Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea | photo: Grzegorz Galazka
Above, Cardinal Robert Sarah. The much-loved African cardinal, born in Guinea in West Africa in 1945 and now 79, was for some years the head of the liturgy office in the Vatican. He is known for his deep mysticism and his compelling, Christo-centric vision of human reality. He has just written a courageous, eloquent, profound new book. In it, he answers 40 questions about the Church and the world in our time posed to him by Italian Catholic editor and publisher David Cantagalli. The Italian cover of the new book is above. The new book may be purchased at this link
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“We seek with the desire to find, and we find with the desire to seek again. Seeking you, my God, I seek the happiness of life.” –St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.)
Letter #49, 2024, Monday, November 18: Sarah
Does God Exist? (“Dio esiste?”) is the title of a new book by Cardinal Robert Sarah, 79, just published by Edizioni Cantagalli, Siena, Italy (the extended title is Does God Exist?: The Cry of the Man who Seeks Salvation).
Here follows Cardinal Sarah’s own note about how this book was born, followed by the preface of the Italian editor-publisher, David Cantagalli, then followed by a long excerpt from the cardinal’s answer to the first question at the beginning of the book.
Sarah is the author of many thoughtful books, including The Power of Silence (2017) and The Day Is Now Far Spent (2019), which may be found here.—RM
P.S. It would be much appreciated if readers who like these letters would support us with even a small donation (link).
1. Cardinal Sarah on how this book came to be
Cardinal Robert Sarah writes this opening note:
“This book was born out of an attempt to answer the questions of the publisher Cantagalli who, with genuine apostolic zeal, wanted to prompt me with questions that were sometimes ‘difficult,’ but of sure and widespread interest.
“I have sought the answers in my personal history and in my heart, in the Magisterium of the Church and in that of the popes who have marked my life and, last but not least, in the fruitful dialogue with friends, priests and lay people, who live an authentic passion for Christ and the Church, witnessing in the world to the One they have encountered.”
—Cardinal Robert Sarah
2. “An Event” — David Cantagalli’s introduction to the new book
The Italian editor-publisher, David Cantagalli, writes:
Introduction
Does God exist? Yesterday as today, men and women of all times, especially when faced with difficulties and their own frailties, have posed this question. Great saints and sinners, believers and atheists, intellectuals and simple people have asked it.
It is a question that finds its greatest extension and fullness in Christianity, for it is precisely Christianity that claims to affirm that the objective existence of God does not depend on a personal and subjective, ideal and emotional conviction, but on a real, sensible and intelligible experience. Faith arises from an event that takes one by surprise and fills one with wonder.
Christianity, in fact, is the religion of the Word who became flesh and dwells among us (cf. Jn. 1:14), and its credibility depends on the possibility of feeling the presence of God, of the One who in the beginning was the Word and then became flesh: “God, no one has ever seen him: the only-begotten Son, who is God and is in the bosom of the Father, it is he who has revealed him” (Jn. 1:18).
The need to verify the existence of God finds its natural place in Christianity, which, before being a religion, is an event or, as the late and beloved Cardinal Giacomo Biffi liked to say, is “an event, the event of the Son of God who enters history, who dies and rises again for us.”
One cannot believe in the True and Only God if one does not know his Son.
With the birth of Jesus, God granted a new and extraordinary possibility to man: to know Him, that is, to verify His real existence and presence in our lives.
As the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum states, “It pleased God in His goodness and wisdom to reveal Himself and to manifest the mystery of His will (cf. Eph. 1:9), by which men through Christ, the Word made flesh, in the Holy Spirit, have access to the Father and are made partakers of the divine nature (cf. Eph. 2:18; 2 Pet. 1:4). For by this Revelation, the invisible God (cf. Col 1:15; 1 Tim 1:17) in His great love speaks to men as friends (cf. Ex 33:11; Jn 15:14-15) and engages with them (cf. Bar 3:38), to invite and admit them to communion with Himself.”
I have always been fascinated by the idea that God, moved by man’s desire to be able to see Him, decided at some point to reveal Himself, through His Son. The desire of the Jewish people to see God, to be able to meet Him, is constantly present in the Old Testament, and God, on various occasions, indulges this human need, showing Himself in the form of a burning bush (cf. Ex. 3:2-3) or a cloud (cf. Ex. 24:15-18; 33:9- 10; 40:36-38). God performs theophanies — from the Greek theophàneia: theos(God) and phàinein (to manifest himself) — that is, he manifests himself to man in a way perceptible to the senses without, however, showing his face.
