“But they should not tell us too much what we have to do.” Such were the words used by the German theologian Cardinal Walter Kasper to describe what he thought of African contributions during the 2014 Synod on the Family as Catholic bishops and laity gathered to discuss challenges facing the family in the modern world.
It was hard not to recall that sentence while recently reading a book requiring translation into English as soon as possible. For in his best-selling 424 page Dieu ou Rien [God or Nothing] (Fayard, 2015), Cardinal Robert Sarah, the newly-appointed Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, illustrates in conversations with the French journalist Nicolas Diat (author of a revealing book on Benedict XVI’s pontificate) precisely why the universal Church should be listening more to Catholics who come from cultures where the faith is flourishing, and much less to those preoccupied with the concerns of particular Western European churches: churches that are fabulously wealthy in material terms but spiritually-moribund by any standard.
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