The push by some Westerners to use
the Vatican’s Amazon synod to ad-
vance their personal agendas is an
insult to God and his plan for the Church,
Cardinal Robert Sarah said in an interview
published this week.
“This synod has a specific and local ob-
jective: the evangelization of the Amazon.
I fear that some Westerners are seizing this
assembly to advance their plans,” Sarah told
Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera Oct.
7.
The cardinal mentioned in particular
synod discussion of the ordination of mar-
ried men, the creation of women’s minis-
tries, and the jurisdiction of the laity.
“These points touch the structure of the
universal Church. Taking advantage to
introduce ideological plans would be an
unworthy manipulation, a dishonest de-
ception, an insult to God who guides his
Church and entrusts to it his plan of salva-
tion,” he stated.
Sarah, who is participating in the Ama-
zon synod in his capacity as prefect of the
Congregation for Divine Worship, noted
that he has heard that some people want
this synod assembly to be a “laboratory”
for the universal Church, and others think
after the meeting everything will have
changed.
“If this is true, this is dishonest and mis-
leading,” the cardinal commented.
He added that he was “shocked and in-
dignant that the spiritual distress of the
poor in the Amazon was used as an excuse
to support typical projects of bourgeois and
worldly Christianity. It is abominable.”
The proposal of combatting priest short-
ages in the Amazon by ordaining married,
respected men — so-called viri probati,
Sarah called “theologically absurd” and
implying “a functionalist concession of the
priesthood…”
The proposal contradicts the Second Vat-
ican Council’s teaching, he said, by seeming
to separate within the priesthood participa-
tion in Christ’s identity as priest, prophet,
and king.
He added that to ordain married men
“would mean in practice to question the
obligatory nature of celibacy as such.”
Sarah said no one fears the viri probati
proposal, but the synod will study it and
Pope Francis will draw his conclusions,
though he noted Francis’ use of a quote
from St. Pope Paul VI in a speech in Janu-
ary: “I prefer to give my life before changing
the law of Celibacy.”
Sarah said “the question is another: to
understand the meaning of the priestly vo-
cation. Ask yourself why there are no more
people willing to give all of themselves for
God, for the priesthood and for virginity.”
He argued that people prefer to think of
“ploys,” instead of addressing the larger,
more right problems.
The idea, he said, that instituting the
married priesthood would end pedophilia,
or that because there are few vocations lay
ministries should be expanded is the “pre-
sumption of men.”
“And frankly it does not seem to me that
the churches where priestly celibacy does
not exist today are much more prosperous
than the Catholic Church, if that is the pur-
pose,” he said.
