ROME — German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office (DDF), has published a searing article accusing Pope Francis of “sins against the Holy Spirit.”

While never mentioning the pontiff by name, the 76-year-old cardinal nonetheless refers to certain acts that only the pope can carry out.

It is “a sin against the Holy Spirit,” he writes, to depose bishops and priests, or even laicize them, “purely at personal discretion, without a canonical process,” in obvious reference to Pope Francis.

The most evident case in point is Bishop Joseph Strickland, whom Francis ousted from his diocese of Tyler Texas presumably for his criticisms of the pope.

German cardinal Gerhard Müller attends the Easter Vigil Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on April 08, 2023 in Vatican City, Vatican. (Franco Origlia/Getty Images)

Just last week, Bishop Strickland reproached his fellow U.S. bishops as “silent shepherds” for their failure to speak out against “false messages” coming out of the Vatican under the leadership of Pope Francis.

Almost all of you “stood by silently watching as the Synod on Synodality took place, an abomination constructed not to guard the Deposit of Faith but to dismantle it,” Strickland states in reference to a recent month-long meeting in the Vatican.

In his article, Cardinal Müller also takes aim at the notion of “synodality,” asserting that a so-called “synodal Church” is “a concept that at least partially, if not completely, contradicts the Catholic understanding of the Church.”

“Direct divine revelation is weaponized to make the self-relativization of the Church of Christ acceptable (‘all religions are paths to God’),” Müller warns, citing a comment that Pope Francis made in September that seemed to relativize Christianity’s central message of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Anyone who, “by appealing to personal and collective inspiration from the Holy Spirit, seeks to reconcile the teaching of the Church with an ideology hostile to revelation and with the tyranny of relativism is guilty in various ways of a ‘sin against the Holy Spirit,’” Müller writes, alluding to the words of Jesus (Matt. 12:31; Mark 3:29; Luke 12:10).

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The Church maintains that “the person of Jesus Christ is the full truth of God in an insurmountable ‘newness’ for all people,” Müller adds, citing Saint Peter: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

The most current sin against the Holy Spirit is “when the supernatural origin and character of Christianity is denied in order to subordinate the Church of the Triune God to the goals and purposes of a worldly salvation project, be it eco-socialist climate neutrality or Agenda 2030 of the ‘globalist elite,’” Müller states.