Pledge your prayers and fasting for protection of the Church during the Synod on Synodality HERE

(LifeSiteNews) – In a new interview with the Catholic Austrian website kath.net, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, the Vatican’s former doctrine head, made it clear that he fears manipulation is being practiced regarding the upcoming October 4 to 29 Synod of Bishops on Synodality, and he calls for “greatest possible transparency.” He points especially to the danger of an attack on God-given marriage between a man and a woman.  

The German cardinal sees the danger of “relativizing and thus destroying the natural and sacramental marriage of man and woman.”   

“A fictitious ‘blessing’ of same-sex couples,” he expounded, “is not only a blasphemy against the Creator of the world and man, but also a grave sin against the salvation of the people concerned, who are led to believe that sexual activity outside of marriage is pleasing to God, which is described in the revealed Word of God as a grave sin against the sixth commandment (Rom 1:26f; 1 Cor 9:-11).”  

Regarding the working methods of the ongoing synodal process that was launched two years ago, Cardinal Mueller expressed strong concern that it is being steered by ideologues who do not serve the truth of Christ.  

“Only with the greatest possible transparency can the impression be avoided that the working methods are at the service of an agenda, the result of which is manipulated with questionable method,” he stated, adding that “the talk of freedom, which is to be guaranteed by watertight isolation from the media (but which one secretly feeds oneself) everyone sees through, even if – like the child in the parable – he does not dare to say that the emperor is naked.”  

When asked by kath.net with what attitude he was entering this synod – he was invited by Pope Francis to become a member of the Italian-speaking language group – the German prelate returned to foundations of his mission as a bishop: “By virtue of his consecration, a bishop is the successor of the apostles. Thus, in the name of Jesus Christ, Lord and Head of the Church, and ‘by virtue of his guiding Spirit’ (from the Prayer of Ordination for Bishops in Hippolytus, Traditio Apostolica 3), he is commissioned to lead the priestly people of God as shepherd, to teach with the Gospel and to sanctify with the sacraments of grace (Lumen Gentium 20).”  

Here, Cardinal Mueller raises the question of the status in the Church of those who wish to change the Church’s teachings, by quoting St. Irenaeus: “With apostolic succession, bishops have received the reliable charism of truth (charisma vertitatis certum), as it pleased God. But all others who do not want to know about this succession, which goes back to the origin, and who gather arbitrarily anywhere, are suspected of being either heretics with evil in mind, or schismatics…. All these people forsake the truth.” (Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies IV 26, 2).  

For Cardinal Mueller, the truth of Christ is what matters at the synod: “I hope that the truth of Christ will determine the direction of the Synod and not a group dynamic process will lead the participants in the direction of an anti-Christian anthropology that questions the two-gendered nature of man created by God. This blatant contradiction to the divine and Catholic faith is gladly veiled with an alleged pastoral care for persons with any ‘erotic preferences.’”  

That is to say, Cardinal Mueller will not go along with such an attempted change of Church teaching at the upcoming synod in Rome. 

Mueller insisted that those ideologues who wish to change Church teaching are not truly concerned about the well-being of the people concerned.   

“The standard of Christian thinking ,” he stated, “is the human being, for whose sake the Son of God became Man and redeemed us from sin and death by His death on the Cross. For the propagandists of these anti-scientific and anti-Revelation ideologies are in reality not concerned with human happiness and the eternal salvation of people created in God’s image and likeness, but with relativizing and thus destroying the natural and sacramental marriage of man and woman.” 

It is the teachings as laid down in Holy Scripture that guide a believing Christian in his moral conduct, according to this prelate. “Christians do not entrench themselves behind faith-hostile ideologies and arbitrary-positivistic legislations that obviously contradict reason oriented to natural and revealed reality,” Mueller explained.   

Instead, “the disciples of Christ fearlessly orient themselves to the Word of God, which in the mouth of the apostle reads thus: ‘Beware of fornication! Every other sin that a man commits remains outside the body. But he who commits fornication sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who dwells in you, whom you have from God?’ (1Cor 6:18f).” 

Synod’s working method remains unclear 

Cardinal Mueller also regretted in his interview that it is not yet clear how he as a participant is even allowed to present a statement.  

“Unfortunately,” he explained, “until now the working method of the Synod is not clear. It would be correct if all (!) bishops without exception could speak at least once for [three to five] minutes in the plenum. The work in the small groups (circuli minores) should complement and concretize this and serve the preparation for the final document, which will be presented in its individual points for voting.” 

