ROME — German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office (CDF), warns of a creeping secularism within the Catholic Church, the National Catholic Register reported Friday.
The 74-year-old cardinal said many of the prelates and clerics who promote dissenting views in the Church are “secularized people.” They “want to keep the name ‘Catholic’ to stay in the institution and take the money, but they won’t accept the teaching of the word of God.”
“They relativize the Catholic faith, but remain with their titles: cardinals, bishops, theology professors — but in reality they don’t believe what the Church is saying,” he said.
The problem is that they are “materialists,” he said, who base their opinions not on creation and divine revelation but on pseudo-sciences.
The LGBT agenda that many of them support “is totally idiotic because its Neo-Gnostic mythology is absolutely against human nature, not only in a biological sense, but also in a philosophical one,” the cardinal added.
Müller was referring to recent statements by Jesuit Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, who has insisted that the Catholic Church should change its teaching on homosexuality.
Cardinal Hollerich, the archbishop of Luxembourg and president of the EU Bishops’ Commission (COMECE), told Catholic News Agency (KNA) on February 1 that Catholic teaching on the sinfulness of homosexual relations is misguided and needs to be updated.
“I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct,” Hollerich said, while calling for a fundamental revision of Catholic doctrine on the matter.
The Catholic Church teaches that same-sex attraction is “is objectively disordered.”
“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,’” states the Catholic Catechism, adding that under no circumstances “can they be approved.”
“I know that I have homosexuals among my priests,” Hollerich told KNA. “I have homosexual women and men among the laity. And they know they have a home in the Church.”
In his interview with the Register, Cardinal Müller, who was prefect of the CDF from 2012 to 2017, declared that the blessing of same-sex couples encouraged by the German bishops is “blasphemy” because it is a “negation of the constitution of human beings as man and woman, and there can be no blessing there.”
The Vatican released a statement on March 15 declaring that the Church has no power to bless homosexual unions, since God Himself “does not and cannot bless sin,” a position that drew sharp reactions from prelates, theologians, and clergy from German-speaking countries.
Blessings require both “the right intention of those who participate” and “that what is blessed be objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace, according to the designs of God inscribed in creation,” the text stated, which was published with the approval of Pope Francis.
“For this reason, it is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage,” the document noted, “as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex.”
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