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NOISY-LE-ROI, France, April 8, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — An African cardinal has warned that the West is descending into barbarism and is likely to bring the developing world down with it.

Cardinal Robert Sarah, author of such new spiritual classics as God or Nothing and The Power of Silence, gave an interview to the French Catholic magazine La Nef  in which he told its founder Christophe Geffroy that the West had rejected God and His gifts, including culture and human nature itself. 

An English translation of the original interview has been made available by Zachary Thomas through the U.K.’s Catholic Herald.

“People in the West are guilty of rejecting God,” Sarah told Geffroy.

“They have not only rejected God. Friedrich Nietzsche, who may be considered the spokesman of the West, has claimed: ’God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him…’ We have murdered God. In view of God’s death among men, Nietzsche would replace him with a prophetic ‘Superman.’”

This Western rejection of God involves the rejection of fatherhood itself, by which Sarah seems to mean a refusal to be a cultural descendent, a refusal to accept the gifts a culture bestows upon children from one generation to the next.

“Western people are convinced that receiving is contrary to the dignity of human persons,” the cardinal said.

“But civilized man is fundamentally an heir, he receives a history, a culture, a language, a name, a family. This is what distinguishes him from the barbarian. To refuse to be inscribed within a network of dependence, heritage, and filiation condemns us to go back naked into the jungle of a competitive economy left to its own devices.” 

Sarah said this condemnation is to a “hell of liberal globalization” in which people struggle against each other with no law except that of financial profit.

The Guinean cardinal also took aim at transgender ideology, which he called “a Luciferian refusal to receive a sexual nature from God.”

“From Him we receive our nature as man and woman,” Sarah told Geffroy.

“This is intolerable to modern minds. Gender ideology is a Luciferian refusal to receive a sexual nature from God. Thus some rebel against God and pointlessly mutilate themselves in order to change their sex. But in reality they do not fundamentally change anything of their structure as man or woman,” he continued. 

“The West refuses to receive, and will accept only what it constructs for itself. Transhumanism is the ultimate avatar of this movement. Because it is a gift from God, human nature itself becomes unbearable for western man.”

Cardinal Sarah explained that the revolt is “spiritual … the revolt of Satan against the gift of grace” and that Westerners don’t want God’s salvation, as they would rather create their own. He also intimated that the West is hell-bent on pushing its self-made salvation onto the developing world with its rebellion.

“Africa and Asia are not yet entirely contaminated by gender ideology, transhumanism, or the hatred of fatherhood,” he said. “But the Western powers’ neo-colonialist spirit and will to dominate pressures countries to adopt these deadly ideologies.”

Sarah believes that Christians shouldn’t give up their place in public life, saying a “society inspired by the Gospel protects the weak against he consequences of sin.”

“Conversely, a society cut off from God quickly turns into a dictatorship and becomes a structure of sin, encouraging people toward evil,” the cardinal continued.

“That is why we can say that there can be no just society without a place for God in the public sphere. A state that officially espouses atheism is an unjust state. A state that relegates God to the private sphere cuts itself off from the true source of rights and justice. A state that pretends to found rights on good will alone, and does not seek to found the law on an objective order received from the Creator, risks falling into totalitarianism.”

Cardinal Sarah’s most recent book, Le soir approche et déjà le soir baisse (“It is nearly evening, and the day is almost over”), was released in France on March 20.