"We firmly and radically oppose a heresy": Guinean Cardinal on Fiducia Supplicans

While bishops globally are divided on the declaration, many Catholic bishops across Africa have publicly rejected the controversial Fiducia Supplicans. Several bishops’ conferences in Africa asked priests to refrain from offering same-sex blessings in recent weeks, while other bishops instructed the clergy in their diocese to not give blessings to same-sex couples. 

In his address, Sarah encouraged “every bishop to do the same” as the episcopal conferences in Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria.

Sarah noted that the declaration “has not been able to correct these errors” of the Church in Germany, where controversy over the Synodal Way has caused division in the Church. 

In March 2023, the German Synodal Way, a collaboration between the German Bishops’ Conference and a powerful lay lobby, ZdK, approved developing formalized ritual texts for same-sex blessings. The Vatican declaration allows for “spontaneous blessings” but not liturgical ones.

But in Sarah’s view, the Vatican declaration has made things worse.

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“What’s more, with its lack of clarity, it has only amplified the confusion that reigns in hearts and some even seized it to support their attempt at manipulation,” Sarah wrote.

He wrote that “vain quibbles about the meaning of the word blessing” should be avoided. 

While he noted that blessings for sinners are a given, Sarah emphasized that the Church “can never be diverted by making it a legitimation of sin, of the structure of sin, or even of the next occasion of sin.”

He also expressed concern that the confusion brought about by Fiducia Supplicans could “reappear” subtly in the Synod on Synodality in October 2024. 

Sarah reflected that the Church should respond to same-sex couples with the mercy of truth. 

“What to say to people involved in same-sex unions? Like Jesus, we dare the first of mercies: the objective truth of acts,” he wrote.

Sarah argued that blessing a same-sex couple is not the proper response. 

“The only thing to ask of people who are in a relationship against nature is to convert and conform to the word of God,” he wrote.

Sarah, who was born and raised in Guinea, recalled Pope Benedict XVI’s instruction to Africa to be the spiritual “lung” of humanity in contrast to the nihilism, materialism, and relativism affecting the West.

“The Church of Africa is the voice of the poor, the simple, and the small,” Sarah wrote, noting that it has to proclaim the Gospel to Western Christians who “believe themselves to be evolved, modern and wise of the wisdom of the world.”

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“It is therefore not surprising that the bishops of Africa, in their poverty, are today the heralds of this divine truth in the face of the power and wealth of some episcopates of the West,” he added.