In the Old Covenant, therefore, there is already present the seed that will give birth to the New Covenant, the Word becoming flesh, a physically perceptible relationship between God and man, which reaches its fulfillment in the birth of Christ, the Son of God.
God created man, and man, as he was created by God, needs, in order to believe in Him, to see Him, to feel His presence.
It is not a matter of theoretical or philosophical speculation, nor of deluding ourselves that an abstract entity is present in our minds or in our hearts, confused by the nothingness that surrounds us.
It is a matter of observing reality, that is, feeling and seeing, and having the reasonable certainty that also what is invisible exists.
The perception of the objective reality that surrounds us, also made up of our relationships with the people we meet, moves our hearts and minds toward a “more” that we have been waiting for all along, and that suddenly shows itself in all its beauty and wonder:
“Of what is it that you sense you are missing, this lack, heart, that all of a sudden you are full of it? of what? Broken the dam, it floods and submerges you” (Mario Luzi).
Thus we remain amazed and astonished, stopped, “stuck” for an instant by that “more” that recalls an eternity once known and now forgotten.
This is the “beauty that will save the world” prophesied in The Idiot, by (Fyodor) Dostoevsky, through the mouth of Prince Myškin, accused by Hippolit of simply having fallen in love. No, it is not about a mere feeling, an illusion, or an idea. It is about an encounter, the discovery that God exists.
In the Gospel account of the sinful woman who bathes Jesus’ feet with her tears, dries them with her hair and perfumes them (cf. Lk 7:36-50), it is evident how this woman’s conversion comes about through her encounter with Jesus. She does not know that Jesus is the Son of God and yet she performs an act of faith and great love toward him. From this physical encounter, an act of love is born, her conversion is born, faith is born in her.
In this book, I asked Cardinal Sarah many questions about the existence and real presence of God in our lives… His apparent silence… death… suffering… pain… joy, and much more. I believe that today, perhaps more than in the past, we all have a profound need for answers, clear, grounded and illuminated by Scripture, tangible testimonies, encounters that reveal the existence and visible presence of God.
As there was in Zacchaeus, so there is in us a desire for truth and fullness, we need to “see Christ” to fill that “lack” that constantly reminds us that God exists.
Vladimir Solov’ëv calls it “the infinitude of the human soul, which does not allow man to stop forever and to settle for something partial, something trivial and incomplete, but urges him to want and to seek a full, universal, everlasting life, to identify himself with a cause valid for all men everywhere” (Discourses on Dostoevsky).
I asked Cardinal Sarah to write this book because I am convinced that, in a time when many sanction the end of Christianity and the dethronement of God, in a time when man is shipwrecked in the illusion of a new meaning of life, under the banner of impermanence and compulsiveness, that everything grasps and nothing truly possesses, a man of the Church like him and a layman like me have the responsibility of those “creative minorities, that is, men who in the encounter with Christ have found the precious pearl, the one that gives value to the whole of life,” that were so dear to Pope Benedict XVI’s heart.
I therefore thank Cardinal Robert Sarah for his friendship and for the trust he has had in me, and for accepting this undertaking with the shared awareness that nothing depends on us.
“The Lord will complete His work for me.
Lord, your goodness endures forever:
do not forsake the work of your hands”
(Ps. 137:8).
—David Cantagalli
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3. The Beginning of the New Book: The 1st Question
Your Eminence, we are living in an age in which Christian culture seems so opposed that there has arisen almost a sense of shame for our past, for our Christian roots. Why is this happening?
Cardinal Robert Sarah: We cannot answer this important question except by placing the Christian event in history and clarifying what culture is.
First, culture has been defined as the critical and systematic consciousness of an experience. In other words, the Christian cultural dimension takes place in the confrontation between the truth of the person of Christ and our life in all its implications.
Each man assumes, in the connection with the environment and the community in which he lives (family, people, nation, community of worship and religion), a hypothesis of the meaning of existence, a hypothesis that is necessarily totalizing, that is, it invests all aspects of existence. Everything, really everything, has to do with religiosity. Everything has to do with Christ. The first sign of a new culture taking hold is the change in the thinking of those who have encountered this proclamation.
In our bimillennial history, the culture born of the proclamation that, in Christ, God became man, that God himself is no longer “veiled,” has always been opposed. The revelation that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses dwells among men, that nothing already announced to the Jewish people is undone but, rather, is perfected, made clear, “unveiled” in the time that begins with Christ the man, implies an immediate repercussion on the whole world, it invests society, every human society, and thus the culture that is proper to society.