He also speaks of “false expectations for a correction of the Revelation that is infallibly present in the dogmatic teaching of the Church, in the sense of the naturalistic conception of man, in which man is just the accidental product of a blind development, instead of a thinking spirit that understands the world in the light of God’s creation and will of salvation.” 

“We remain Catholic only if we believe and confess that God has revealed himself once for all in Jesus Christ, his Son, ‘full of grace and truth.’ (cf. Jn 1:14-18),” Cardinal Mueller stressed. 

Quoting from the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution Dei Verbum, Cardinal Mueller once more laid down the foundations of our Catholic faith and how it is to be preserved by the Church’s hierarchy: 

What God had revealed for the salvation of all peoples, He decreed in goodness – should be preserved intact for all time and handed down to all generations. Therefore Christ the Lord, in whom the whole revelation of the Most High God is completed, commanded the apostles to preach the gospel, which he himself brought as the fulfillment of the prophetic promise made earlier and personally proclaimed publicly, to all as the source of all truth of salvation and moral teaching, and thus to communicate divine gifts to them. This has been faithfully carried out, both by the apostles, who passed on by oral preaching, by example and institutions, what they had received from Christ’s mouth, in their intercourse with him and by his works, or what they had learned under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and by those apostles and apostolic men who, under the inspiration of the same Holy Spirit, wrote down the message of salvation. In order that the Gospel might be preserved intact and alive forever in the Church, the Apostles left bishops as their successors and “handed down to them their own Magisterium”. This Sacred Tradition and the Sacred Scriptures of both Testaments are, as it were, a mirror in which the Church looks at God, from whom she receives everything, during her earthly pilgrimage, until she is led to see him face to face as he is. (Dei verbum 7).

These eternals truths will last and outlive the respective ideologies of a fleeting moment in history. Says the cardinal: “The person who believes in God differs fundamentally from his ideologically (Jacobin, Communist, Social Darwinist, National Socialist, Wokist) seduced contemporary in that he sees himself as a hearer of the Word of God. He confesses Jesus, the only teacher of truth (Mt 23:10; Jn 14:6) and ‘author of life’ (Acts 3:15). ‘And in no other name is salvation to be found. For there is to us men no other name under heaven given, by which we must be saved. (Acts 4:12)’”  

To be a member of the Catholic Church, one must ‘accept her whole order’ 

He also quoted St. Iraeneus, who in the second century opposed the heresies of his time: 

Against the historical and modernist Gnostics of today, already Irenaeus of Lyon, to whom Pope Francis gave the honorary title of “Doctor ecclesiae”, stated in the 2nd century that with Christ entered into history the full truth and all newness that cannot be surpassed by any philosophy (idealistic or materialistic) and human science and engineering and technology (of Agenda 2030). “I contradict all heretics… Why don’t you read more carefully the Gospel given to us by the apostles, and why don’t you read more carefully the prophets? You will find therein the whole work, the whole teaching and the whole passion of our Lord foretold. But should you get the idea to ask: ‘What new thing did the Lord bring by coming?” Take note, then, that Christ brought only new things. For this very thing was foretold, that new things would come to renew and revive man.’ (Against Heresies IV, 34, 1)

Reminding us that in order to be a member of the Catholic Church, one must “accept her whole order,” Cardinal Mueller concludes this foundational German language interview:

Christians in the sense of the Catholic faith can call themselves only those who are “fully incorporated into the communion of the Church and in possession of the Spirit of Christ, who accept her whole order and all the means of salvation instituted in it, and are united in their visible union with Christ, who guides them through the pope and the bishops, and this by the bonds of the profession of faith, the sacraments, and ecclesial government and communion.” (Lumen Gentium 14)

Recently, Cardinal Mueller gave a strong interview to the Spanish website Infovaticana, in which he expressed his concern that the upcoming synod will follow the U.N.’s pro-abortion Agenda 2030, and he made some strong criticism of his modernist fellow bishops.  

“Apparently,” Müller stated, “there are even bishops who no longer believe in God as the origin and end of man and savior of the world, but who, in a pan-naturalistic or pantheistic way, consider the supposed ‘Mother Earth’ to be the beginning of existence and climate neutrality the goal of planet earth.”

Pledge your prayers and fasting for protection of the Church during the Synod on Synodality HERE