Cardinals Müller, Burke rebuke German bishops over same-sex union blessings

 

German Cardinal Gerhard Müller (left) and American Cardinal Raymond Burke. / Credit: Daniel Ibañez/CNA

Washington D.C., Mar 17, 2023 / 13:09 pm (CNA).

A synod of German bishops overwhelmingly approved Church blessings of same-sex unions and unions between divorced and remarried Catholics, but the move has faced harsh criticism from some members of the Catholic hierarchy who have accused the German bishops of abandoning the faith.

German Cardinal Gerhard Müller and American Cardinal Raymond Burke rebuked the German bishops and called on them to be sanctioned in an interview on EWTN’s “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo,” which aired on Thursday night, March 16.

“There must be a trial and they must be sentenced and they must be removed from their office if they are not converting themselves and they are not accepting the Catholic doctrine,” Müller said during the interview.

“That is very sad that a majority of bishops voted explicitly against the revealed doctrine, and the revealed faith of the Catholic Church and of all our Christian thinking, against the Bible, the word of God in the Holy Scripture and in the apostolic tradition and in the defined doctrine of the Catholic Church,” the cardinal added.

Müller said the laypeople and the bishops who supported these resolutions at the German Synodal Way are “influenced by this LGBT and woke ideology, which is materialistic and nihilistic.”

“It is absolutely blasphemic to make a blessing about those forms of life which is, according to the biblical and the ecclesial doctrine a sin because all forms of sexuality outside of a valid matrimony is sin and cannot be blessed,” he said.

“If you look in the Bible, it’s absolutely only the matrimony between man and woman who are united in love in the body and in the soul,” the cardinal said, “and to have the possibility [to] become fathers and mothers and to found a family.”

Burke urged the Vatican to sanction the bishops who voted in favor of blessing homosexual unions.

“Whether it’s a departure, heretical teaching and denial of one of the doctrines of the faith, or apostasy in the sense of simply walking away from Christ and from his teaching in the Church to embrace some other form of religion, these are crimes,” Burke said. “I mean, these are sins against Christ himself and, obviously then, of the most serious nature. And the Code of Canon Law provides the appropriate sanctions.”

The cardinal warned that the Church is being “used” to push an ideological agenda.

“These are human inventions, human ideologies that are being pushed and the Church is being used,” Burke added. “And what it does is it renders the Church then into some kind of a human agency, almost like a government agency that’s being manipulated to foster certain programs and certain agenda. And so we need to wake up to what is happening.”

“You will notice that in a lot of this talk, you never hear the name of Our Lord,” Burke said. “You never hear talk about what Our Lord Jesus Christ is teaching us, what he’s asking of us. So this is a very serious situation.”

The cardinal also responded to Arroyo’s suggestion that “opponents of these reforms are often derided as going against the pope.”

“We are the ones who love the pope and are trying to help him to carry out his mission, whereas these people who simply ignore what Rome is saying to them, what the See of Peter is saying to them, show that they have no respect for him, whatever they are indeed the enemies of the pope. I think it’s clear any reasonable person can see that,” he said.

Burke said that Pope Francis “sometimes says things that are very clear and in accord with the Church’s teaching with regard to these matters.”

“What the agents of the revolution do is simply ignore these statements and take other statements in which he seems to be favorable,” he said.


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7 Comments

  1. WHAT’S A POPE FOR?
    1. If the police in a city stood by an watched people wantonly murder other people, what would be the point of having a police force?
    2. If a nation’s army stood by and watched as a foreign army invaded and killed citizens, what would be the point of having a national army?
    3. It a pope stands by allows Catholic bishops to carry out public rituals in which there is an ecclesiastical blessing of acts of intrinsic evil, what’s the point of having a pope? Couldn’t my cat just as well be pope?

  2. Not only a sin against God, but a betrayal of the younger generations who are being groomed or directly abused into a demographic that is growing rapidly, even though by it’s nature it doesn’t reproduce biologically! Go figure…

    So, this from St. John Chrysostom: “The road to hell is paved with the bones of priests and monks, and the skulls of bishops are the lampposts that light the path.”
    Or, as St. Jerome remarked of an earlier catastrophe: “The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Aryan.”
    Or, rather than the whole world, more like Thomas More to another liar, Richard Rich: “For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world…But for Wales!”
    Or, this finally and firstly, from Jesus Christ: “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea” (Matthew 18:6).

    If there still are no consequences, then surely the textual abusers at the block-party Synod on Synodality can harmonize the contradictions! Or, perhaps only silence. Butt, again with St. Thomas More: “qui tacet consentire”—That’s Latin! “Silence means consent”…

    With a German accent, McCarrick takes the entire Church to the beach house! If no one complains, then it’s consensual between adults. What’s the problem?

  3. Praise God for strong cardinals who honour His word. It is a comfort to hear that they denounce these profligate enemies of the church. Have we heard strong rebukes from Papa. Some wonder if his silence means his assent?

  4. I don’t understand why anyone would expect action from Francis. Is there any reason to understand his actions as much different from a cynical politician? Scripted lip service of orthodoxy on rare occasions, ridicule of orthodoxy on other occasions, and honoring of voices hostile to the Deposit of Faith at the Vatican on many occasions.

  5. The Pope and the German hierarchy agree substantially on the issue. Francis has long favored civil union legislation. He also has come out for the right of same sex couples to adopt children and bring their “families” to church. The Germans aren’t defying Francis, they are just getting a little ahead of him, which is probably all part of the plan.

  6. Finally!! Two Cardinals with both a brain AND a spine!! Bravo, gentlemen, for speaking out. I hope you have sent formal letters of protest about the actions of the Germans to the Vatican expressing your views. What these German Bishops have agreed to do flies in the face of long standing Catholic teachings on sexuality and many other issues. For the Pope to allow this to bubble and boil can only hurt the church more each day. The sooner he makes an effective move against these German Bishops, the better. If their intent is to found yet another leftist Protestant sect, its better that a clear and public severance of their relationship to the Catholic church is made to the world.

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