BREAKING: Pope removes conservative Vatican doctrine chief – Cardinal Mueller
ROME, June 30, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis is removing the head of the Vatican's doctrinal office, one of the Church's most senior cardinals, who has taken an orthodox stand from the beginning of the pontificate.
LifeSite has confirmed with a source in Rome that Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, is to be removed from his office on July 2, the end of his five-year mandate in the position.
In recent years, the mandate for the office has been extended until the normal retirement age of 75. In the case of Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, it was extended beyond, until his election to the pontificate at age 78.
But Cardinal Muller, 69, has been steadfast in his opposition to the liberal interpretation of Amoris Laetitia favored by Pope Francis.
In terms of vocal conservatives in the hierarchy of the Vatican only Cardinal Robert Sarah remains. Cardinal Burke was removed by Pope Francis and demoted to patron of the Order of Malta. Australian Cardinal George Pell, as reported yesterday, is now off to his home country to defend himself against media-hyped charges of sexual abuse.
Cardinal Muller, according to sources, seems set to take over as the Patron of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, replacing Cardinal Edwin O’Brien who at 78 is three years past retirement age.
The story broke last week in the Spanish-language newspaper Clarin, and was reported today by the Rome-based Corrispondenza Romana.
Clarin suggested Muller would be replaced by Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, known as a yes-man in Church circles. Other candidates include Vienna Cardinal Chistoph Schonborn and Archbishop Victor Fernandez, a close collaborator of Pope Francis.
According to the Vatican press office, Pope Francis met Cardinal Muller this morning, but no information about the meeting has been made public.
The head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was at one time second in power only to the Pope.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/br...doctrine-chief
Cardinal Müller: Nobody can alter the way the Sacraments work
April 17, 2017
Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has said that local bishops cannot reinterpret Church teaching subjectively.
In an interview with the German magazine Rheinische Post, Cardinal Müller said: “I do not think it is particularly beneficial for each individual bishop to comment on papal documents to explain how he subjectively understands the document.”
He further said: “It cannot be that the universally binding doctrine of the Church, formulated by the Pope, is given different and even contradictory regional interpretations. The basis of the Church is the unity of faith. The Church no longer experiences a new revelation.”
In recent weeks, the bishops of Malta and Germany have issued guidelines permitting Communion for the remarried. The Maltese bishops said that it might be “impossible” for some couples to avoid sex, and that people could not be refused Communion if they discerned that they were “at peace with God”.
However, several bishops have affirmed the traditional teaching that the remarried cannot receive Communion, except when they endeavour to live “in complete continence”. Cardinal Müller pointed to magisterial teaching, most recently that of John Paul II, Benedict XVI and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which says continence is necessary. The cardinal told an Italian magazine that this teaching was “not dispensable, because it is not only a positive law of John Paul II, but he expressed an essential element of Christian moral theology and the theology of the sacraments.”
Cardinal Müller also said that, in order to be absolved of adultery, a penitent must resolve not to sin again. He said: “No one can alter the sacraments as a means of grace according to their own choice – for example, so that the sacrament of Confession can be given without the intention to sin no more.”
https://veritas-vincit-international.org/2017/04/
Vatican doctrine chief: Amoris Laetitia cannot be interpreted in a way that refutes previous teachings of popes
January 4, 2017
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Muller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, said that Amoris Laetitia cannot be interpreted in a way that contradicts magisterial teachings of previous popes and councils.
In his December 1, 2016 interview with the domradio.de, the radio station of the Diocese of Cologne, Germany, the Vatican’s doctrine chief said:
The binding declarations of the popes, of the Councils of Trent and of the Second Vatican Council and of the Congregation for the Faith on the essential characteristics of marriage and on the precondition for a fruitful reception of the Sacraments in the state of justifying [i.e., sanctifying] grace may not be pushed aside by anyone under the pretext that marriage is, after all, merely an ideal which only can be reached by a very small number of people.
Regarding Communion for “remarried” divorced Catholics, Muller cites a 1994 letter by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which denied the possibility for bishops to permit Communion for the couples in question. The letter by Cardinal Ratzinger was a response to a 1993 Pastoral Letter of three progressive German bishops (one of them being the then-Bishop Walter Kasper) who were then already pushing for Communion for the “divorced and remarried.”
The indissolubility of marriage must be “the unshaken foundation of teaching and of every pastoral accompaniment,” Müller emphasizes.
The interview was Muller’s first – and so far only – public response to the issue of the four Cardinal’s Dubia addressed to the Pope. Muller said that his Congregation cannot answer the four Cardinals’ Dubia without the express authority of the Pope.
