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Cardinal Müller warns of grave danger that could lead to humanity’s ‘collective suicide’

CNA Staff   By CNA Staff

Cardinal Gerhard M¸ller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2012 to 2017, speaks with students and faculty at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana Oct. 27, 2021. (CNS photo/Matt Cashore, University of Notre Dame, courtesy Today's Catholic)

Denver Newsroom, Oct 3, 2022 / 18:00 pmGerman Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, warned of a grave danger that could lead to the “collective suicide” of humanity.

“Christianity promotes a civilization of life and challenges the culture of anthropological nihilism, which would have to end in the collective suicide of humanity. Atheism is nihilism. Its fruit is death,” the cardinal said in a presentation given in Spanish by his secretary Sept. 30 at the 14th World Congress of Families, which took place Sept. 30–Oct. 2 in Mexico.

On its website, the congress states it is “a major international and interreligious event that seeks to unite and equip leaders, organizations, and families to affirm, celebrate, and strengthen the family as the natural and fundamental human environment, key to the flourishing of mature individuals and sustainable societies.”

In his lecture, Müller explained that “nihilism, that is, ‘the feeling of the new age’ that ‘God himself is dead,’” as the philosopher Hegel wrote, can lead to the feeling that “there is nothing bad in the human being and everything that pleases him is allowed, if we believe in the kindly divine rationality over and in all that has being in his creation.”

In his discourse titled “Man made in the image and likeness of God: a manifesto against anthropological nihilism,” the cardinal referred to the theses of Nietzsche, “the prophet of post-Christian nihilism” who proclaimed “the death of God”; and to the historian Yuval Noah Harari, who “has become something like the guru of the so-called trans- and post-humanism.”

‘Divine superman’ can become ‘diabolically inhuman’

The prefect emeritus explained that “as a historian, Harari himself should know how quickly the vision of a divine superman can become diabolically inhuman. The 20th century has cruelly demonstrated this. In Western and Eastern Europe. Especially in Germany and Russia.”

“If man ceases to be a creature in the image and likeness of the triune God, he sinks into the depths of anthropological nihilism,” Müller warned.

For example, the cardinal referred to people “who have had their face or other parts of their body ‘lifted’ or ‘updated.’ It’s no longer a Hollywood fashion, but rather that these poor creatures deserving of mercy have fallen — without knowing it — into anthropological nihilism.”

“Anthropological nihilism has as its father the pride of the creature that wants to become like God (Genesis 3:5) and wants to establish the difference between good and evil, true and false for itself,” he said.

Its source of motivation, the German cardinal continued, “is the blind madness of the impious, who exchange the ‘glory of the incorruptible God’ for their self-fabricated ideological images. When man worships the creation instead of the Creator, he loses the glory of the sons and friends of God.”

Hostile to life and marriage

The cardinal warned that anthropological nihilism “is significantly hostile to life,” since it encourages the act of “killing children in the womb as a human right and the utilitarian requirement of the so-called ‘merciful death’ (euthanasia) for ‘depleted’ or ‘no longer utilizable’ human beings.”

“But the rotten fruits of anthropological nihilism are also shown in the questioning of marriage between man and woman, which is seen as a variant among any number of possibilities of the orgiastic enjoyment of sexual satisfaction without the full surrender in love and without transcendending oneself to (form) a third person, namely, the child as the fruit of love and of the womb of its parents,” he continued.

Thus the relationship of marriage to fruitfulness is denied, “with which the Creator has blessed man and woman so that they transmit, preserve, and promote the life created by God.”

Gender ideology

Cardinal Müller then addressed the issue of gender ideology, which makes a false distinction between biological sex and gender as a sociocultural construct.

“Apart from the biologically proven fact that a real sex change isn’t possible, the fiction of freely choosing one’s gender is a denial of God’s will for our person. Every human being exists in (his or her) bodily nature in either male or female expression,” he said.

“Gender ideology, which certainly also falls under the umbrella of anthropological nihilism, deprives both men and women of their own possibilities,” he pointed out.

“A man, by virtue of his spiritual and bodily disposition, has the possibility of becoming a loving husband to his wife and a faithful father to his children. But he cannot be a wife or mother to another person without betraying himself,” the cardinal said.

The prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that “no one can reform or modernize the teaching of Christ, ‘because he himself (by his Incarnation) brought with him all the newness and modernness to renew and vivify man,’” as St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who was recently declared a doctor of the church by Pope Francis, said.

Dangerous for the Church

“Anthropological nihilism becomes really dangerous for the Church when even Catholic theologians in key positions no longer assume the fact of the historically unique and insuperable revelation of God in Jesus Christ, but instead make a perverse compromise with post-humanism, just for the Church to ‘survive’ as a social organization in a modern world without God,” the cardinal said.

For this “theology without God,” then, “the creation and the covenant, the Incarnation and sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and his bodily resurrection are only considered existential symbols of mythical quality.”

“If Christianity were just a collection of disparate views of the unknowable divine that spread over our theoretical understanding of the world and the practical way of coping with contingency, then it wouldn’t really be worth fighting, suffering, and dying for the truth of Christ,” Müller explained.

The German cardinal stressed that “our faith in the God and Father of Jesus Christ overcomes the culture of death and anthropological nihilism. Faith opens us to a culture of life in the love of the Triune God because we are freed from the ‘slavery of the transient to the freedom and glory of the children of God.’”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.


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12 Comments

  1. It would be a considerable contribution to the body of Catholic teaching if someone undertook to compile the writings of Cardinal Muller in a book. Please…someone…we desperately need a clear and true exposition of the faith in these desperate times.

    • Earlier and no longer complete, there is at least “The Cardinal Muller Report: An exclusive interview on the state of the Church,” Fr. Carlos Granados, Ignatius Press, 2017. (We are reminded of “The Ratzinger Report,” 1985.)

      Chapters are: What can we hope for from Christ, then from the Church, then from the Family, then from Society, and then the Conclusion: The Key to an Understanding of Mercy–from which we read: “I should make it clear that love and truth are not two elements that compete with each other, between which one must choose. What would love be without truth [….]?

      Not complete, but never obsolete or abrogated, either.

      • We might as well get right to it, the depth of our nihilism…

        In the West and with German accommodation, the ultimate homosexual end game is not only to redefine marriage, and the family, and the natural law, but then even the Holy Family and even the very nature of the Triune Oneness. Reality collapses like the Titanic in 12,000 feet of icy black ocean darkness.

        From Muller, in his interview (noted above), we have this revelatory remark regarding nihilism and nominalism: “We cannot say, for example, that Jesus Christ [the Son of the Father] is God’s nephew.” Nephew! No longer the circumincession of reciprocal existence in each other of the three persons of the Trinity; instead, homosexual grooming of a younger “nephew”—Arianism with a postmodern and totally novel sexual twist.

        And, outside of the West, we already have Christ reduced to a prophet foretelling not the coming of the Holy Spirit, but rather the coming of the “final prophet” Muhammad, the oracle of a forever distant and arbitrary Allah whose dictated Qur’an omits even the word “Father.” Is there some kind of resonance between today’s 21st century deconstruction of the Logos and the earlier 6th century Islamic regression? And, is “fraternity” a restoring breath of the Holy Spirit as a dove, or is it the swansong of fading sanity?

        Let us pray for the former, and therefore that the next conclave discerns the depths of our miseries, and attends to the whispering of the Holy Spirit, rather than to the lesser maneuvering of a witless or even diabolical tribal faction within the Church itself.

  2. The only surprise here is that some people might think that His Eminence is saying something new. As has been obvious for the past two centuries with the advent of the “New Things” (rerum novarum) of modernism, socialism, and the New Age, the entire social order is in grave danger.

    The New Things base everything, including the natural law, on faith without reference to reason. I suspect that Cardinal Müller is familiar with the writings of Dr. Heinrich A. Rommen, co-founder of the Königswinterkreis discussion group (composed primarily of students of Fr. Heinrich Pesch, S.J.), which sent two members, Fr. Gustav Gundlach, S.J. and Fr. Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S.J., to Rome to consult on Quadragesimo Anno. As Rommen pointed out in his book on the natural law, shifting the basis of the natural law from reason to faith leads to pure moral positivism and nihilism — just as we see in the world today.

