The following year, new seminarians were required to have a certificate of good conduct from their priest before entering. He insisted that he could not allow men who would set fire to a chapel to become priests, and his decision stood. Nobody came forward, and he was true to his word.Ĭardinal Sarah faced pressures from authorities of both Church and state, urging him to reverse his decision, but he would not yield. He threatened that if nobody would come forward, he would dismiss every seminarian and shut down the seminary for the year. Cardinal Sarah stated that he would have preferred if they set fire to his own room in protest, but was deeply troubled that men training to become priests would set fire to the house of the Lord.
He faced a rebellion, which quickly culminated in a group of students setting fire to the seminary chapel.Ĭardinal Sarah first asked the guilty party to come forward, then put pressure on those who knew the culprits to accuse them. Cardinal Sarah was shocked by the lack of spiritual formation and order, and made changes to establish discipline.
In 2015, Cardinal Robert Sarah released the book, “ God or Nothing.” Commenting on his time as rector of the seminary in Conakry, Guinea, Cardinal Sarah describes inheriting a culture where “ sort of moral disintegration prevailed” among the seminarians. In such times of doubt, I often turn my thoughts to one particular anecdote from a recent book, which gives me hope that the right man with the right attributes can indeed reform a bureaucracy. After all, we have seen great reformers rise to authority and yet we see no reform. The sober realist may doubt that meaningful reform of these seemingly unreformable bureaucratic behemoths is possible. Pope Benedict resigned in 2013 he left the Church an impressive theological and liturgical legacy but was apparently unable to dislodge the bureaucratic dysfunction. We heard him ask the people immediately upon his elevation to the papacy to “pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.” The pope struggled for eight years with bureaucratic obstruction, internal rivalries, and a seeming inability to make meaningful reform to the institution of which he was the visible head. Likewise, in the Catholic Church, we saw Pope Benedict XVI, one of the greatest orthodox theological minds of the 20th century, elected pope in 2005. By the time Trump and his supporters realized the necessity of “an entire cadre of young Americans motivated by the same values he represented to rise to the occasion and lead,” his first term was coming to an end.
Yet the Trump presidency seemed bogged down by bureaucracy, by agencies filled with Bush- and Obama-era middlemen who could not be wielded to pursue a Trump agenda.
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Suddenly, we had a leader willing to challenge the globalist status quo on free trade, our marauding foreign wars, and our unchecked immigration. After the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, conservatives saw a glimmer of hope that something might actually change in the established order.
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