Robert Sarah
Robert Sarah is a Guinean Catholic prelate who served as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments from 23 November 2014 to 20 February 2021. He previously served as secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples under Pope John Paul II and president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum under Pope Benedict XVI. He was made a cardinal in 2010.
Early life and education
Sarah was born in Ourous, a rural village in then French Guinea, on 15 June 1945, the son of cultivators and converts to Christianity from animism. He is a member of the Coniagui ethnic group in northern Guinea. In 1957, at age 12, he entered Saint Augustine Minor Seminary in Bingerville, Ivory Coast, where he studied for three years. Because in 1960 relations between newly independent Guinea and the Ivory Coast were strained, he continued his studies briefly in Conakry, Guinea, at Saint Mary of Dixinn Seminary run by the Holy Ghost Fathers, until the radical government of Guinea expropriated Church property in August 1961. After independent study at home, the Church negotiated a place for Sarah and some fellow seminarians at a government-run school in Kindia in March 1962 and then won the right to open a seminary, where Sarah earned his baccalaureate in 1964. In September of that year he was sent to study at the Grand Seminary in Nancy, France. Again, deteriorating international relations, this time between Guinea and France, forced him to interrupt his studies, and he completed his theological studies in Sébikotane, Senegal, between October 1967 and June 1969. From 1969 to 1974 he studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he obtained a licentiate in theology, except for the year 1971 which he spent at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum of Jerusalem, where he obtained a licentiate in Sacred Scriptures.Sarah speaks French, English, Spanish and Italian fluently.
Presbyterate and episcopate
Sarah was ordained to the priesthood on 20 July 1969, and incardinated in the Diocese of Conakry. On 13 August 1979, Pope John Paul II appointed him Metropolitan Archbishop of Conakry. He was consecrated bishop on 8 December 1979 by Cardinal Giovanni Benelli. He served as Conakry's bishop for more than twenty years and during that tenure filled terms as president of the Guinean bishops' conference and of the Episcopal Conference of West Africa.Archbishop under the dictatorship of Sékou Touré
Sarah served as archbishop under the dictatorship of Ahmed Sékou Touré, who put Sarah on a death list before dying in 1984. However, despite the persecution of priests and laymen, Sarah worked to maintain the Church as the one institution that was independent of the dictatorship. In his book God or Nothing, Sarah rebuked the Marxist dictatorship as a utopian scheme that brought misery and death.The French daily newspaper Le Figaro reports that Sarah "did not hesitate to oppose the all-powerful Sékou Touré, then 'supreme leader of the revolution' but also a commander of violent repressions. He made the celebrated public statement: 'power wears man out !
The Historical Dictionary of Guinea commented on Sarah's role in resisting Sékou Touré's dictatorship, writing that the Church "managed to play a remarkable role under former Archbishop Robert Sarah in Guinea's public life... Monsignor Robert Sarah is one of the most respected leaders among Guineans, who expressed their strong desire to see him lead the country's political transition on various occasions between 2006 and 2010. He arguably earned much of this popular trust by speaking truth to power during the stormiest years of President Ahmed Sékou Touré's regime, while other spiritual leaders endeavoured to cater to the regime."
Cardinalate
On 20 November 2010, Pope Benedict XVI made him Cardinal-Deacon of San Giovanni Bosco in Via Tuscolana. He had the right to vote in papal conclaves until his 80th birthday on 15 June 2025. He was a cardinal elector in the 2013 papal conclave that elected Pope Francis and the 2025 papal conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV.He was mentioned in the press as papabile,
a possible candidate for the papacy, both in 2013 and 2025.
Roman Curia
On 1 October 2001, John Paul II named Sarah secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, a post he held for ten years. He used the occasion of his departure from Guinea, when he was awarded the country's highest honour, to condemn the government of Lansana Conté. He said that Guinean society was "built on the oppression of the insignificant by the powerful, on contempt for the poor and the weak, on the cleverness of poor stewards of the public good, on the bribery and corruption of the administration and the institutions of the republic".In October 2010 he was appointed president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, which carries responsibility for organising Catholic relief efforts worldwide. He was the second African appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to lead a Vatican dicastery. The first was Peter Cardinal Turkson of Ghana who was appointed president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in 2009.
