Cardinal Sarah: Pope Leo’s Generosity towards the Traditional Latin Mass ‘Must Apply to All Bishops’
In a new video-interview five years after Traditionis Custodes, the Cardinal weighs in on the future of the vetus ordo — and warns that “Synodality” and paganism are eroding the Church from within.
This interview was conducted in Italian. The video, with English subtitles, appears below; a full English transcript appears at the end of this article.
VATICAN CITY, 16 July 2026 — Cardinal Robert Sarah has a message for bishops the world over: emulate Pope Leo XIV’s generosity towards the Traditional Latin Mass. In a new video interview, the Guinean Cardinal — Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments — argues that Pope Leo’s recent letter urging openness from France’s bishops toward priests and communities attached to the vetus ordo should bind every bishop of the Roman rite, not France’s alone. “What was written to the French Bishops must apply to all Bishops,” he says.
His call comes as new weight falls on a year-old revelation: that a Vatican survey of the world’s bishops had in fact contradicted the very grounds Pope Francis gave for severely restricting the TLM in his 2021 motu proprio, Traditionis Custodes. “We cannot say that what has been done for 1,600 years is no longer valid now,” Cardinal Sarah says, rejecting the premise behind the restrictions and calling on the world’s episcopate to follow the new Pope’s lead rather than cling to what was imposed under his predecessor.
Cardinal Sarah goes further still, questioning the very legitimacy of a decree that would cancel centuries of liturgical practice: “What cancels is not a valid text, because the Church is a continuity.”
The interview was conducted on June 29, the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, at the close of the second extraordinary Consistory of Cardinals of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate. It ranged far beyond the question of the status of the Traditional Latin Mass.
Commenting on the ongoing Synod on Synodality, the Cardinal says flatly it is a term he has “never understood.” The Study Group No. 9 report on homosexuality, he argues, should not reach the world’s dioceses without Pope Leo’s own scrutiny first. And on the liturgy at large, he warns of what happens when divine worship becomes, in his words, “a kind of entertainment.”
Cardinal Sarah expanded on his critique of Synodality in remarks following the interview. “Synodality,” he said, is “an abstract term, untranslatable into our African languages,” with no grounding in Scripture, history, or Church Tradition. When Paul VI restored the Synod of Bishops, he recalled, the aim was precise: to let bishops “better live out collegiality” and help the Pope fulfil his mission as universal Pastor “with greater fidelity.” What is needed now, urgently, is a clear definition of “the exact meaning, the competencies, the limits, and the mission” of Synodality — one that leaves the Church’s doctrine, morals, nature and structure untouched. The Church, he insists, is Bride, Mother, and the Mystical Body of Christ. “It seems improper to me to call her ‘synodal,’” he said.
In our sit-down interview, we also discuss his new book (available in French), 2050, in which he confronts the Church’s crisis of faith head-on and asks whether she will still be a beacon a quarter-century from now.“The Church belongs to Christ; it is not ours,” he says — not something “we manufacture,” reshape, or rename to suit the age.
He also points to what he regards as paganism entering the Church. In a forceful and candid critique on the Pachamama’s presence at the 2019 Amazon Synod hosted at the Vatican, he says: “We carried it in procession from the Basilica to the Paul VI Hall, and it remained in front of us the whole time during the Synod.” Missionaries once told African converts to burn such idols, he notes. “And now,” he says, “we bring the Pachamama into the Basilica.”
Asked directly whether the Church will still be that light in 2050, Cardinal Sarah does not equivocate: “Yes … Christ will not abandon his Church,” he says. “He will remain until the end of the world.” But he insists that “we must convert ourselves to Christ; it is not that Christ must convert Himself to us, to our ideas, to our paradigm shift.”
Below is the English transcript of my interview with His Eminence Robert Cardinal Sarah.
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I wish Card. Sarah had been elected pope.
Well, Your Eminence, for these reasons and many more, the SSPX claims a real state of necessity in the Church…