St. Mary’s Cathedral (Cathédrale Sainte-Marie) was built in the 1930s. West Africa, Conakry, Guinea. By aerrant @ Adobe Stock
Conservative Catholics are pushing for Cardinal Robert Sarah for the next pope. Sarah wouldn’t be the first African pope, but he’d be the first in 1500 years, according to A.R. Hoffman at The New York Sun. Hoffman explains:
There has not been a pope from Africa in some 1,500 years. The first of three African popes, Victor I, ordained that Easter always falls on a Sunday. The holiday had previously been celebrated on the 14th of Nissan, the date the Jewish calendar assigns to the night before Passover.
The hopes of Catholic traditionalists who felt betrayed by Francis’s rhetoric of reform appear to be migrating to the person of Robert Cardinal Sarah, a Guinean prelate and unabashed conservative. At a prayer breakfast at Washington, D.C., in 2016, he decried “the legalization of same-sex marriage” and the “obligation to accept contraception within health care programs.”
Cardinal Sarah, who has also called fundamentalist Islam an “apocalyptic beast,” is not the only African papabile, or potential pope. Fridolin Ambongo Cardinal Besungu, the archbishop of Kinshasa, is another contender. Cardinals Sarah and Besungu both opposed Francis’s guidelines on blessing same-sex couples. The 266th pope called that a “special case” because of widespread hostility to homosexuality in Africa.
Another papabile is Peter Kodwo Appiah Cardinal Turkson of Ghana. In 2013 he told the BBC: “I’m not sure whether anyone does aspire to become a pope,” though he serves as the chancellor of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences at Rome and was elevated to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope Benedict.
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