On 23 November 2014, Pope Francis appointed Sarah as Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, as Cor Unum was going to be eliminated as part of Pope Francis' reorganization of the Roman Curia.
On 21 January 2016, Sarah announced that participation in the Holy Thursday foot-washing rite was no longer limited to men, following instructions from Pope Francis who had included women since the beginning of his papacy. However, in March, Sarah said that there was no obligation to include women in the ceremony.
Liturgy
On 27 May 2015, the memorial of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, a new form of the Catholic Mass using the traditional language of the Book of Common Prayer, and titled Divine Worship: The Missal was promulgated over his signature.In May 2016, Sarah told an interviewer that the Second Vatican Council did not require priests to celebrate Mass versus populum, describing it as "a possibility, but not an obligation". Sarah also stated that readers and listeners should face each other during the Liturgy of the Word, but "as soon as we reach the moment when one addresses God – from the Offertory onwards – it is essential that the priest and faithful look together towards the east. This corresponds exactly to what the Council Fathers wanted." Sarah rejected the argument that priests celebrating Mass facing the East, or ad orientem, are turning their backs on the faithful or "against them".
Speaking at a London conference on 5 July 2016, Sarah asked all bishops and priests to begin celebrating the Mass ad orientem "wherever possible", "perhaps" by 27 November 2016, the start of Advent. He encouraged Catholics to receive Communion kneeling and said that Pope Francis had asked him to "continue the liturgical work Pope Benedict began". Sarah then met privately with Francis and on 11 July the Holy See Press Office issued a statement that said that Sarah's London remarks had been "incorrectly interpreted, as if they were intended to announce new indications different to those given so far in the liturgical rules and in the words of the Pope regarding celebration facing the people and the ordinary rite of the Mass", that celebrating Mass facing the congregation was "desirable wherever possible" and not to be superseded by ad orientem. It reported that the Pope and the Cardinal were in complete agreement on these points.
He once wrote: "I refuse to waste our time pitting one liturgy against another or the rite of Saint Pius V against that of Blessed Paul VI." In July 2017, he wrote in the French magazine La Nef that he wanted the two forms of the Roman-Rite liturgy whose use is authorized by the 2007 papal document Summorum Pontificum to have the same calendar of feasts and the same Scripture readings, but that the work of a committee formed for that purpose had been unsuccessful. He still proposed that the newer form should restore certain practices that had been abandoned: that the faithful receive communion only on the tongue and while kneeling, that the prayers at the foot of the altar be included in the Mass, and that from the consecration of the host to the ablutions at the end of Mass the priest should keep thumb and index finger of each hand joined. In the older form, in which use of the vernacular language in the Scripture readings instead of Latin has only been made optional, he wished that the Scripture readings should be understood by the people. Earlier that year, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi criticised the expression "reform of the reform", which Sarah had used in the previous year; in his La Nef article Sarah said that the expression was best avoided and that he preferred to speak of "liturgical reconciliation".
On a related note, on 24 August 2017, Pope Francis insisted that the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council were "irreversible". Some perceived this as having part of a declaration invoked in his "magisterial authority".
In September 2017, Pope Francis transferred primary responsibility "to faithfully prepare approve and publish" translations of liturgical books into vernacular languages from the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments to conferences of bishops, ordering the congregation to "help the Episcopal Conferences to fulfil their task." An explanatory note, attributed to Sarah, soon appeared, specifying that the congregation's approval would not be a mere formality but would involve a detailed review that could lead to binding rejections of unsatisfactory translations. On 22 October 2017, the Holy See released a letter that Pope Francis had sent to Sarah, clarifying that the Holy See and its departments would have only limited authority to confirm liturgical translations recognized by a local episcopal conference.