Conservative Cardinal Robert Sarah, who often clashed with Pope Francis, steps down from post

A conservative cardinal who often clashed with Pope Francis on theological issues is stepping down from his post.

On Saturday, Cardinal Robert Sarah announced on Twitter that Francis “accepted the resignation of my office as Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship after my seventy-fifth birthday.”

According to the National Catholic Reporter, 75 is the traditional retirement age for bishops.

“I am in God’s hands. The only rock is Christ. We will meet again very soon in Rome and elsewhere,” he wrote.

Vatican News, the news portal of the Holy See, confirmed the news in a short statement with two paragraphs that briefly summarized Sarah’s career.

The Guinea-born cardinal was ordained as a priest in 1969 and has served in a number of Vatican positions for the last 20 years. He participated in the March 2013 conclave that elected Pope Francis, who appointed him as head of the Vatican worship office on Nov. 23, 2014.

Conservative Cardinal Robert Sarah, who often clashed with Pope Francis, steps down from post. (Andrew Medichini/)

Sarah frequently disagreed with the pope on a number of theological issues, which made him a popular name among more traditional cardinals.

According to Reuters, conservatives in the Church hope that Sarah would one day succeed Francis as pontiff.

An outspoken proponent of more traditional styles of Catholic liturgy, Sarah often dragged his feet to implement some changes ordered by Pope Francis, such as allowing women to take part in Holy Thursday services.

In 2015 he told the Synod of Bishops that western family values faced “subjectivist disintegration” through easy divorce, abortion, homosexual unions and euthanasia.

He also compared the 20th century’s “Nazi fascism and communism” to today’s “Western homosexual and abortion ideologies and Islamic fanaticism,” the Catholic News Agency reported at the time.

Last year Sarah was involved in an embarrassing episode over a book he said he’d written with former Pope Benedict.

Days before the publication of the book, entitled “From the Depths of Our Hearts,” Benedict said that he wanted Sarah’s name removed as a co-author because he had made only a minor contribution.

On Jan. 17, 2020 Sarah took to Twitter to clarify the episode, writing that he had met with Benedict and that “there [was] no misunderstanding between us.”