WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in Rome, linked the attempted suppression and rejection of the Traditional Latin Mass within the Church to the rejection of traditional Catholic morals and Europe’s wider defection from Christianity in what he called “practical atheism.”
The comments on the attempt to cast off the Church’s ancient liturgy within the Latin rite came in a talk Cardinal Sarah offered at the Catholic University of America (CUA) on Thursday, June 14, at an event titled “An Evening with Robert Cardinal Sarah,” sponsored by the Napa Institute and the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C.
The Guinean cardinal offered Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception before giving his lecture and received a standing ovation at the start and end of his remarks.
The talk was titled “The Catholic Church’s Enduring Answer to the Practical Atheism of Our Age.” In the speech, the cardinal lamented the rejection of God that has taken hold of much of the west, especially once-Christian Europe. He said this rejection of God takes the form of not so much intellectual atheism but a practical atheism by which modern man acts as if God does not exist or does not matter.
He especially denounced the ways this practical atheism has entered even the Church, evidenced in the rejection of traditional Catholic morality, traditional Catholic doctrine, and the traditional form of the Catholic liturgy.
Among his other remarks on the state of the Church, the former prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, who has long been a champion of the Traditional Latin Mass and a return to a more reverent manner of celebrating the liturgy, said that the widespread attempt in the Latin Church to cast off her traditional manner of worshipping God, which the Church has seen fit to use for centuries, is a form of practical atheism in which God is no longer at the center of divine worship but rather the sensibilities of modern man.
Linking this rejection of the Church’s traditional liturgy to the rejection of the Church’s traditional moral theology, Sarah identified both as a subtle form of atheism, which he said “is not an outright rejection of God, but it pushes God to the side.”
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Referencing John Paul II on the forms practical atheism can take, Sarah said, “We see this in the Church when sociology or ‘lived experience’ becomes the guiding principle that shape(s) moral judgment. It is not an outright rejection of God, but it pushes God to the side. How often do we hear from theologians, priests, religious, and even some bishops or bishop conferences that we need to adjust our moral theology for considerations that are solely human?”
There is an attempt to ignore, if not reject, the traditional approach to moral theology, as defined so well by Veritatis Splendor and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. If we do, everything becomes conditional and subjective. Welcoming everyone means ignoring Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium.
None of the proponents of this paradigm shift within the Church reject God outright, but they treat Revelation as secondary, or at least on equal footing with experience and modern science. This is how practical atheism works. It does not deny God but functions as if God is not central.
Sarah went on to apply a similar critique to the rejection of the Church’s ancient liturgy. Without naming Traditionis Custodes, he yet warned that portraying the Church’s centuries-old liturgical traditions as “dangerous” and focusing on the horizontal is a way of pushing God to the side.
He said, “We see this approach not only in moral theology but also in liturgy. Sacred traditions that have served the Church well for hundreds of years are now portrayed as dangerous. So much focus on the horizontal pushes out the vertical, as if God is an experience rather than an ontological reality.”
Criticizing the mentality of thinking of tradition as limiting rather than freeing or perfecting, Sarah rooted the casting off of tradition in the focus on the present moment inherent in practical atheism.
“There is an implied understanding by the proponents of practical atheism that faith somehow limits the person … The practical atheists see God and his moral order as a limiting factor,” he said. “Our happiness, according to this way of thinking, is found in being who we want to be, rather than conforming ourselves to God and his order.”
It is all very “now” oriented. What has meaning is that which speaks to the contemporary moment, divorced from our individual and corporate history. This is why the traditions of our faith can be so easily dismissed. According to the practical atheists, tradition is binding, not freeing.
And yet it is through our traditions that we more fully know ourselves. We are not isolated beings unconnected to our past. Our past is what shapes who we are today.
Salvation history is the supreme example of this. Our faith always echoes back to our origins, from Adam and Eve, through the kingdoms of the Old Testament, to Christ as the fulfillment of the old law, to the advent of the Church and the development of all that was given to us from Christ. This is who we are as a Christian people. It is all radically connected. We are a people who live within the context of who God created us to be, which has been received more deeply over the centuries but is always connected to the revelation of Christ, who is the same yesterday and today. To pursue fulfillment by lowering our sights to our experience, emotions, or desires is to reject who we are as God’s creatures, endowed with sublime dignity and created ultimately for Him.
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The cardinal further lamented a kind of “paganism” that he said has entered the Church and the ranks of the hierarchy, warning that “The real crisis is a lack of faith within the Church.”
Referencing a 1958 lecture of then Joseph Ratzinger — which Sarah said “suggests our current situation has roots much deeper than the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s” — the cardinal quoted Ratzinger, who said, “This so-called Christian Europe for almost 400 years has become the birthplace of a new paganism, which is growing steadily in the heart of the Church and threatens to undermine her from within.”
Ratizinger argued in his 1958 lecture that the Church “is no longer, as she once was, a Church composed of pagans who have become Christians, but a Church of pagans who still call themselves Christians but actually have become pagans. Paganism resides today in the Church herself (The New Pagans in the Church, 1958),” Ratzinger wrote.
Sarah pointed out that as “harsh” a critique of the Church as it was, Ratzinger made his comments in 1958. “So the criticism that there exists a practical atheism in the Church is not new to this moment,” he said.
He argued, however, that this atheism in the Church is “more apparent now” than in 1958, and that “it comes in the loss of devout Christian living, or an obvious Christian culture, and in the form of public dissent, sometimes even from high-ranking officials or prominent institutions.”
“How many Catholics attend weekly Mass?” he asked. “How many are involved in the local church? How many live as if Christ exists, or as if Christ is found in his or her neighbor, or with the firm belief that the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ? How many priests celebrate the Holy Eucharist as if they are truly Alter Christus, and, even more so, as if they are ipse Christus – Christ Himself? How many believe in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist?”
“The answer is too few,” he lamented. “We live as if we do not need redemption through the blood of Christ. That is the practical reality for too many in the Church. The crisis is not so much the secular world and its evils, but the lack of faith within the Church.”
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