In Dakar, Cardinal Sarah Denounces a Defaced Liturgy

The progressives may not forgive him, but that did not prevent Cardinal Robert Sarah from issuing a new warning. During a conference on the liturgy organized in Dakar, on December 4, 2023, the high Guinean prelate engaged in a full-blown attack against what he considers to be the “destruction” of the Mass.

“We are witnessing today, especially in the West, a dismantling of the values of faith and piety. … And a destruction of the forms of the Mass,” he denounced. He adds: “We sprinkle the liturgy with African and Asian elements, thus distorting the mystery that we celebrate, and our celebrations sometimes last six hours.”

“Our liturgies are often too banal and too noisy, too African and less Christian.” It is a charge which the progressive Catholic press was quick to seize upon, opposing the traditional figure of the former patron of the liturgy at the Vatican to that of Pope Francis, an opposition which Cardinal Sarah has always rejected. “If we look at the liturgy as a practical question of pastoral efficacy…, we risk making it a human work, a set of more or less successful ceremonies,” also warned the Guinean prelate. 

Sacrosanctum Concilium and the Liturgical Revolution

The Cardinal's observations are correct, though he does not identify the origin of the liturgical crisis in Sacrosanctum Concilium, the conciliar constitution on the liturgy, promulgated on December 4, 1963.

It is a general text which, like a framework law, prefigures a radical transformation of the liturgy by drawing inspiration from two contradictory currents, and striving to achieve a synthesis between tradition and modernity. 

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who participated in the discussion on this text, often deplored the erroneous principle of “active participation” by the faithful - a term which appears eleven times in the text - which was used in an ambiguous and equivocal sense in order to be able to achieve the liturgical upheavals that Cardinal Sarah has denounced.