Cardinal Sarah was prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments from November 2014 to February 2021, when Pope Francis accepted his resignation.
The cardinal had submitted his resignation to the pope when he turned 75 in June 2020, as Church norms dictate.
While head of the liturgy department, Sarah was the most senior African prelate at the Vatican, where he had held important posts since 2001.
Sarah said his book places a special focus on the sacraments, prayer, and the cross.
“A Christian life,” he said, “must be built on three pillars: crux, hostia, and virgo. The cross, the host, and the Virgin Mary. These are the three pillars on which you have to build a Christian life.”
The cardinal said being prefect of the Vatican’s divine worship office really drove home for him the importance of the liturgy being a great and unique moment “to encounter God face to face and to be transformed by him as a child of God and as a true worshiper of God.”
“Liturgy,” he added, “must be beautiful, it must be sacred, and it must be silent.”
He warned against turning the Mass into a “spectacle” or just a gathering of friends, taking the focus off of worship of God.
“I will encourage that the liturgy becomes more and more sacred, more and more holy, more and more silent, because God is silent, and we encounter God in silence, in adoration,” he said. “I think that the formation of the people of God to the liturgy is very important. We can show people the beauty, to be reverent, and to keep silent in the liturgy, in which our encounter with Christ is deepened.”
Sarah also praised silent eucharistic adoration as a chance to encounter Christ in a way that can “really change our lives.”
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Commenting on modern society, the cardinal said: “God has been forgotten.”
“We all live as if God doesn’t exist. Confusion reigns everywhere. Too many would reduce our lives, the very meaning of our lives, to absolute individualism and the pursuit of fleeting pleasure.”
Christians, he said, should respond by returning to the basics of the faith.
“We require a retreat from the world, withdrawal into the desert, where we can relearn the fundamentals, the basics: monotheism, the revelation of Jesus Christ, us and God, his word, our sin, our dependence and need of his mercy,” he said.
Sarah said God, through his Church and the sacraments, “guides us into an ever-deeper relationship with him. And we all have a need to reacquaint ourselves with his profound gift, which is his love.”
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