While speaking at a prayer breakfast in Washington on Tuesday, Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, said attacks on the family, including the forcing of same-sex marriage and transgender bathroom laws on society, are “demonic.”

Breitbart is reporting on the address by Cardinal Sarah who lamented the ongoing and insidious dismantling of religious freedom in the U.S. and the eradication of God from the public square, all of which poses an existential threat to mankind.

“ . . .[T]he death of God results in the burial of good, beauty, love and truth. Good becomes evil, beauty is ugly, love becomes the satisfaction of sexual primal instincts, and truths are all relative. So all manner of immorality is not only accepted and tolerated today in advanced societies, but even promoted as a social good. The result is hostility to Christians, and, increasingly, religious persecution,” the Cardinal said.

“Nowhere is this clearer than in the threat that societies are visiting on the family through a demonic ‘gender ideology,’ a deadly impulse that is being experienced in a world increasingly cut off from God through ideological colonialism.”

He cited the ongoing attacks on the family which manifest today “through separation, divorce or distorted impositions of the family, such as cohabitation and same sex unions”, calling these social constructs “a deep wound that closes the heart to self-giving love unto death, and even leads to cynicism and despair,” he said.

“These situations cause damage to little children through inflicting upon them a deep existential doubt about love. They are a scandal – a stumbling block – that prevents the most vulnerable from believing in such love, and a crushing burden that can prevent them from opening to the healing power of the Gospel.”

Societies such as the U.S. do everything possible to legalize practices such as artificial reproductive technologies, surrogacy, so called homosexual “marriage” and “other evils of gender ideology” which inflict even more wounds on the populace. Legalization can never be a truthful solution,” he said.

“It is like putting bandages on an infected wound. It will continue to poison the body until antibiotics are taken.”

He went on to say that this is why it is so important to fight to protect the family, which he referred to as “the first cell of the life of the Church and every society.”

“This is not about abstract ideas. It is not an ideological war between competing ideas. This is about defending ourselves, children and future generations from a demonic ideology that says children do not need mothers and fathers. It denies human nature and wants to cut off entire generations from God.”

The Guinean native became the world’s youngest bishop in 1979 when Pope John Paul II called him to don the miter at just 34 years of age. He is now one of the most important cardinals in the Church whose name is frequently mentioned when discussing possible papal candidates.

He is an outspoken defender of the Church and her teachings, which is why he refused to mince words while serving as the keynote speaker at this year’s prayer breakfast where he denounced the kind of political, ideological and cultural persecution committed against Christians that the faithful face even in countries like the U.S.

“This form of religious persecution is equally damaging, yet more hidden. It does not destroy physically but spiritually; it demolishes the teaching of Jesus and His Church and, hence, the foundations of faith by leading souls astray. By this violence, political leaders, lobby groups and mass media seek to neutralize and depersonalize the conscience of Christians so as to dissolve them in a fluid society without religion and without God. This is the will of the Evil One: to close Heaven … out of envy."

Signs of this insidious war are all over the United States, he said.

“In the name of ‘tolerance,’ the Church’s teachings on marriage, sexuality and the human person are dismantled. The legalization of same-sex marriage, the obligation to accept contraception within health care programs, and even ‘bathroom bills’ that allow men to use the women’s restrooms and locker rooms. Should not a biological man use the men’s restroom? How simpler can that concept be?”

What should the faithful do about it?

“Be prophetic, be faithful. Pray,” he said. “That is why I came to this prayer breakfast. To encourage you. Be prophetic, Be faithful. And, above all, pray. These three suggestions make present that the battle for the soul of America, and the soul of the world, is primarily spiritual. They show that the battle is fought firstly with our own conversion to God’s will every day.”

He concluded with a prayer that “this great country may experience a new great ‘spiritual awakening’, and help stem the tide of evil that is spreading in the world.”

For in the end, he said, it is “God or nothing.”

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