Cardinal Robert Sarah: 'A diabolical project against the Latin Mass'

On Monday 20 January in Milan, northern Italy, La Nuova Bussola/Daily Compass had the privilege of hosting a presentation by Cardinal Robert Sarah on his latest book, Dio Esiste (Does God exist?)(Cantagalli), in which the Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments answers multiple questions on the existence and presence of God in our lives.
Below are extracts from Cardinal Robert Sarah's lectio specially selected by the Daily Compass for its readers.

Prayer is a silent, contemplative, loving gaze directed towards God. Prayer is looking at God and allowing ourselves to be looked at by God. This is what the story of the farmer and the Curé of Ars teaches us. Amazed to see him regularly and daily on his knees in silence before the Blessed Sacrament, the Curé of Ars asked him: "My dear friend, what are you doing here? And he would answer: 'Je l'avise et il m'avise (I look at him and he looks at me)!

The late Cardinal Ratzinger, in his homily at the Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontifice, said: 'To have a clear faith according to the Creed of the Church is often called fundamentalism. On the other hand, relativism, that is, allowing oneself to be carried 'here and there by every wind of doctrine', seems to be the only attitude in keeping with the times. A dictatorship of relativism is taking shape, which accepts nothing as definitive and leaves only the ego and its desires as the ultimate measure. We, on the other hand, have another measure: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An adult faith' is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; an adult and mature faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ". How dramatically relevant this text by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is!

The most urgent task is to recover the sense of adoration and prostration in faith and awe before the mystery of God! Like the Magi who "bowed down in adoration". The loss of the religious value of kneeling and the sense of adoration before God is the source of all the fires and crises that shake the world and the Church, of the restlessness and dissatisfaction that we see in our society. We need worshippers! The world is dying for lack of worshippers! The Church is withering because it lacks worshippers. This is the first and privileged place of dialogue with God: the tabernacle, His presence in our midst.

For the same reason, Holy Mass is like a necessary and vital appointment with Christ. The Eucharist is the source of the Church's mission; the holy and beautiful celebrations for the glory of God and the sanctification of the people are fundamental for fostering trust in Him, that divine intimacy for which our existence yearns. For this reason, the Holy Mass celebrated in national languages must never lose the sense of the sacred and must never betray the word of the Lord Jesus. Holy Mass is not a social gathering to celebrate ourselves and our deeds, it is not a cultural display, but the remembrance of the Lord's death and resurrection, which the Church has always celebrated for centuries. (...)

We are immeasurably more blessed than the prophet Isaiah: he prayed that God would rend the heavens and come down (cf. Is 63:19); we contemplate Him in our midst. King David wondered where he could find help (cf. Ps 121); we know that our help is in the Lord Jesus. The whole tradition of the Church teaches that Jesus of Nazareth, Lord and Christ, is the only Saviour of humanity, and that there is no salvation in anyone else. Whoever comes to salvation outside the visible boundaries of Christianity comes always and only through the merits of Christ on the cross and not without the mediation of the Church.

These central truths of the Christian faith have recently been reaffirmed (because there was a clear need to do so) by two fundamental documents: John Paul II's Encyclical Redemptor Hominis of March 1978 and the Declaration Dominus Iesus of the Jubilee Year 2000.

They are two fundamental documents of the Magisterium of the Church: the first, with which John Paul II opened his own pontificate, committing in it all his own and the Church's credibility - almost the programme of the pontificate - and summing up what the Church herself had matured over the centuries as an awareness of herself and of her own task; the other, issued by the then Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, presided over by Card. Ratzinger, with the special approval of John Paul II, constitutes the foundation of ecumenical dialogue, in truth, because without truth there can be no dialogue. (...)

The Catholic Church is 'the place where all truths meet', wrote the great Chesterton almost a hundred years ago, discovering that the oldest religion surprisingly turns out to be the newest, newer even than the so-called new religions - such as Protestantism, socialism or spiritualism - because, unlike them, Catholic tradition and truth have preserved their validity intact for two thousand years.

The answer to all the questions that every human being asks himself is to be found in Christianity; the only possible answer to that longing for the true, the good, the beautiful, the just which dwells in the heart of each one of us is Christ. (...)

The abandonment of God has led to the conviction that moral liberalism leads to the progress of civilisation. Instead, observation of reality shows that this supposed progress is in fact a moral and anthropological decadence, a new form of paganism that has desacralised man and his relationships: it even claims to determine who has the right to live, and the most vulnerable pay the price: the unborn, the elderly, the handicapped and, more recently, all those who have been abandoned, convinced that they are a burden on society, on their friends and even on their own family.

The Church, deeply concerned to save the whole person, body and soul, has always given priority to evangelisation, to education through schools, and to human health by opening dispensaries and hospitals. In this defence of mankind, of the sacredness of his life, we must not allow the powers of this world, expressed in national or supranational governments (think of the UN and its offshoots; military defence pacts that then become offensive), to dictate utilitarian and inhuman agendas. Let us be wary of the new globalist ethics promoted by the UN; let us be wary of gender ideology! (...)

Why change one's own nature? Why violate it by manipulating it? Why change one's gender by unnecessarily mutilating a body created by God? We must not mutilate ourselves in order to realise ourselves according to our feelings or tendencies, in a way that is different from what God has made us. He created us in his image and likeness, male and female he created us (cf. Gen 1:27). We destroy ourselves when we deny or refuse to be born male and female, when we choose to mutilate our nature as male or female. On the contrary, we must enter into a logic of welcoming nature, our own nature, as a gift, as a free gift from the Creator, who reveals to us a fragment of his infinite wisdom. (...)

The Eucharist is the most vital sacrament. It is the life of our lives. It is the most precious gift that we have inherited. And an inheritance is preserved, it cannot be squandered!

In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but not rupture. What was holy for previous generations remains holy and great for us, and cannot suddenly be forbidden or even judged harmful. It is good for all of us to preserve the riches that have grown in the faith and prayer of the Church and to give them their rightful place" (Benedict XVI).

Hence the plan to definitively abolish the traditional Tridentine Mass, a rite that dates back to St Gregory the Great, a liturgy that is 1,600 years old, a Mass celebrated by so many saints: St Padre Pio, St Philip Neri, St John Mary Vianney: the Curé of Ars, St Francis de Sales, St Josemaria Escrivá, etc. And all the way back to Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) and even to Pope Damasus (366-384). This project, if it is true, seems to me to be an insult to the history of the Church and to Sacred Tradition, a diabolical project that seeks to break with the Church of Christ, the Apostles and the Saints.

Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that "the First Vatican Council did not define the Pope as an absolute monarch but, on the contrary, as the guarantor of obedience to the word handed down: his authority is linked to the tradition of the faith: this is also true in the area of the liturgy. It is not "made" by a bureaucratic apparatus. Even the Pope can only be a humble servant of its proper development and of its constant integrity and identity... The Pope's authority is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition".

*Cardinal