Monday, January 21, 2013

Cardinal Sarah: “Charity beyond secularist logic”

Cardinal SarahThere is an urgent need to counter secularist ethics which has been “violently” imposed on “cultures and people across the world through the use of political, legal and cultural mechanisms.” 

This has fuelled “a negative and destructive vision of men and women,” and is now coming dangerously close to creeping into Church charity.

The President of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, Cardinal Robert Sarah, strongly condemned the world’s ethical model as thought out by certain international organisations. 

It ends up heavily conditioning the lifestyles of entire populations.

During the opening of the dicastery’s plenary session this morning, the cardinal condemned the way in which presumed financial and technological aid for development is used as an instrument that is subject to specific conditions set by providers of the aid. 

A typical example of this is that linked to the Western idea of contraception and the disregard for man and woman who are created in the image of God and have taken on various legal forms in different parts of the world, such as the laws regarding the much-talked-about ideology on gender.”

The cardinal expressed particular pastoral concern for those who have been called to bring Christian charity to the world. He condemned the imposition “of political and cultural laws which transmit ideologies and forms of secularism that are aggressive, intolerant and destructive towards cultures and above all faith.” 

He spoke out against the “cultural, political and legal” attack against the identity of man and woman as people, against their nuptial identity and against their wonderful complementarity in love.”

What the Council will need to reflect on during its assembly is “the realisation that some members of the Church who work in the field of charity, have let themselves be seduced and defined by the purely secularist ethics of International government aid agencies. They have even gone as far as forming unconditional partnerships and adopting the same aims of anthropological deconstruction, the same language and the same slogans.”