(LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Gerhard Müller said that supporters of the so-called “synodal Church” are guilty of “sins against the Holy Spirit.”
In an essay published in First Things, Cardinal Müller criticized Pope Francis’s modern concept of “synodality,” listing seven ways in which the “synodal Church” sins against the Holy Spirit.
“Factions with ulterior motives have hijacked the traditional principle of synodality, meaning the collaboration between bishops (collegiality) and between all believers and shepherds of the Church (based on the common priesthood of all those baptized into the faith), to further their progressive agenda,” the former prefect of the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) said.
“By executing a 180-degree turn, the doctrine, liturgy, and morality of the Catholic Church is to be made compatible with a neo-gnostic woke ideology,” he said.
In an attempt to change the Church’s teaching on marriage or ordination of women, the proponents of the Synod invoke an alleged “direct communication between the Holy Spirit and Synod participants,” Cardinal Müller continued.
“But 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’ (Matt. 12:31; Mark 3:29; Luke 12:10),” the German cardinal added.
“The most current sin” of the seven sins 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.’”
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Cardinal Müller warned that it is a sin against the Holy Spirit to reinterpret “the history of Christian dogma as an evolution of revelation, reflected in advancing levels of consciousness in the collective church, instead of confessing the unsurpassable fullness of grace and truth in Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh (John 1:14–18).”
He explained that the pope and his teaching office “is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on (Dei Verbum, 10).”
Therefore, the pope cannot change the deposit of faith, as it was fully revealed in Jesus Christ.
Moreover, Cardinal Müller said that it is a sin against the Holy Spirit “when the unity of the Church in the teaching of the faith is handed over to the arbitrariness and ignorance of local bishops’ conferences (who allegedly develop doctrinally at different paces) under the pretext of so-called decentralization.”
Citing St. Irenaeus of Lyon’s work against the Gnostics, the cardinal wrote: “Though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth… the Catholic Church possesses one and the same faith throughout the whole world (Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, Book I, 10, 1–3).”
Cardinal Müller’s remarks are likely a reference to the German bishops’ conference, the majority of which approved heretical pro-LGBT and other texts during the German bishops’ “Synodal Way.”
In a likely reference to unjust “cancellations” by Pope Francis, such as the removal of Bishop Joseph Strickland from his Diocese of Tyler, Texas, and Bishop Daniel Fernández Torres from his Diocese of Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Cardinal Müller said:
It is a sin against the Holy Spirit, who, through the sacrament of Holy Orders, has appointed bishops and priests as pastors of the Church of God (Acts 20:28), to depose them, or even secularize them, purely at personal discretion, without a canonical process.
The cardinal also criticized the politicization of the Church along the lines of “revolutionary philosophy” and the ideas of the French Revolution as a sin against the Holy Spirit:
It is a sin against the Holy Spirit when the political and ideological division of society since the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution is incorporated into a restorative or revolutionary philosophy of history and when the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church is thereby paralyzed by internally pitting “progressive” against “conservative” factions.
The former head of the CDF closed his essay by reminding the faithful to put their trust solely in Jesus Christ instead of “woke” modernist ideologies.
“Anyone who really wants to hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church will not rely on spiritualistic inspirations and woke-ideological platitudes, but will place all their trust, in life and death, solely in Jesus, the Son of the Father and the Anointed One of the Holy Spirit,” Cardinal Müller said.
He concluded by citing the Gospel of St. John: “Those who love me will keep My word, and My Father will love them, and We will come to them and make our home with them… But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, Whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” (John 14:23–26)