    The focus of the Catholic Church in the temporal order since Gregory XVI issued Mirari Vos, the first social encyclical, in 1832 has been to counter modernism, socialism, and the New Age. Success has been hampered largely by the economic disempowerment of ordinary people, making them dependent on the wealthy or the State, and therefore subject to manipulation and virtual enslavement by means of the latest economic, social, political or other fad that the elite favor.

    The solution, as Pope Leo XIII pointed out in Rerum Novarum in 1891, is that “The law . . . should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.” The “problem” (if you want to call it that) was that Leo XIII was not an expert in finance and did not suggest a feasible means whereby people could become owners without redistribution or impractical economic measures, i.e., relying on past decreases in consumption instead of future increases in production to finance economic growth.

    Fortunately, Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler presented a way to turn anyone and everyone into a capital owner without redistribution or money manipulation in their two collaborations, “The Capitalist Manifesto” (1958) and “The New Capitalists” (1961). Kelso’s program is applied in the proposal for an “Economic Democracy Act” and presented in “The Greater Reset” from TAN Books:

    https://tanbooks.com/contemporary-issues/social-issues/the-greater-reset-reclaiming-human-sovereignty-under-natural-law/

  3. At the center of anthropological incoherence is denial of First Principle of existence and order, God. Concomitant is repudiation of first principle of all knowledge, sensible perception [repudiations from Descartes to Kant are post fact imaginary speculation primarily based on the error that the phantasm is a physical image rather than the intermediary means of conveying reality to the intellect. Aquinas describes the intellect’s apprehension via the phantasm as a quasi reflection].
    Cardinal Muller is impeccably right to attribute the driving force of anthropological collapse to pride. Distancing from First Principle God breaks the golden thread that reveals order within Nature and specifically human nature. Christ’s entry into our dimension of existence intended to restore the divine dimension of the natural world in particular Man made in God’s image. Break the divine thread and we destroy the very meaning and beauty of human life. Man’s intellect enshrined as the source of truth, a phenomenon evident in current theology, even papal documents Amoris Laetitia among them sadly has the counter effect of the dissolution of that truth, the First Principle, which alone explains, teaches, the sole means of living life in fullness.
    Self destruction, the cultural suicide Muller refers to is the absolute inevitable consequence of denial of the source of life in its fullness and good. Man by nature adds to this since wht he finds within himself sans faith, a profound darkness in which evil is indistinguishable from good.
    Unlike previous culture, Greek, Roman, Chinese and so forth there was a natural pursuit for the good stemming from human nature and natural law within. Today, what makes our dilemma exceptional, is the initial absorption of life giving dogma revealed primarily in Christ, and now, its repudiation. Christians remain the final light.

    • As a reflexion on Muller’s collective suicide, the exceptional nature of the current darkness in which darkness is most profound, is when we reject what the soul inherently knows is true, though we rationalize the truth into meaninglessness. It’s suicidal by nature of predilection [an unfortunate reason for the increase in panic attacks and suicides, drug induced or not] in which our nature, created for good rather than evil, experiences revulsion of what it has become. An unbearable vision. And with that, a tendency toward self destructive self affliction.
      A manifestation is the current unreasonable decision of politicos, retired and active executive military, journalists, heads of government, and their headlong rush toward a nuclear holocaust with Russia. The West determined to eliminate Putin, crush nuclear powerhouse Russia as if all will be handled easily. If hit with a mega nuclear weapon simply go indoors and wait until the dust clears. Total, unmitigated, suicidal madness. We need much prayer and sacrifice to avert this impending disaster.

    • “Our Lady was the one who prevailed on her Son to work His first miracle at Cana in Galilee. She is still the one, through whose intercession He wants to perform miracles now, on earth, in our day. But there is one condition: We who have the faith, must believe. And we who have the grace, must use it to live lives of heroic virtue.” Father John Hardon

      Pray that Our Holy Father, Benedict XVI, and those Bishops in union with him, and thus in communion with Christ and His One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church, The One Body Of Christ, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), will do The Consecration Of Russia to Our Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Heart, exactly as Our Blessed Mother requested, visually separating the counterfeit church from The True Church Of Christ.