Whether it is a small society, a family, a group of people, a city, or an empire — wherever they are and are located on earth, as well as in the span of time they traverse — each is obliged to confront a proclamation that compels response. God has spoken and man cannot be silent.
By responding — even by the silence of an unspoken answer — man reveals his position, declares his adherence or non-adherence to the proposal made by Christ himself, and in so doing, says what the horizon of the society in which he lives and which he is building is.
From the earliest times of Christian history, we can identify examples that highlight the scope of this proclamation and the repercussion it had in the society in which it was introduced.
St. Paul does not deny the institution of slavery, but affirms that the slave is to be treated as a brother: “I pray you for Onesimus, […] who was useless to you one day, but is now useful to you and to me. I send him back to you, he who is so dear to me […]. Perhaps he was separated from you for a moment: that you might have him back forever; but no longer, however, as a slave, but much more than a slave, as a dearest brother, in the first place for me, but still more for you, both as a man and as a brother in the Lord” (Phlm 1:15- 17), recognizing him as having a dignity equal to that of every man “for as many as have been baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free” (Gal 3:27-28).
“We have all been baptized by one Spirit into one body, Jew or Greek, slave or free” (1 Cor. 12:13). The Christian proclamation points out that family relationships themselves have changed:
“Be submissive to one another: wives be to their husbands, as to the Lord […]. So also husbands have a duty to love their wives as their own bodies: he who loves his wife, loves himself. For no one has ever hated his own flesh; on the contrary, he nourishes and cares for it […] each one on his part should love his wife as himself, and the wife should be respectful toward her husband” (Eph. 5:21-33).
“You, wives, be submissive to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. You, husbands, love your wives and do not treat them harshly. You, sons, obey your parents in everything; this is pleasing to the Lord. You, fathers, do not exasperate your children, lest they be discouraged. You, slaves, be docile in everything with your earthly masters” (Col. 3:18-22).
When Paul affirms that our homeland is in heaven, that from heaven we await as savior the Lord Jesus Christ, he affirms this in antithesis to the worship of Caesar: “For our citizenship is in heaven, and from there we await as savior the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transfigure our wretched body to conform it to his glorious body, by virtue of the power he has to subject all things to himself” (Phil. 3:20-21).
Christ Himself does not deny the institution of the death penalty, but He subtracts it from human arbitrariness and circumscribes its purpose: life is valuable insofar as it is possible to recognize, adhere to, and have faith in Him; to interject oneself in this purpose, to divert it to secondary ends, to prevent its fulfillment, that is, to “scandalize” — insofar as it is a stumbling block that drives away, that prevents — definitely removes from proper perspective the life that comes from God and must return to Him. It becomes “just” for a man to be condemned, for his punishment to be death, the end of temporal life: “Whoever shall scandalize a single one of these little ones who believe in me, it behooves him that a millstone be hanged about his neck and he be cast into the deep of the sea” (Mt. 18:6). Such a condemnation, until the very recent past, has been admitted as a possible last call to repentance, that is, to the recognition of a “Beyond” that has made itself known with precise coordinates, elements, indications. On the cross, the condemned man, whom tradition indicates to us by the name of Dismas, does not challenge the excessive severity of the judge, does not seek extenuating circumstances; he recognizes that everything he has pursued, erroneously, for a lifetime, the cause for which he has moved — violating laws, lives, property — is there, before him, and he can finally “deliver himself,” through that Person, reach the fulfillment pursued vainly until then.
Such consciousness of novelty and uniqueness of the Christ event is already present in the early Christians.
Not a hundred years have passed since Christ was seen risen by the first disciples and already social consequences are being drawn from his teaching. Diognetus is a pagan to whom is addressed what today we would call a “synthesis” of Christian doctrine, in which we read (Letter to Diognetus, Chapter V):
“For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe.
“For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines.
“But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners.
“As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life.
“They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonored, and yet in their very dishonor are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honor; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.”
So already in the second century of the Christian era, the community — the Church — is aware of its own diversity and uniqueness in the landscape of the world, and the world has already come to know this newness, taking its measure, deciding which side to take, accepting or rejecting the new culture, that is, the set of social, material, spiritual and intellectual manifestations it generates.
Adherence is always, first and foremost, personal: whether a peasant or a ruler; whether sincere or instrumental, it is the person’s will that is at stake and the ends he or she recognizes as good for himself or at least useful. Depending on the network of relationships, influence on others, or civic role played, such a choice has the power to affect a larger number of people, to inform a society.
