4t VATICAN CARDINAL DROPS A THEOLOGICAL NUKE: “You CAN’T Be a True Catholic AND a Communist — Or Swallow Woke Ideology!” — Cardinal Müller’s Blistering Warning Shakes the Faithful
(LifeSiteNews) — On November 1, the Feast of All Saints, LifeSite sat down for an interview with Cardinal Gerhard Müller in Philadelphia at the International Institute for Culture. In the hour-long conversation, the German prelate gave a beautiful testimony to the Catholic Faith, to Jesus Christ, the Holy Trinity, the Seven Sacraments, and God’s Grace in our personal lives. Throughout he made it very clear that “there exists only one Savior; this can only be God who became Man.”
Cardinal Müller reminded us of the essential aspects of our Faith that make us fall in love with God.
“God loved so the world that He gave His own Son, the Son of the Holy Trinity,” he insisted. He added that God helps us throughout our lives with the help of the Seven Sacraments, bestowing the needed Grace on our souls.
Modernism
In our discussion, Cardinal Müller expounded on the nature of the Modernists undermining the Church’s teachings on, for example, marriage and sexuality.
“The Modernists are not modern,” he stated. The cardinal explained that they have revived gnostic and other heresies that have been around for thousands of years in an attempt to overturn “the teachings of the Apostles” who are seen and demeaned as “mere fishermen.”
But, the cardinal asserted, “a good Catholic is firm in the real faith, in the truth, once and forever given and present in Jesus Christ.” Here, he pointed to the importance of the Creed repeated at every Mass. A good Catholic is “firm in the Holy Scripture, in the Apostolic Tradition,” the cardinal added. The Catholic faith “calls us for a conversion from our old life” to a new life, he said, quoting St. Paul.
Thus, he presented to us the traditional Faith as it has always been taught. Part of that traditional teaching is that our separation from God is created by our own sins. We are called to grow close to God by conversion.
However, the destruction of matrimony that we witness today is increasing the distance between man and God, Cardinal Müller said. The first gift of the Logos to human beings was to make us male and female, man and woman, he added. Gnostics want to overcome that creation by an “unisex” creature. The cardinal explained that this heresy thereby directly attacks God’s creation.
Modernist ideas emerging from the French Revolution into the nineteenth century and then sprouting again around the time of the Second Vatican Council created a “wrong antagonism in society,” the cardinal asserted. However, “we are brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, we have solidarity, we should be united in the truth coming from God, and the ideologues … are splitting the people,” he said. Cardinal Müller described the ideas of the Jacobins and the Marxists and Communists as only different variations of that same ideology. “And they split the societies,” he continued. “They are splitting the Church.”
However, “if you have the conviction that the Word of God is the foundation of the unity of believers, if you believe in the truth of the Word of God, you cannot be split,” Cardinal Müller asserted.
LGBT agenda
Saying that a homosexual partnership is the same as a marriage is “the splitting of the Church,” the cardinal insisted. It is “an introduction of these wrong ideologies.” “We cannot fall into the trap of all these false ideologies,” such as those speaking about social justice, he said. At the same time, as the cardinal explained, certain ideas were “stolen” from the Catholic Church who is truly promoting social justice. These ideologies stole ideas and principles of the Catholic Church in order to gain the “power that is so destructive for the world.”
“We do not have a will to power, but we have the will to love and respect the other,” Cardinal Müller stated. At the same time, all of us need a “moral and intellectual” conversion. We cannot find the answers regarding the meaning and goal of life by the mere use of our reason; we need, according to the cardinal, “the revealed truth, the presence of God our Creator and our Redeemer.” As the prelate reminded us, Christ invited us to His Fellowship, but in order to take part, we have to “change our lives, and with the help of Grace, we can change our lives,” he said. “With only our own powers, we cannot overcome our desires, our disordered nature.”
“There is needed the healing of our human nature, and we have to cooperate; that is the greatest form of dignity God gave to us: that we are able to cooperate with the Grace of God,” the cardinal added. “Everybody is invited, but they are invited to change their lives.”
“No moral problem can be solved with technology,” the cardinal continued, “but only with the Grace of God.”
Persecution within the Catholic Church
In a discussion of the persecution of traditional Catholics within the Catholic Church, Cardinal Müller told LifeSite that “all persecution inside the Catholic Church is against the will of Jesus Christ because the disciples cannot persecute each other.” The cardinal also insisted that the traditional Latin Mass was “never forbidden” and that there is nothing wrong with it. On the contrary, it is the rite which “St. Augustine and St. Cyprian” celebrated.
Moreover, this former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith pointed out that at the center of our faith is the “doctrine of the Church,” which is “the response of the Church to the Word of God, which is present in the Creed and the doctrine of the Church. Therefore, we have no possibility to change the Word of God; we are not more intelligent than God.”
Religious relativism
Cardinal Müller also discussed the problem of religious relativism. He argued that when in dialogue with other religions, such as Islam, which does not profess belief in the Blessed Trinity, we cannot “relativize” our own faith. In an interreligious dialogue, we can present and explain our faith, but not “reduce our faith to a so-called common civil religion that is good for the state.”
“We have to remain loyal to the truth and the faith as revealed by Jesus Christ,” the prelate expounded.
