Cardinal Sarah accuses EU of pushing abortion, LGBT ideology on Africa

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter Thursday, July 23, 2026

Cardinal Robert Sarah has condemned attempts by the European Union to use the force of international law to require African countries to embrace abortion and LGBT ideology.

Sarah, a Guinean prelate who formerly served as Prefect of the Roman Catholic Church's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, addressed the European Parliament in Brussels on July 15 at an event titled "Europe and Africa: In Dialogue with Cardinal Robert Sarah."

The conference was held at the invitation of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) Group, specifically MEPs Paolo Inselvini and Nicolas Bay, in partnership with the advocacy groups SOS Chrétiens d'Orient and Pro Vita e Famiglia.

As the event's title suggests, Sarah's remarks focused on the relationship between Europe and Africa, with particular attention to a series of enacted and proposed agreements between the EU and the Organization of African, Caribbean and Pacific States. Chief among them is the Samoa Agreement and a proposal currently before the European Parliament. 

Sarah took issue with the agreements’ use of “imprecise and ambiguous” language to refer to aspects of LGBT ideology as well as abortion. “If words no longer mean what they say, how can there be authentic dialogue?” he asked. “How can Africa trust a Europe that speaks with equivocal, double-meaning words?” 

"A treaty, a resolution or an action plan that uses imprecise and ambiguous vocabulary are not tools of cooperation but tools of perversion and silent power of cultural and economic neocolonialism," Sarah said. "Whoever controls the meaning of the words effectively controls the outcome of the negotiation without the other party noticing."

As a concrete example, Sarah pointed to a 2023 European Parliament resolution on Uganda, which called on the EU to consider diplomatic, financial and commercial measures in response to the country's anti-homosexuality legislation. He argued that using aid and trade as leverage over a sovereign nation's family or criminal law violates the principle of self-determination — citing, by contrast, the constitutions of Kenya and Uganda, which protect life from conception, as examples of that self-determination in practice.

“They speak of gender equality and sometimes, they mean the deconstruction of the sexual difference between man and woman inscribed in the human body. They speak of human rights for African countries and they mean the imposition of legal standards foreign to our history, our faith, our culture and our anthropological vision,” he added. 

“Let us return to speaking according to the truth of the human person, of the family, of peoples even and especially in the context of cooperation between the European Union and Africa,” he proclaimed. “When Europe constructs rights detached from the truth about … man, abortion being elevated to a fundamental right, sexual identity being reduced to mere subjective self-creation, reason itself becomes deformed.”

Sarah lamented that rather than serving as “a tool for knowing the truth,” reason “becomes an instrument of power capable of imposing itself through the force of law and money upon those who do not share those premises” in such cases.

He maintained that Europe “imposes throughout the world … via treaties, aid and trade conditionalities a specific and contestable vision of man” that he views as problematic. 

Sarah agreed with Pope Francis’ characterization of Europe’s use of certain words to advance a preferred agenda as “ideological colonization” and reiterated comments he made more than a decade ago at the 2015 Synod of the Family asserting that “gender ideology and Islamic fundamentalism each represent, in their own way, two apocalyptic beasts that threaten to destroy not only the family but man himself — the image of God.”

"Some judged the image excessive," Sarah acknowledged. "I continue to believe that it captures something true. These forces, although very different in origin and form, share the pretention of rewriting men as they please: the one in the name of a supposed progress, the other in the name of a supposed return to an original purity."

Sarah closed by calling on the European Parliament to "make a serious examination of conscience; listen to Africa, respect its cultural sovereignty, offer free cooperation not conditioned by ideological agendas, be willing to receive from Africa what it can still offer to the West, namely, the testimony of a living faith."

“I would therefore like to invite the entire European Parliament, the representatives present here, to a real examination of language, to say clearly without diplomatic ambiguity what is truly meant when speaking of human rights, of sexual and reproductive health, of gender, of family and to ask yourselves with intellectual honesty whether these definitions truly respect the dignity of the human person and religious freedom or if they betray them under a language … that is apparently neutral,” he said.