CLJ:
Cardinal Sarah's Warning to the West by Chase Padusniak
While the African prelate sometimes sounds not unlike a vocal America-first Catholic, a thoughtful reading of his statements make clear that these are incidental similarities, not ideological concurrences. Take, for example, his stance on the European refugee crisis. In an interview with the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles, he appeared to contradict Pope Francis’s position on immigration, saying “It is better to help people flourish in their culture than to encourage them to come to a Europe in full decadence . . . It is a false exegesis to use the word of God to promote migration.”
His reasoning, however, is not that migrants pollute or corrupt the cultures they enter. Instead, in The Day is Now Far Spent, he notes that Europe displays oligarchic tendencies.
Sarah
is concerned that migrants will be corrupted by the host societies; but he is concerned with the
ethnic and cultural changes that mass migration brings as well. The choice of "pollute" or "corrupt" to characterize the odiousness of "America-first" Catholics or conservatives is most likely deliberately, but even Aquinas warns against having too many foreigners in a polis in terms of the harmful effects they will have on the rule of law.
As for "oligarchic tendencies," those tendencies are much more than that, they are the system and the state. In fact, Sarah himself would probably use stronger language than that to describe the state. Similarly, many "America-first" American patriots are also concerned with the oligarchy in this country, and how it profits off importing foreign workers. Are "America-first" Catholics aligned with Pope Francis, then? Does Pope Francis see things that way?
This is the sort of fluff piece aimed at downplaying what might be taken as "extremist views" from a churchman yet untouched by scandal and who is popular among "conservative" Catholics.
