South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier sent out a series of angry tweets after watching Tuesday’s State of the Union address, criticizing Obama’s secularism and exclusive focus on American interests.
The Cardinal’s first tweet focused on the President’s secular worldview, noting that the closest Obama came to mentioning God was his quote of Pope Francis.
This is noy the first time the President has been censured for a lack of religious spirit. Even in his yearly Thanksgiving proclamations, Obama seems reluctant to ever mention the source of the nation’s blessings. Napier’s second Twitter message highlights what he considers to be Obama’s provincialism and lack of global ethical sense. Everything is about material prosperity, he complains, and there is no mention of the common good of humanity.
In his third tweet, Cardinal Napier moves on to Obama’s foreign policy, which, he says, has only U.S. interests at heart, with no real care for other peoples.
In his fourth and final tweet, the South African Cardinal summarizes Obama’s view of America as a self-centered island of prosperity surrounded by oceans of poverty and misery.
Cardinal Napier was appointed by Pope Francis as a member of the organizing committee for next year’s Vatican marriage summit, after Napier forcefully criticized the proceedings of the last synod, and its distraction with unimportant issues.
In an interview last December, Napier underscored that the Church in Africa is “a Church made up of people who know and acknowledge that they need God. Because of that, God has a real and living place in their lives.”
He also said that the Church in Africa is much more committed to living the faith than to arguing about it. “I believe the Church in the West could benefit from putting faith in God, especially the sacrifices that are implicit in that faith, before and above niceties of explanations of doctrines,” he said.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome.
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