Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has praised Pope Francis for his November 2014 appointment of Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah to head the Vatican congregation that oversees liturgy, despite differences that have emerged since then between the cardinal and Pope Francis.
Writing a laudatory afterword to Cardinal Sarah’s new book “The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise”, Pope Emeritus Benedict writes: “We should be grateful to Pope Francis for appointing such a spiritual teacher as head of the congregation that is responsible for the celebration of the liturgy in the Church.”
However, in July last year the 71-year-old cardinal, who is prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine worship and the Sacraments, said that priests should start to celebrate Mass ad orientem – facing east, away from the congregation, in the manner of the pre-Second Vatican Council “Old Rite” liturgy. Soon afterwards, the Vatican released a statement saying there would be no changes to this part of the liturgy.
Then in October Francis appointed a raft of new members to the Congregation choosing a series of pastoral moderates to replace more conservative-minded figures. “Cardinal Sarah is a spiritual teacher, who speaks out of the depths of silence with the Lord, out of his interior union with him, and thus really has something to say to each one of us,” Benedict wrote in the afterword, published on the First Things website. “With Cardinal Sarah, a master of silence and of interior prayer, the liturgy is in good hands.”
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