We have to be “witnesses” of the truth given by Jesus Christ: “We cannot say that everybody has some part of the truth, and we have also 20% of the truth; truth cannot be quantitatively divided in so-called different religions.”
“We are not one religion among other religions,” he insisted. Historically, all men came from God, and, coming from different directions, they were all searching for the truth, the cardinal continued, but in the end the truth was revealed by Jesus Christ. “We do not possess the truth, but the truth possesses us,” he added.
“It is absolutely anti-Catholic to relativize the revealed truths in Jesus Christ, just to get applause from the relativists in the world, from the ruling philosophy of the world, relativism.”
Cardinal Müller also pointed out that these modernists or progressivists are not relativistic when it comes to psychological or social realms. “Ideologies are absolutely totalitarian,” he observed. As an example, he mentioned that one is forced today to accept or display the rainbow flag of the LGBT movement. In Germany under Hitler, people were killed for not making the Hitler salute, he said, recalling the testimony of his own parents, who lived under Hitler’s regime. But brave Catholics of the time would not give the “Heil Hitler” greeting, because “heil” means “salvation” which pertains only to Jesus Christ, and not a creature.
In the same way, “… we cannot have rainbow flags in our churches because behind this ideology is the atheistic ideology, absolute negation of God as the Creator,” the cardinal said. “We cannot accept the other gods of these ideologies,” we can only adore the God of Jesus Christ. There exist “new gods, new prophets” of this ideology.
Woke ideology
In speaking about “woke ideology,” Cardinal Müller said that there can be “no compromise” with it. “We have the right anthropology,” he expounded. “We have, in Jesus Christ, the true image” of humanity as male and female.
“We cannot be a good Catholic and be a Communist … or accept the Woke Ideology.”
The recent LGBT pilgrimage to St. Peter’s was, in the cardinal’s opinion, an “absolute abuse of the Christian message and of St. Peter… of our Christian doctrine and message of the Gospel for making propaganda for an atheistic ideology.” This movement “ridicules” and “relativizes” the Christian faith.
The German prelate also stated: “There is only one truth, in the Creation and in the Redemption, in the anthropology and in the doctrine of Grace, in nature and grace, and therefore I have to reject [it] openly, and I hope that a higher authority in the Church will criticize these people.”
“And if a bishop is celebrating this Mass in favor of this ideology, that is a heresy, an absolute heresy. We cannot make compromises,” he declared. Faithful pastoral care here would be a “conversion” to the Commandments of God.
“We cannot accept other forms of sexuality,” the cardinal said, adding that God gave us the right form, and that is the marriage of one man and one woman.
“These promoters are not interested in the salvation of souls” but in receiving praise from the world, he continued.
Giving witness to the truth
Cardinal Müller is not invested in what the press has to say about him.
“It is not a criteria for me if the New York Times or German publications praise me; they cannot help me in the hour of my death,” he asserted.
The cardinal noted that he “will stand before the Throne of God” and “will have to give the answer whether [he] was true to the Gospel.” The prelate also reminded us that Christ foretold that His followers will be persecuted for His sake.
“To say the truth is the best way to help people in troubles and difficulties,” Cardinal Müller expounded, and later added that “unity has to be based on truth.” This last remark was pronounced in response to the new pontificate of Pope Leo XIV, who is trying to establish more peace and unity in the Catholic Church.
The German prelate reminded us that St. Augustine was a “fighter” and did not compromise with heretics. The Bishop of Hippo took “the shield of the faith and the helmet of the faith” – images invoked by St. Paul – and it is “necessary to fight back against the woke ideologues” who are “infiltrating” the Church with a false concept of pastoral care.
Regarding the document Fiducia supplicans, which allows for the blessing of same-sex couples, Cardinal Müller said that “the blessing is the helping grace, [and] it must be in conformity with sanctifying grace.”
“It is absolutely against the Christian faith to bless realities which are intrinsically wrong,” he asserted, underscoring that people cannot be blessed in situations that are sinful.
We are grateful for Cardinal Müller’s strong and heart-felt witness to the truth of the Faith as it has been handed down to us throughout the ages. May God bless, guide and strengthen him, so that he may continue on this path of defending the truth of Christ.
The trip for this interview was sponsored by The Wynnewood Institute (Charles J. Waldecker, Esq. and Thomas J. Gilmartin), as well as the International lnstitute for Culture (Dr. John M. Haas), both in Philadelphia.
Dr. Maike Hickson was born and raised in Germany. She holds a PhD from the University of Hannover, Germany, after having written in Switzerland her doctoral dissertation on the history of Swiss intellectuals before and during World War II. She now lives in the U.S. and is the widow of Dr. Robert Hickson, with whom she was blessed with two beautiful children.
Dr. Hickson published in 2014 a Festschrift, a collection of some thirty essays written by thoughtful authors in honor of her husband upon his 70th birthday, which is entitled A Catholic Witness in Our Time.
Hickson has closely followed the papacy of Pope Francis and the developments in the Catholic Church in Germany, and she has been writing articles on religion and politics for U.S. and European publications and websites such as LifeSiteNews, OnePeterFive, The Wanderer, Rorate Caeli, Catholicism.org, Catholic Family News, Christian Order, Notizie Pro-Vita, Corrispondenza Romana, Katholisches.info, Der Dreizehnte, Zeit-Fragen, and Westfalen-Blatt.
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