We should be grateful to Pope Francis for appointing Cardinal Robert Sarah to guard the Church’s liturgy, Benedict XVI has said.
In an afterword to Cardinal Sarah’s new book The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, the retired Pope gives a rare endorsement of a serving Church official, saying that the liturgy is in “good hands” with the cardinal as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.
Benedict XVI praises the book, saying that the cardinal “teaches us silence – being silent with Jesus, true inner stillness, and in just this way he helps us to grasp the word of the Lord anew.”
He also calls Cardinal Sarah a “master of silence and of interior prayer”, saying that silence is necessary to help us interpret the Gospels.
“Anyone today who reads the ever-thicker commentaries on the Gospels remains disappointed in the end,” Benedict writes. Instead, one must imitate the example of Jesus, who spent much time in silence.
“We know that His speech, His word, comes from silence and could mature only there. So it stands to reason that His word can be correctly understood only if we, too, enter into His silence, if we learn to hear it from His silence.”
The English translation of the afterword was published for the first time in English by the magazine First Things.
The Italian journalist Riccardo Cascioli said Benedict’s intervention was “actually a real bomb”. It meant, said Mr Cascioli in La Nuova Bussola, that the Pope Emeritus was defending Cardinal Sarah, who had “been isolated and marginalised” by Pope Francis’s new appointments to the Congregation for Divine Worship.
Cardinal Sarah has also been sidelined with a public rebuke from the Vatican after he appealed to priests to say Mass ad orientem.
Pope names new cardinals from far-flung countries
Pope Francis has named five new cardinals for Laos, Mali, Sweden, Spain and El Salvador.
In his surprise announcement on Sunday, Francis said his selection reflected the universal nature of the Church. In some of the countries, such as Laos and Sweden, Catholics are a minority. The Pope continued his practice of naming cardinals from places normally on the peripheries.
The churchmen will be formally installed as cardinals in a ceremony at the Vatican on June 28.
They include Bishop Anders Arborelius of Stockholm, a convert from Lutheranism who welcomed Pope Francis to Sweden to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.
The other new cardinals-to-be are Archbishop Jean Zerbo of Bamako, Mali; Archbishop Juan José Omella of Barcelona, Spain; Bishop Louis-Marie Ling Mangkhanekhoun, apostolic vicar of Paksé, Laos; and Bishop Gregorio Rosa Chávez, an auxiliary bishop in San Salvador, El Salvador.
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