cardinal Sarah’s remarks about Islam, but the Cardinal’s analysis of the precarious state of Western civilization was much deeper and bears further study by all those who wish to preserve the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage.
In an interview published by the Catholic Herald UK, Cardinal Sarah offered this insightful analysis of why the West has become so vulnerable:
The spiritual crisis involves the entire world. But its source is in Europe. People in the West are guilty of rejecting God. They have not only rejected God. Friedrich Nietzsche, who may be considered the spokesman of the West, has claimed: “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him…” We have murdered God. In view of God’s death among men, Nietzsche would replace him with a prophetic “Superman.”
The spiritual collapse thus has a very Western character. In particular, I would like to emphasize the rejection of fatherhood. Our contemporaries are convinced that, in order to be free, one must not depend on anybody. There is a tragic error in this. Western people are convinced that receiving is contrary to the dignity of human persons. But civilized man is fundamentally an heir, he receives a history, a culture, a language, a name, a family. This is what distinguishes him from the barbarian. To refuse to be inscribed within a network of dependence, heritage, and filiation condemns us to go back naked into the jungle of a competitive economy left to its own devices. Because he refuses to acknowledge himself as an heir, man is condemned to the hell of liberal globalization in which individual interests confront one another without any law to govern them besides profit at any price.
In this book, however, I want to suggest to Western people that the real cause of this refusal to claim their inheritance and this refusal of fatherhood is the rejection of God. From Him we receive our nature as man and woman. This is intolerable to modern minds. Gender ideology is a Luciferian refusal to receive a sexual nature from God. Thus some rebel against God and pointlessly mutilate themselves in order to change their sex. But in reality they do not fundamentally change anything of their structure as man or woman. The West refuses to receive, and will accept only what it constructs for itself. Transhumanism is the ultimate avatar of this movement. Because it is a gift from God, human nature itself becomes unbearable for western man.
Now, from our perspective here was Cardinal Sarah’s key point in the interview: Africa and Asia are not yet entirely contaminated by gender ideology, transhumanism, or the hatred of fatherhood. But the Western powers’ neo-colonialist spirit and will to dominate pressures countries to adopt these deadly ideologies.
In a 2015 statement during the Synod on the Family, Sarah said the idolatry of Western freedom and Islamic fundamentalism are “almost like two apocalyptic beasts” and similar to Nazism and Communism.
“To use a slogan, stated Cardinal Sarah, “we find ourselves between “gender ideology and ISIS”. Islamic massacres and libertarian demands regularly contend for the front page of the newspapers. (Let us remember what happened last June 26!)* From these two radicalizations arise the two major threats to the family: its subjectivist disintegration in the secularized West through quick and easy divorce, abortion, homosexual unions, euthanasia etc. (cf. Gender theory, the ‘Femen’, the LGBT lobby, IPPF …). On the other hand, the pseudo-family of ideologized Islam which legitimizes polygamy, female subservience, sexual slavery, child marriage etc. (cf. Al Qaeda, Isis, Boko Haram …)
“Several clues enable us to intuit the same demonic origin of these two movements,” said the Cardinal. “Unlike the Spirit of Truth that promotes communion in the distinction (perichoresis), these encourage confusion (homo-gamy) or subordination (poly-gamy). Furthermore, they demand a universal and totalitarian rule, are violently intolerant, destroyers of families, society and the Church, and are openly Christianophobic.”
Cardinal Sarah was born in the African nation of Guinea, where almost 90 percent of the population is Muslim. It is one of the great ironies of the nascent 21st century that the colonialized peoples of Asia, and especially Africa, are now the most committed defenders of the values, ideals and culture of the West – especially in the face of the Muslim onslaught that is the new century’s most predictable constant.
Europe is rapidly sinking, but America, while seriously infected with the “radicalization” of gender ideology and other effects of Nietzschean teaching, has yet to succumb to the “radicalization” Islam – but it is perilously close.
Cardinal Sarah’s books, sermons and statements are stark reminders that our ability to maintain the Western culture in which mankind’s greatest material and spiritual accomplishments were achieved is rapidly eroding and that unless we Americans bend the arc of our culture back toward its Judeo-Christian values and teachings the civilization of the West will disappear.
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Editor’s Note: June 26, 2015 was the day the United States Supreme Court made homosexual “marriage” a constitutionally protected right.
Photo “Cardinal Robert Sarah” by François-Régis Salefran CC4.0.
