Modern Western advocates of abortion and population control in Africa are like the French revolutionaries who massacred the people of Vendée, Cardinal Robert Sarah has said.
In a homily honouring the Vendée martyrs, published by the magazine Famille Chrétienne, Cardinal Sarah praised the region and its inhabitants for resisting atheistic republicanism during the Revolution, but said the Church and the traditional family still faced persecution.
“Once again today, more than ever, revolutionary ideologists want to annihilate the natural place of self-giving, joyful generosity and of love,” he said. “I want to talk about the family! Gender ideology, and contempt for fertility and fidelity are the many slogans of this revolution.
“Who will rise today for God?” the cardinal asked. “Who will dare to confront the modern persecutors of the Church? Who will have the courage to rise up without any weapons other than the rosary and the Sacred Heart, to face the columns of death of our time?”
These modern “columns of death”, the cardinal explained, were “relativism, indifferentism and contempt for God”.
“Who will say to this world that the only freedom worth dying for is the freedom to believe?”
The War in the Vendée, which lasted from March to December 1793, was a popular uprising against France’s revolutionary republican government. It was led by the self-styled Catholic and Royal Army, which was largely composed of peasants. In the aftermath of the rebellion, tens of thousands of civilians were massacred by the “Infernal Columns” of General Louis Marie Turreau. Many of those who died have been beatified.
African children are being ‘given guns instead of pens’
Cardinal Dieudonné Nzapalainga of Bangui has said that a “lost generation” in the Central African Republic has been “born into violence”.
The cardinal, speaking to Catholic news site Crux on a visit to Cameroon, said children were being “given guns instead of pens” and made to carry arms instead of going to school.
He stressed that the conflict between different militias was not about religion. “Those who give out weapons are not imams, pastors or priests … people do not fight for the Koran or the Bible. They fight for diamond, gold, cows, to make money; they fight for political positioning, but in doing so, they use young people as sacrificial lambs.”
The UN says that 10,000 orphaned children have been recruited into fighting in the Central African Republic.
Fighting has intensified in recent months. About 2,000 Muslims are living in a Catholic cathedral compound in Bangassou to escape being attacked.
Cardinal Nzapalainga said that, “outside the capital Bangui, power rests in the hands of armed groups … They control everything. Government has soldiers, but they are badly trained and ill-equipped.”
Bishop: pray for cholera-hit Yemen
Bishop Paul Hinder has asked for prayers for Yemen as the country endures famine, a cholera outbreak and civil war.
Bishop Hinder, who leads the Apostolic Vicariate of Southern Arabia, said “we cannot expect that the cholera can be stopped” or that “starving people” can be properly fed unless a ceasefire is agreed.
“As I believe in the power of the prayer,” he said, “I can only ask the faithful around the world to keep in mind the suffering people in Yemen.”
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