ACI Prensa Staff, 22 January, 2025 / 1:00 pm (ACI Africa).
“Does God Exist?: The Cry of Man Asking for Salvation” is the title of a new interview book by Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect emeritus of the Congregation — now Dicastery — for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.
In the book published in Italian at the end of 2024, the African cardinal answers various questions posed by journalist David Cantagalli and explains that the text “arises from an attempt to answer the questions of the editor … who with authentic apostolic zeal” wanted to ask “difficult questions.”
“I have sought the answers in my personal history and in my heart, in the magisterium of the Church and in that of the popes who have marked my life, and, last but not least, in the fruitful dialogue with friends, priests, and laypeople, who live an authentic passion for Christ and for the Church, bearing witness in the world to him whom they have encountered,” Sarah writes.
In a recent interview with Il Timone of Italy and reported by Religion en Libertad, the cardinal explained why it is man and not God who has “died” in the West: “The West is experiencing a profound identity and anthropological crisis in which man, in his truth and beauty, seems no longer to be aware of his dignity and his vocation to happiness, to the fulfilment of his personal being.”
The cardinal also noted that “it is obvious that all this has remote roots, starting from the substitution of the Augustinian ‘amo ergo sum’ (‘I love, therefore I am’) with the Cartesian ‘cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’), thus reducing relational ontology to subjective self-consciousness, depriving man of that healthy relationship with reality on which ontology, the knowledge of one’s being, is founded.”