Cardinal Müller stated in the interview that the “Holy Father, at the same time, wishes to help all people whose marriages and families are in a crisis to find a path in accordance with the ever-merciful will of God. We can always assume that the just and merciful God always wants our salvation in whatever need we find ourselves. But it does not stand in the power of the Magisterium to correct God’s Revelation or to make the imitation of Christ comfortable.”
As a follow-up question, the interviewer asked Muller: “Would the bishops’ conferences thus then be asked to help? Francis himself, after all, writes in Amoris Laetitia that not all questions need to be clarified in Rome….”
When answering this pertinent question, the German Cardinal first explains that bishops’ conferences “are merely working groups with certain competences” and, thus, are not of “Divine Law.” He continues:
Only in fidelity to the teaching of the Apostles, to the whole of the revealed Faith, can the bishops of a conference speak, for example, about the pastoral application of Amoris Laetitia. Otherwise, the Church would disintegrate into national churches and, in the end, would atomize. The Sacrament of Marriage, however, is in Korea just as valid as it is in Germany.
When asked whether the individual bishop may make his own independent decision as a response to Amoris Laetitia, Muller responded that“Nor can the individual bishops do whatever they want according to their own private taste. They are servants, not masters of the Faith.”
Muller emphasized that marriage is not an “ideal” to which we aspire to, but rather a Sacrament founded by God Himself:
Marriage is in truth not a wishful image produced by ourselves, but, rather, a Sacrament, that is to say a reality founded by God Himself. It is an expression of the Mercy of the Creator and of the Redeemer. God does not put excessive demands upon us so that he then can show His Mercy toward us in the face of our own failure. With the help of Grace, we are able to fulfill the Commandments – among them the Sixth Commandment – and thus find peace of heart in a life in accordance with God’s will.
https://veritas-vincit-international.org/2017/01/
Pope’s doctrine chief warns of possible ‘schism’ in the Church like Protestant split
REGENSBURG, Germany, September 8, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) -- In a move that is making headlines in Germany, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has said German bishops are leading the Church to a schism.
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mueller is warning that the tendency of German bishops to divide doctrine from pastoral practice is not unlike the abuses surrounding the Protestant split in 1517. One should "be very vigilant and not forget the lesson of Church history,” he said.
Last week, in a speech at the release of the German version of Cardinal Robert Sarah's new book God or Nothing in Regensburg, Germany, Cardinal Mueller criticized "a climate of the German claim to leadership for the Universal Church." According to the German newspaper Die Tagespost, Mueller said that he is frequently asked why German bishops claim to be leaders of the Catholic Church -- while flouting teachings on marriage and sexuality -- despite overseeing dramatic reductions in church attendance, shrinking numbers of seminarians, and a drop in vocations to religious orders.
Mueller also said that predictions of a worldwide collapse in Christianity, as has taken place in Europe, were premature. "We should not predict for others that it will all develop as it has developed with us [in Europe] - as if de-Christianization is a process according to a law in nature. No. With the help of the Faith, one can move mountains," he explained.
Only with the help of a "strong new evangelization with an apostolic courage and zeal," can weakness in Germany's Christianity be reversed, explained Mueller. However, such zeal faces an enormous challenge that he described as "an ideological constrictedness," according to which the truth and the unity of the Church shall be sacrificed in order to achieve a change at least in the field of pastoral care.
Mueller specifically identified allowing "remarried" Catholics to receive the Eucharist, as well as accepting a redefinition of marriage, as challenges to overcome. "One tries, with all means - with the help of exegesis, history, dogmatic history, and with reference to psychology and sociology - to deconstruct and relativize the Catholic teaching on marriage which comes from the teaching of Jesus, and this only in order that the Church appears to conform with society," he said.
"He who remains faithful to the teaching of the Church is attacked by the media, and even defamed as an opponent of the pope," Mueller said, "as if the pope and all the bishops in union with him were not witnesses of the revealed truth which has been entrusted to them so that it does not run the risk of being leveled down by men to a human measure."
"We may not deceive the people, when it comes to the sacramentality of marriage, its indissolubility, its openness toward the child, and the fundamental complementarity of the two sexes," he firmly stated."Pastoral case has to keep in view the eternal salvation," as opposed to a desire to be popular or accepted in the world.
German bishops cannot separate themselves from the Universal Church, said Mueller. The nation's Catholic leaders must be "very attentive and [not] forget the lesson of the history of the Church."
Many German bishops have declared that "life realities" must be taken into account as part of Church teaching and salvation. However, Mueller said the goal should not be "about adapting the Revelation to the world, but … about gaining the world for God."
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/po...ch-into-schism
The Whore of BabylonEWTN VIDEOS:
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To Protect the Faith
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