Pope St. John XXIII sought to initiate a new period of optimistic engagement with the modern world by opening the Second Vatican Council in 1962. He spoke of opening the windows of the Church, seeking to move beyond the entrenched position reacting against modern secular society. Pope St. Paul VI would later describe the purpose of Vatican II as evangelization, but what followed the Council led to the dark clouds of the modern world’s confusion entering in through those open windows. False understandings of freedom, a mundane approach to liturgy, and politically motivated disputes have blown in with those clouds, while more and more Catholics have stopped practicing the faith.
Even as some Church leaders continue to advance a naively optimistic approach to our secular culture, one voice has arisen to counter this approach and to point us back to the truth and beauty of the Gospel and the Church’s life. Cardinal Robert Sarah released the third installment of his trilogy of interview books, The Day Is Now Far Spent (in conversation with Nicholas Diat, Ignatius Press, 2019). The first volume, God or Nothing, related the Cardinal’s amazing life, beginning with his baptism from paganism as a young boy, his study in a French colonial seminary, becoming Archbishop of the capital of his native Guinea in his early 30s under an oppressive dictatorship, and his later work at the Vatican. The Power of Silence reflected on a crucial topic for our culture, the need to withdraw from the omnipresence of technology to be able to listen to God’s voice in silence.
The Day Is Now Far Spent begins by explaining the crisis of faith that has led to a larger crisis within the Church. Cardinal Sarah explains that “the crisis that the Church is experiencing is much deeper [than problems with a business]; it is like a cancer eating away at the body from within … In large sectors of the Church, we have lost the sense of God’s objectivity. Each individual starts from his subjective experience and creates for himself a religion that suits him” (88). Over and against a “veritable cacophony [that] reigns in the teachings of pastors, bishops, and priests” which has led to “confusion, ambiguity, and apostasy,” the Cardinal calls Catholics “to receive the Church’s teaching with a spirit of discipleship, with docility and humility” (91; 92).
Following from putting God first through faith, Cardinal Sarah invites the Church to recover a sense of the sacred. He quotes Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) that “the renewal of the liturgy is the fundamental prerequisite for the renewal of the Church” (111). He comments on this passage: “I humbly beg bishops, priests, and the people of God to care more for the sacred liturgy, to put God at the center of it, to ask Jesus Christ once again to teach us to pray. We have desacralized the Eucharistic celebration” (ibid.). The liturgy should be the place to encounter God and to enter into a contemplative union with him. He unites the crisis of the liturgy to the broader crisis of culture: The West “no longer weeps with gratitude before the Cross; it no longer trembles in amazement before the Blessed Sacrament. I think that men need to be astonished in order to adore, to praise, to thank this God who is so good and so great. Wisdom begins with wonder, Socrates said. The inability to wonder is the sign of a civilization that is dying” (127).
Sarah documents at great length the death of Western culture. “I am convinced,” he relates, “that Western civilization is going through a lethal crisis. It has reached the limits of self-destructive hatred” (158). This requires that the Church awaken to preserve “what is most human in man. She is the guardian of civilization” (ibid.). He exhorts the Church to defend the goodness of creation and human nature, as well as the family. He also returns to the theme of his previous book, the need to fight against the distraction of technology and to enter into the interior life where God can be found. “Modern man neglects his interior life so much that he longer knows what it means. He is submerged in the mud of passions, preoccupied with musing himself and enjoying all the pleasures of the world” (251).
Despite his challenging words on the crisis of the Church and the world, ultimately Sarah offers inspiration for renewal: “We must burn with a love for our faith. We must not tarnish it or dilute it in worldly compromises … The day when we no longer burn with love for our faith, the world will die of cold, deprived of its most precious good. It is up to us to defend and to proclaim this faith!” (324).