Cardinal Müller: Synod's homosexuality report leads to ‘heretical relativization’ of marriage
The prominent German cardinal roundly slated the latest text to emerge from the Synod, as well as any proposals for blessing of same-sex unions.
VATICAN CITY (PerMariam) — Cardinal Gerhard Müller has issued a blistering critique of the latest study group report from the Synod on Synodality and its platforming of anti-Catholic, pro-homosexual ideology.
The great welcome form LGBT advocates to the Synod Study Group 9’s recent report, is – says Cdl. Müller – greatly revealing. The report’s text highlights how “the heretical relativization of natural and sacramental marriage is openly welcomed.”
Such a move, adds the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “is portrayed as the first step toward the recognition of LGBT ideology, which advocates nothing other than a materialistic view of humanity without God, the Creator, Redeemer, and Perfecter of humankind.”
This correspondent’s coverage of the study group’s report released on May 5 can be found on Pelican+ and on the Catholic Herald.
Cardinal Müller’s full commentary on the report, as sent to this correspondent from his office, is found below.
On God’s Blessing and the False Blessings of This World
By Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Rome
The study groups established by Pope Francis during the 2024 Synod on Synodality are now gradually publishing their — albeit highly controversial — findings.
They are fatally similar in two respects: 1. Through their distrust of the central tenets of Catholic doctrine, which they confuse with a time-bound system of thought, rather than recognizing them as the unabridged and complete transmission of God’s revelation to present and future generations; and 2. in their attempt to align themselves with prevailing ideologies through a so-called “paradigm shift from rigid dogmatism to a people-friendly pastoral approach” in order to gain recognition from their proponents.
They do not openly deny the revealed truths. But they ignore them and build their own house of a comfortable and worldly-conforming Christianity alongside them.
To confuse the naive fellow believers, one garnishes it with biblical and spiritual-sounding platitudes: “what the Spirit says to the churches,” discernment instead of condemnation, the merciful and all-accepting Jesus pitted against the rigorist teachers of the law and the conservative theology professors trapped in their systems, who are more concerned with fidelity to the letter of the law and rigid doctrine than with people in their weakness and vulnerability.
In disregard of or ignorance of Catholic tradition, this leads to the sophistically exaggerated claim that sin does not consist in conscious and voluntary acts against God’s commandments, but rather in the refusal of all-encompassing mercy toward those who cannot or will not fulfill them.
In reality, the Church teaches that Christ died on the cross for the sins of all people and that the Holy Spirit withholds God’s grace from no one who converts to the Gospel, so that they may lead a new and holy life in the following of Christ. Only for this reason can the Apostle say to the baptized: “Do not live any longer as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds… Put off the old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; be renewed in the spirit of your minds; and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Eph 4:17, 22–24).
In the context of the Synods of Bishops and the national synodal paths in the local churches, the favorite topic of certain bishops, theologians, and laypeople in tune with the spirit of the times keeps cropping up. Instead of leading people to the God-man Jesus Christ, the one and true Mediator between God and humanity, they see the future of the Church — in a monothematic and spiritually limited way — in the adoption of gender and rainbow ideology.
Therefore, they even risk the visible unity of the Church in the truth of Christ, as the Lord Himself, as Head of the Church, has entrusted to the entire College of Bishops with and under the Pope as the personal successor of Peter on the Roman See.
The private or even paraliturgical blessing of same-sex and opposite-sex couples in irregular relationships is based on the heretical denial of the revealed truth that God created human beings as man and woman.
Jesus, who in his person is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, confirmed the Creator’s original will against the Pharisees’ casuistry regarding divorce and definitively revealed that man and woman become one flesh only through the marital “I do” (cf. Mt 19:3–9). Thus, in marriage, man and woman form a personal and sexual two-in-one unity in mutual love, in shared life, and in openness to the children God wishes to give them. And only a man and a woman in marital union are blessed by God so that they may be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and rule (wisely) over all other creatures of the earth (cf. Gen 1:28). There is no mention in Sacred Scripture or in the entire tradition of the Church of a blessing for people in adulterous relationships, nor is there any indication that bishops are authorized to ordain or permit fraudulent and blasphemous blessings.
EXCLUSIVE: Cardinal Müller – Everybody has a right to listen to fullness of the Gospel
VATICAN CITY (PerMariam) — Cardinal Gerhard Müller has emerged as one of the more vocal prelates in recent years, regularly welcoming journalists to his office to give commentary and analysis on various issues predominant in the Catholic Church.
The liturgical or private blessing (benedictio = approval), by which we are blessed in Christ, is a prayer of the Church in trust in God’s help and assistance for people, so that they may be promoted in all that is good, and by no means a confirmation of a life contrary to God in sin. Human weakness cannot be an excuse, because the Holy Spirit helps us with His grace, which God withholds from no one who earnestly asks for it (cf. Rom 8:26).
But of those who “exchange the truth of God for a lie,” and replace God’s order with their own ideologies and self-concocted pseudo-theologies mixed with sociology and psychology, the Apostle says that they think wrongly and live in sin, which means the death of the life of grace; yet, knowing their wrongdoing, they even agree with those who act in such contradiction to God (cf. Rom 1: 25:32).
In the reactions of the pro-LGBT lobby within the Church to the publication of the relevant synodal working group’s report and the blessings of non-marital sexual unions — even those ordered by bishops — the heretical relativization of natural and sacramental marriage is openly welcomed. This is portrayed as the first step toward the recognition of LGBT ideology, which advocates nothing other than a materialistic view of humanity without God, the Creator, Redeemer, and Perfecter of humankind.
Anyone who, as a teacher of the faith and shepherd of the faithful appointed by Christ, is truly interested in the inner peace of soul and the eternal salvation of the faithful entrusted to him, does not make people in difficult situations the playthings of a godless ideology or the instruments of his own desire for prominence in the woke milieu, but rather points them personally to Jesus Christ, the Son of God. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” (Heb 4:15ff).
For he alone is the true Messiah, and he alone can help every person, without exception, out of every spiritual distress and all emotional turmoil — unlike the worldly saviors whose doctrines of self-redemption have so often led humanity to ruin. Gender ideology directly contradicts Christian anthropology. And with its arbitrarily invented 60–80 genders, it also stands in direct contradiction to biological science. It violates common sense, which knows that every individual human being is the product of the union of his own father with his own mother.
With the “woke” ideology — originally derived from atheistic-materialist thought — a destructive heresy and a schismatic divisive force has penetrated the Catholic Church, one that, in the extent of its contradiction to God’s revealed truth, corresponds to Manichaeism or Pelagianism. And the study of Church history teaches us: It was only through the continuous resistance of the Magisterium of the popes and councils, and the intellectual power of the great Doctors of the Church from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman, that these and other existential threats to the Church were averted. All man-made empires and atheistic strongholds of thought must fall sooner or later. Yet the gates of hell cannot prevail against the Church, because Jesus, the Son of the living God, built it upon the rock of St. Peter.
It is not the transformation of the Church into a philanthropic movement with a religious-social twist that will lead the secularized people of the de-Christianized West back into the open arms of the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, who is the “Light of the Nations.” It can only be said, in the words of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, “that the desire is to enlighten all people through His glory, which is reflected in the face of the Church as she proclaims the Gospel to every creature” (Lumen gentium 1).
The true disciples of Jesus do not seek the approval of people or the false blessings of “the powerful, the prominent, and the influential of this world” (cf. 1 Cor 2:6). For in love and truth, “God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms through our union with Christ” (Eph 1:3)