The conservative African archbishop also blasted various American Catholic institutions, saying they were Catholic ‘in name only.’
The Catholic archbishop overseeing the Archdiocese of Washington suggested in late March that despite claiming to be a devout Catholic, President Joe Biden had effectively subordinated his faith to leftist politics. The term Cardinal Wilton Gregory used to describe Biden and others with the tendency to pick and choose which nonnegotiable moral teachings to follow was “cafeteria Catholic.”
In his recent speech at a Napa Institute event in Washington, D.C., Cardinal Robert Sarah — one of the most senior and recognizable leaders in the church — similarly slammed Biden, reusing Gregory’s descriptor.
Cardinal Sarah, the former head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments and president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum under Pope Benedict XVI, noted at the outset of his remarks that the “West, while not the birthplace of Christianity, is home [to] much of what was once called ‘Christendom’ and much of what has become modern society, the roots of which are firmly European.”
Sarah, a socially conservative West African, bemoaned the loss of distinction between the former and the latter, indicating that Catholics in the West have assimilated some of the same beliefs as “the general population.”
The Catholic leader singled out Biden, now unpopular with the vast majority of American Catholics, as a poster boy for this kind of syncretism and willfully diluted faith.
“You have a self-identified Catholic president who is an example of what Cardinal Gregory recently described as a ‘cafeteria Catholic,'” said the archbishop.
Blaze News previously reported that while Biden was celebrating the so-called “Transgender Day of Visibility” on Easter Sunday, Cardinal Gregory said that “like a number of Catholics, [Biden] picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts.”