African Cardinal Confronts EU “Colonialism”

By | 2026

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 31 (C-Fam) – At a recent event in Brussels, a prominent Guinean Catholic cardinal issued a stern rebuke to the European Union for its efforts to impose gender ideology and abortion on the continent of Africa.

“In the relationship between the European Union and Africa, words are today used not to reveal reality but to hide it, and even to distort it.”

Cardinal Robert Sarah, formerly the head of the Church’s office on liturgy and the sacraments in the Vatican, was speaking at a conference in the European Parliament hosted by members of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group and cosponsored by European pro-life and pro-family organizations.

The use and abuse of language was a frequent theme in Sarah’s speech, where he pointed to the Greek word logos, which “means both reason and word.”

“Words, for a Christian, are never mere instruments, but participate in the truth they communicate.”

“How can Africa trust a Europe that speaks with equivocal, double-meaning words?” the cardinal asked. He said that ambiguous words in treaties and resolutions “are not tools of cooperation but tools of perversion and silent power of cultural and economic neocolonialism. Whoever controls the meaning of the words effectively controls the outcome of the negotiation.”

Among the ambiguous terms he criticized were “gender,” “sexual and reproductive health,” and even “human rights,” which are used by the EU to impose “juridical categories alien to our history, to our faith, to our culture, to our anthropological vision.”

Cardinal Sarah quoted from Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical as well as the words of previous popes Francis and Benedict XVI, making the case that a correct understanding human anthropology must be at the heart of any political project.

Pointing to EU resolutions prioritizing access to legal abortion, he said “a juridical system that raises abortion to a fundamental right […] obliges States, religious communities, health-care and educational personnel to conform to a vision of man incompatible with their convictions of faith.”

He cited the Samoa Agreement, a 20-year partnership framework which regulates relationships between the EU, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, which calls for governments to “comprehensive sexual and reproductive health education.”

The cardinal pointed out that, based on such curricula, “education becomes the laboratory in which children are taught to consider their own sexual identity as purely fluid and self-determined, detached from the body, from family history, from relationship.”

He condemned the use of “educational programs and conditioned aid to penetrate the cultural fabric of African countries, redefining the person and the family according to secularized Western standards that do not belong to the history of those peoples.”

In closing, Cardinal Sarah urged Europe to undergo a “serious examination of conscience.”

“Listen to Africa. Respect its cultural sovereignty. Offer free cooperation, not conditioned by ideological agendas.”

He drew parallels between the crisis of the Western Church and the crisis of the West itself. “It is because the Church in many European nations has lost her own identity, her prophetic voice, that the West itself has lost the sense of its own civilization.”

In response, the cardinal proposed that Europe “be willing to receive from Africa what it can still offer to a tired West: the testimony of a living faith and of a sense of the family, which can help Europe itself to rediscover its own logos.”

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