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INVESTIGATION. Friend of Cardinal Sarah, close to Bolloré, former adviser to Wauquiez, this independent publisher, a complex man claiming to be of a non-Gaullian right, plays the Mazarin between Paris and Rome.
By Violaine de Montclos
© Jack Tribeca/Bestimage
Published on
Reading time: 13 mins
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Qhat does a simple French priest respond to a Roman prelate who asks, through his secretary, to preside over his next Sunday mass? He agrees kindly. Thus this Parisian priest, approached in 2015, completely unaware of who this Cardinal Sarah was, whose arrival was announced to him, opened wide the doors of his church to the prelate: “I was surprised, the following Sunday, to see a new faithful mingle with the usual parishioners,” he recalls.
Robert Sarah had just, at the time, been appointed Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Guinean, appointed in 1979, at the age of 34 – then the youngest bishop in the world –, Archbishop of Conakry, Sarah was a courageous opponent of the dictator Sékou Touré.
Called to Rome in 2001, close to Benedict XV…