ROME — A leading African cardinal said last weekend religious liberty is “under threat” in the West where there is an “implicit bias against Christianity.”
Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, the former head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship, told EWTN News Sunday that religious liberty is under attack around the world and must never be taken for granted.
“Threats against religious liberty take many forms,” the 77-year-old cardinal stated. “Countless martyrs continue to die for the faith around the world. But religious liberty is under threat in the West, too.”
“It is not often an overt threat, or hatred of the faith,” he said, but an “implicit bias against Christianity.”
Sarah also criticized what he called the easy acceptance of “draconian restrictions” on Mass attendance during the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’ll face more pandemics and other emergencies, and there will be debate concerning how best to address this in relation to the celebration of the Eucharist. This is good,” he stated. “Liberal democracy requires debate, but never can the importance of our worship of God be forgotten or neglected in the course of debate. Liberal democracy must not forget God.”
File/Muslim protesters hold signs as they demonstrate against a French magazine that published nude cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed outside the French embassy in London on September 21, 2012. (ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/GettyImages)
This is not the first time Cardinal Sarah has railed against attacks on Christianity and religious freedom in the West.
In 2016, the cardinal addressed the annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C. in which he denounced an “insidious war” against Christians taking place in the United States under the guise of tolerance.
While other countries face “merciless beheadings,” “bombings of churches,” and “torching of orphanages,” he said, in the United States, Christians face an “equally damaging, yet more hidden” form of religious persecution.
In America, “political leaders, lobby groups and mass media seek to neutralize and depersonalize the conscience of Christians so as to dissolve them in a fluid society without religion and without God,” he warned.
“In the name of ‘tolerance,’ the Church’s teachings on marriage, sexuality and the human person are dismantled,” he said, by measures such as the “legalization of same-sex marriage, the obligation to accept contraception within health care programs, and even ‘bathroom bills’ that allow men to use the women’s restrooms and locker rooms.”
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