      What is needed is a Miracle, and every Miracle requires an Act Of Faith. At this moment it is late, but not too late!

  4. “Christianity promotes a civilization of life and challenges the culture of anthropological nihilism, which would have to end in the collective suicide of humanity. Atheism is nihilism. Its fruit is death,” the cardinal said”

    Not all of humanity commits suicide through Atheism. Jesus tells us that the meek, humble and pure of heart will inherit the earth. Jesus tells us that those who immerse themselves in His, (initiated in the year 2000) “the Feast of My Mercy”, gifts of Divine Mercy Sunday, will survive.

    Matthew 5:5 The Beatitudes
    Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land

    Psalms 37:9
    Those who do evil will be cut off, but those who wait for the LORD will inherit the earth. Wait a little, and the wicked will be no more; look for them and they will not be there. But the poor will inherit the earth,…
    …The wicked perish, enemies of the LORD; They shall be consumed like fattened lambs; like smoke they disappear. The wicked one borrows but does not repay; the righteous one is generous and gives. For those blessed by the Lord will inherit the earth, but those accursed will be cut off….
    …When the unjust are destroyed, and the offspring of the wicked cut off, The righteous will inherit the earth and dwell in it forever….
    …Wait eagerly for the LORD, and keep his way; He will raise you up to inherit the earth; you will see when the wicked are cut off….
    …Sinners will be destroyed together; the future of the wicked will be cut off. The salvation of the righteous is from the LORD, their refuge in a time of distress. The LORD helps and rescues them, rescues and saves them from the wicked, because they take refuge in him.

    Acts of the Apostles 26:17
    I shall deliver you from this people and from the Gentiles to whom I send you, to open their eyes that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God,

    Divine Mercy in My Soul, 965
    Jesus looked at me and said, Souls perish in spite of My bitter Passion. I am giving them the last hope of salvation; that is, the Feast of My Mercy. If they will not adore My mercy, they will perish for all eternity. Secretary of My mercy, write, tell souls about this great mercy of Mine, because the awful day, the day of My justice, is near.

    Revelation 7
    ‘Do not damage the land or the sea or the trees until we put the seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.’ I heard the number of those who had been marked with the seal, one hundred and forty-four thousand marked from every tribe of the Israelites:…
    …Then one of the elders spoke up and said to me, ‘Who are these wearing white robes, and where did they come from?’ I said to him, ‘My lord, you are the one who knows.’ He said to me, ‘These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’.

    Divine Mercy in My Soul, 40
    Jesus appeared suddenly at my side clad in a white garment with a golden girdle around His waist, and He said to me. I give you eternal love that your purity may be untarnished and as a sign that you will never be subjected to temptation against purity. Jesus took off His golden cinture and tied it around my waist.

    Matthew 6:13
    Subject us not to trial but deliver us from the evil one.

    New American Bible, Notes for Matthew [6:13] Jewish apocalyptic writings speak of a period of severe trial before the end of the age, sometimes called the “messianic woes.” This petition asks that the disciples be spared that final test.

  5. A recent article in Crux noted of Francis:

    In a 2019 visit to Naples Francis said: “I studied in the period of decadent theology, decadent scholasticism, the age of the manuals. We used to joke that all the theses in theology could be proved by the following syllogism. First, things appear this way. Second, Catholicism is always right. Third, Ergo… In other words, a defensive, apologetic theology shut in a manual. We used to joke about it, but that was what we were presented with in that period of decadent scholasticism. During that same gathering, the pope repeated his well-known aversion to what he calls “laboratory theology”, which he’s defined as a type of intellectualism that’s disconnected from peoples real lives and experiences, calling it “a pure theology, ‘distilled’ like water, which understands nothing”.

    To believe there is a disconnect between real lives and experiences that does not include how we delude ourselves about the evil we do and that we need the coherent thought of non-decadent rational expressions of moral principles as a God given corrective, illustrates a shallowness of thought shocking for the Chair of Peter and a prime example of why nihilism is now a more rapidly growing cancer not everywhere except but also within the Church.

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