Installed on May 3, 2025 as a metropolitan archbishop of Dakar, following Monsignor Benjamin Ndiaye, who reached the retirement age, Monsignor André Guèye is a respected figure of the Senegalese Catholic church. He embodies a rooted faith, a rare spiritual intelligence and a pastoral sense forged by listening. Philosopher, teacher, pastor, he arrives at the head of the archdiocese in a period when the challenges are immense, but not impossible to take up. Portrait of a church man with a glowing course.
The fate of André Guèye was not written in the precipitation. He advanced, step by step, carried by the fidelity, the devotion and the love of God and his fellow men. Born January 6, 1967 in Pallo-Younga, a village in the region of Thiès, he grew up in a modest and deeply believing family. He learned very early that faith is less a matter of speech than of posture: to serve without noise, to hope constantly. His academic journey is remarkable: seminars of sebikotane and strand, then pushed training in philosophy at the Gregorian pontifical university of Rome, where he obtained a doctorate. A slow and safe walk towards the heights of the church far from making it a set, it makes this intellectual wealth a lever to better understand the complexities of the world and transmit faith with finesse. He also teaches philosophy for several years to the great Libermann seminar of Sébikotane, shaping the spirits and hearts of the future priests of Senegal.
Ordained a priest in 1992, he became bishop of Thiès in 2011, at only 44 years old. His appointment as Archbishop of Dakar in February 2025 and his installation in May 2025 crown a course marked out of consistency, commitment and discretion. What strikes Monseigneur Guèye is not first of all his erudition. It’s his way of being with people. He listens. Really. He never stands out. He enters communities as we enter a house: gently, without a crash. This pastoral style marked the faithful of Thiès, where he favored proximity visits, sober celebrations, spiritual pensions, discreet accompaniments. In Saint-Louis, where he was an apostolic administrator for a year after the departure of Archbishop Mamba, he knew how to maintain balance and appease tensions, in a region yet marked by rapid secularization and aging of the clergy.
This passage, although transient, confirmed its ability to govern in temperance. In Dakar, a social and religious mosaic, Monsignor Guèye arrives with this same humility, determined to take up the challenges and to hoist the torch of the Catholic Church at the highest peak. The Archbishop of Dakar is not a prelate cut off from the world. On the contrary. He is aware of social fractures, cultural changes, identity tensions. He knows that faith can no longer be satisfied with rites. She must speak to hearts, touch intelligence, dialogue with other traditions. On sensitive questions, he adopts a clear but open line. Faced with inter-religious tensions, he pleads for a dialogue of truth and respect. And when he evokes the situation of the country after post-electoral disorders, he insists on the need to rebuild trust and anchor peace in justice.
A pastor in the face of the challenges of the present time but, he is not satisfied with analyzes. He acts. He encourages training, united entrepreneurship, the commitment of laity. He wants a standing church, which speaks to the world not by nostalgia for the past, but out of love of the present. It is not enough to be bishop to be a pastor. André Guèye knows it. To be a pastor is to enter the wounds of men, to wear their faults, their hopes, their joys with them. His motto, “everything is possible to God”, is not an easy formula. It is a way of believing that in the nights of the world, there is always a possible star. He celebrates, teaches, walks, prays. Often at dawn, in silence. He likes pensions, slow readings, psalms sung in the wind. He believes that spirituality is not a refuge but an engine. His authority, he derives her from his coherence, his inner peace, from his loyalty to little things. He doesn’t need to thunder to convince. It radiates by sweetness. And this influence is contagious. A successor in the line of the adults the charge he now assumes is immense.
He succeeds Mgr Benjamin Ndiaye, a man of culture and speech, who himself walked in the footsteps of Cardinal Sarr and Cardinal Thiandoum. These are major figures of the African Church. But Bishop Guèye does not seek to imitate them. He wants to follow Christ in his own way. And his own way is patience, unity, depth. At Dakar Cathedral, this May 3, 2025, he did not settle. He gave himself. He entrusted his ministry to God and the people. He recalled that the cross he carries is not an honor but a service. Dakar is entering a new page in its ecclesial history. In a country where tensions can go from time to time, where youth are looking for landmarks, where traditions are jostling, the Catholic Church needs a reassured face and a voice that brings together. With André Guèye, she receives more than a chief. It welcomes a brother. A man of faith, of culture, of peace. A rooted pastor and a standing watchman. A rare man, up to man.
Daouda Diouf