Aversion to the Christian hypothesis takes the form of physical violence: the persecution of those who have embraced the proclamation bathes showplaces in blood just as it calls for the sacrifice of soldiers and legions, not because of infidelity to the task of defense or betrayal of comrades, but because of mere membership in a faith that recognizes as God only Christ and not — together — the emperor, and by extension, the human chain that binds these to the last centurion. Christ would still be tolerated if he were admitted as a god among others, but not if proclaimed Unique.
Such persecution achieves its purpose only in the shedding of the blood of those who do not accept compromise, of those who do not accept being part of one vision among others in the world, of those who are the bearers of a way of living, of aggregating, of professing faith, of elaborating symbols, that is the only true one, the only one worthy for every man.
And it is a clash that continues for centuries, a persecution, that still in the 20th century — and in several geographical areas even in the 21st — demands the lives of Christians who do not bow to worldly power.
The Christian community, the Church, has since its origin stood as the defender of those who are disadvantaged — personally, socially, economically — removing them from the arbitrary power of an individual or the state, combining the ancient concept of justice with the new proclamation (St. Augustine, The City of God, IV):
“If justice is not respected, what are states if not great bands of robbers? For what, too, are bands of robbers if not small states? It is still a group of individuals that is governed by the command of a leader, is bound by a social pact, and the spoils are divided according to the law of convention. If the wicked gang increases with the addition of perverse men so much that it possesses territories, establishes residences, occupies cities, subdues peoples, it more openly assumes the name of State which is now accorded to it in the reality of the facts not by the diminishing ambition to possess but by a greater security in impunity. With finesse and truth at once, a captured pirate once answered Alexander the Great in this sense. The king asked him what idea he had come up with to haunt the sea. And he, with frank bravado: “The same as you to haunt the whole world; but I am considered a pirate because I do it with a small ship, you a commander because you do it with a great fleet.”
The state is thus not the origin of ethics.
Solemnly and directly addressing those who are manipulating consciences and claiming to indoctrinate new generations and seeking to annihilate all those they perceive as “enemies” of the race, people or nation, Pius XI writes (Encyclical Letter Mit brennender Sorge [“With burning concern”], 14 March, 1937, n. 9):
“The fundamental fact [is] that man, as a person, possesses God-given rights, which must be protected from every attack by the community, which would have for its purpose to deny them, to abolish them and to prevent their exercise.
“By despising this truth, one loses sight of the fact that the true common good is ultimately determined and known through man’s nature with its harmonious balance between personal right and social bond, as well as by the purpose of society determined by human nature itself.
“Society is willed by the Creator as a means for the full development of individual and social faculties, which man has to make use of, now giving now receiving for his own good and that of others. Even those more universal and higher values that can be realized, not by the individual, but only by society, have by the Creator’s will as their ultimate purpose man and his natural and supernatural development and perfecting. Those who stray from this order shake the pillars on which society rests, and endanger its tranquility, security and existence. […]
“Parents who are conscientious and conscious of their educational mission have before all else the essential right to the education of their children, given to them by God, according to the spirit of the true faith and in accordance with its principles and prescriptions. Laws, or other similar provisions, which do not take into account in school matters the will of parents or render it ineffective with threats or by violence, are in contradiction with natural law and in their intimate essence immoral.”
The clear explanation of the social and cultural consequences of the Christian faith contained in the message, the courage, unforeseen on the part of those who govern the country [Germany], determines the power to make the persecution even more intense, even making false accusations:
“There are cases of sexual abuse that come to light every day against a large number of members of the Catholic clergy. Unfortunately, we can no longer speak of individual cases but of a collective moral crisis that perhaps the cultural history of humanity has never known on such a frightening and disconcerting scale. Numerous priests and religious are confessed offenders. There is no doubt that the thousands of cases that have come to the attention of justice represent only a small fraction of the authentic amount, since many molesters have been covered up and hidden by the hierarchy. (Joseph Goebbels, discourse of 28 May, 1937)
In May of the same year, that is, beginning in the second week following the reading of the encyclical, the rounding up of priests and religious began in Germany: 1,100 were imprisoned and among them more than 300 deported to the Dachau camp. But even in that unexpected form of sociality, the Church brought its own message: those deportees went into the barracks, where no others wanted to enter anymore for fear of contagion (a typhus epidemic had spread), to heal and console the dying. (See Guillaume Zeller, La Baraque des prêtres, Dachau, 1938-1945, Éditions Tallandier, Paris 2015.)
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