ROME — Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah told a meeting of Catholic bishops in Cameroon this week they had offered an inestimable service to Church unity by their “courageous and prophetic” opposition to the blessings for gay couples recently permitted by the Vatican.

“You have done a work of pastoral charity by recalling the truth,” stated the cardinal, who held one of the highest positions in the Vatican hierarchy as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship from 2014 to 2021.

“Some in the West wanted people to believe that you had acted in the name of African cultural particularism,” Sarah said in reference to recent comments by Pope Francis. “It is false and ridiculous to attribute such comments to you!”

“Some have asserted, in a logic of intellectual neo-colonialism, that Africans were not ‘yet’ ready to bless homosexual couples for cultural reasons,” the 87-year-old cardinal added. “As if the West was ahead of backward Africans.”

“Since when would the truth of the faith, the teaching of the Gospel, be subject to particular cultures?” he asked. “This vision of a culturally responsive faith reveals how relativism divides and corrupts the unity of the Church.”

Demonstrators from the Coalition of Botswana Christian Churches chants slogans against homosexuality and hold placards while marching toward the Parlament of Botswana on July 22, 2023 protesting against legislation seeking to make same-sex relation legal. (MONIRUL BHUIYAN/AFP via Getty)

Pope Francis has contended that the people who are vehemently protesting the Vatican’s decision to allow the blessings of gay couples “belong to small ideological groups” but that the resistance coming from the African continent is a “special” case because for Africans “homosexuality is something ‘ugly’ from a cultural point of view; they do not tolerate it.”

The bishops of Africa “are now being condescendingly portrayed as culturally conditioned,” responded Dr. Nina Heereman, a theologian, “while we fail to ask ourselves to what extent we are the ones succumbing to the pressure of the culture around us.”

In his address to the bishops of Cameroon, Cardinal Sarah urged “vigilance,” warning that progressives in the Church will “defend a reform agenda” in the next session of the Vatican synod on synodality.

This agenda contains “the destructive idea that the truth of the faith should be received differently according to places, cultures and people,” he declared.

“This idea is only a disguise for the dictatorship of relativism so strongly denounced by Benedict XVI,” he said. “It aims to allow breaches of doctrine and morality in certain places under the pretext of cultural adaptation.

In the face of this, some “recently appointed theologian experts” will tell you with false kindness: “Rest assured, in Africa, we will not impose this type of innovation on you. You are not culturally ready,” Sarah said, repeating recent words from the newly appointed prefect of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, the Argentinean Cardinal Víctor “Tucho” Fernández.

“But we, successors of the Apostles, are not ordained to promote and defend our cultures, but the universal unity of the faith!” Sarah said, adding that the truth “is the same everywhere, in Europe as in Africa and the United States!”