Did Cardinal Robert Sarah once say "The Jewish people have slain our messiah -- I shall never forget that"? No, that's not true: Contrary to a meme that was shared widely in April 2025, we could find no record of the Guinean cardinal having written or uttered words to that effect. After the death of Pope Francis, Sarah was mentioned as a potential successor as pontiff.
The quote was attributed to Sarah in a meme posted to X on April 24, 2025 (archived here). The text embedded in the meme read:
"THE JEWISH PEOPLE HAVE SLAIN OUR MESSIAH --
I SHALL NEVER FORGET THAT."
CARDINAL ROBERT SARAH
This is what it looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot)
Following the death of Pope Francis on April 21, 2025, Sarah was among several cardinals listed as a possible successor, bringing him to broader public attention.
Lead Stories conducted Google, Google News, Google Books and Internet Archive searches for the words "Robert Sarah" and "Jewish." We found no results which supported the claim that he had ever written or spoken words to the effect of those contained in the meme, and we found no results whatsoever for the precise wording "Jewish" and "slain our Messiah", even without attribution to Sarah.
In his 2019 book "The Day is Now Far Spent", Sarah described the Jewish people as "God's chosen people", and said the Shoah, or Holocaust, was "the greatest scandal of humanity, the worst crime in modern history." In attempting to exterminate the Jewish people, Sarah wrote, the Third Reich in Germany showed that they "wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind." He continued:
By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.
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To read previous Lead Stories fact checks about Pope Francis, click here.
