(LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Gerhard Müller has called on proponents of the German Synodal Way to accept Pope Francis’s statement to them and the teaching of the second Vatican Council if they want to remain part of the Universal Church.
In a recent opinion piece, Müller refers to a comment in a recent interview by Pope Francis in which the Pontiff recalled what he told Bishop Georg Bätzing, chairman of the German bishops’ conference: “We already have a good Evangelical Church in Germany. We don’t need two of them.”
The cardinal says that what the Pope meant is that the council of the Synodal Way and two-thirds of the German Episcopate are moving towards schism and that the adjective “Catholic” is in danger of becoming a mere empty phrase in the German Church. The Synodal Way would deny the sacramentality of the Catholic Church and therefore contradict the teaching of Vatican II, which says in Lumen gentium 1: “[…] the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race […] “.
Müller continues to criticize the Synodal Way by saying that God has revealed himself once and for all in Christ and that there is no new revelation. He adds: “The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the earthly and exalted Christ and not the condensate of zeitgeist ideologies that would supplement, correct, and falsify the natural truths about the world and man and the revealed truth of God Himself through propagandistic framing from episcopal websites.”
The cardinal reflects on the attempt by the German Synod to change the Church’s teaching on sexuality by stating the following:
What is striking is the monothematic fixation on sexuality, which – reduced to mere satisfaction of sexual urges – shows an image of man without the living God, which can only be described as anthropological nihilism, even if there is still talk of love on the level of narcissistic sentimentalities but no longer in the Christological sense of love as devotion and sacrifice.
Regarding the question of sexual morality, Müller also condemned Father James Martin’s LGBT propaganda as heresy in a recent interview with LifeSite’s Editor-in-Chief John-Henry Westen. He asserted that nobody could change the doctrine of the Catholic faith and that according to that doctrine, all forms of sexuality outside of legitimate matrimony between one man and one woman are gravely sinful.
WATCH: Cdl. Müller: Father James Martin’s LGBT propaganda is ‘heresy’
In his writing addressing the German Synodal Way, Cardinal Müller also expresses concern about the possible abolition of priestly celibacy in Germany:
Also, the determined fight against the celibacy of priests and the infamous suspicion of the freely chosen charismatic celibacy for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven as source and cause of sexual perversions up to criminal assaults on adolescents is a striking proof of the lack of Catholic thinking and for the denial of grace, which does not contradict nature, but purifies, elevates and perfects it. Here, too, the majority of the Frankfurt Synod is on the wrong track and in opposition to the supernatural nature of the faith and the sacramentality of the Church when Vatican II says: ‘Perfect and perpetual continence for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, commended by Christ the Lord […] is held by the Church to be of great value in a special manner for the priestly life’ (Presbyterorum ordinis 16).
Müller concludes his article by saying that, in order to stay Catholic, the Church in Germany needs to read Pope Francis’s letter to the pilgrim people of God in Germany, as well as accept the teaching of Vatican II, “especially with its theological epistemology in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation ‘Dei verbum’ and also the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church ‘Lumen gentium’.”