Cardinal Müller reflects on pilgrimage, evangelization, and following Christ

Rome (kath.net) Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller was invited by the organizers of the 2024 pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres to celebrate the concluding high mass in Chartres Cathedral and to give the sermon.

Over 18,000 pilgrims—others unfortunately had to be turned away for organizational reasons—spent three days hiking through the springtime countryside of France, filled with faith in Jesus Christ, happy about the encounters with the Lord, with the Blessed Mother, and with the many other, mostly young pilgrims. The route is long, over 60 miles, which in itself already demands a physical effort from the pilgrims, but it offers many opportunities for prayer, and also confession, song, and joy during these three days. Cardinal Müller was able to observe the consequences of this communal demonstration of faith.

Lawyer Lothar C. Rilinger asked him about his experiences for kath.net.

Lothar C. Rilinger: Could the pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres be interpreted as an attempt at a new evangelization?

Gerhard Ludwig Cardinal Müller: Yes, it has to do with the great undertaking of proclaiming and bearing witness to the “Gospel of Jesus the Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1:1) to young people and thus to future generations.

The confession just quoted is at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, which laid the foundation for this special literary genre that we find in four forms in the New Testament. But in reality, the apostles had already proclaimed “the gospel of God” and “the gospel concerning his Son” (Romans 1:1,3) to all people, namely “to Jews and Gentiles”, “as the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith”. (Rom 1:16). By its very nature, then, the gospel is not a worldview or a psychological self-discovery program, but the good news that through faith in the crucified and risen Lord we find ultimate salvation and are freed from the power of evil and death.

I believe that the young people on this pilgrimage understood this. This arduous journey in wind and weather is a symbolic contraction of the entire journey of life in following Christ.

In singing and praying, in sharing with each other in catechesis and spiritual discussion, but also in the celebration of the sacrament of penance (with personal confession and absolution) and the large mass celebrations with thousands of faithful, they experience that Jesus is not a distant figure in history, whom we can only remember and take as a moral example, but that the risen Christ is really present in the hearts of the individual faithful, and at the same time sacramentally as close to us as he was once physically visible with the disciples—both before Easter and after Easter.

For Christ lives and intercedes for us with his Father, and it is he himself who baptizes and confirms and who, in the Eucharist, as the head of the Church, together with all the members of his body, the Christians, gives himself to the Father in love and gives himself to us in his sacramental body and blood as food for eternal life.

Rilinger: Can you imagine that the large number of participants in this pilgrimage can be understood as a sign that, starting in France a mobilization to fight against the de-Christianization of our societies is possible?

Cardinal Müller: It is surprising that you meet many people who are open to the Christian faith in other parts of France, too. Just recently, I gave a talk in a simple Parisian parish on the occasion of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicea in 325, which defended the divinity of Christ against the Arians, with many hundreds of Catholics participating, most of them young people. The number of adult baptisms in officially secular France is also encouragingly high.

Incidentally, the—alleged—secularity of the state since the so-called separation law of 1905 is merely a ploy to curtail religious freedom as a fundamental right to practice one’s faith in public – with the ideological claim that religion is a private matter. In reality, a democratic state based on universal human rights must stay out of the personal religious decisions of its citizens and their social organizations.

And the public sphere is the space for all citizens, where the state must not favor the faithless or enemies of the Church over faithful Christians or people of other faiths, just because some ideologues who consider themselves enlightened accuse religion of being opium, administered to the superstitious people by deceitful priests. The state must confine itself in its institutions to its task of serving the common good in temporal matters by staying out of questions of conscience regarding the truth and the ultimate goal of human existence. Any state that abuses its power in order to impose a certain man-made ideology on all its citizens has degenerated into a tyranny and dictatorship.

Rilinger: From participating in the pilgrimage, did you come to the conclusion that the participants have the strength not only to take on the hardships of the journey, but also to subsequently show their faith in public and try to convince others of it?

Cardinal Müller: Yes, the participants have to put up with a lot from the liberal and Marxist press, which regard any public declaration of faith in God as the origin, content and goal of the human search for truth and inalienable happiness as a regression to the time before the Enlightenment (à la Voltaire), into what they call the “Middle Ages”.

But there is also mistrust on the part of the Church, above all because the preferred liturgy is the one from before the liturgical reform (around 1970). This is a separate issue, but every Catholic must be aware of the distinction between the dogmatic content and the external ceremonial form (there are legitimately over 20 different rites of the same Catholic Mass; there are also some variants in the Latin West).

In any case, the courage for a young person to publicly profess Jesus Christ and his Church in front of his peers and in front of a post-Christian zeitgeist that prides itself on its intellectual and moral superiority over religion is to be admired.

One may feel reminded of St. Paul, who wrote to the small minority of Roman Christians in the then world capital of paganism, with the goal of encouraging them: “I am not ashamed of the gospel: […] For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith.” (Rom 1:15, 17).

Rilinger: Could the overwhelming number of participants alone, the sheer multitude, be an impetus for wanting to show others the way to God and encourage them to follow suit?

Cardinal Müller: In a survey among young and adult candidates for baptism, i.e. not among children of faithful parents, the answer was often that contact with people of the same age gave them the impetus to search for the meaning of life and thus for God. The apostle Paul said to the Athenian philosophers (i.e. literally: “to those who love wisdom”) that it was recommended to all people that they should “seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him” and that “he is not far from each one of us”. (Acts 17:27).

And that at length, with Jesus Christ, the decisive day in world history and the hour of decision for every single person had come, when God raised his Son, crucified by mankind, from the dead, so that through him we can pass from death to life, from falsehood and ignorance to the knowledge of the truth. As a result, many scoffed when they heard about the bodily resurrection of the dead; for people then, as now, would love to have the solution to existential questions and the salvation from real misery, but on their own terms and ways of thinking.

The fact that God has truly redeemed us through the incarnation of his eternal Word, that in his Son Jesus Christ, who became man, he died the shameful death of a criminal on the cross for us, and that we can only participate in his salvation through faith in his resurrection from the dead, only appeals—as it did at the Areopagus—to men and women who reflect more deeply and trust in God more than in men, who in response to the preaching of the gospel of Christ joined Paul “and believed” (Acts 17:34). They are received into the apostolic Church by means of confession of Christ and baptism in his name. (Acts 2:38-41).

Rilinger: The Gospels call on us to take the word of God into the world—to evangelize. What opportunities does the lay person have to live up to this mission?

Cardinal Müller: It was not only the apostles and their successors in the episcopate and priesthood who received from Christ the mandate and mission to bear witness to the faith with their words and deeds. Every baptized person not only lives for himself before God and in God and towards Him, but also bears witness to his faith for others and disseminates the hope in God to the world, and thus confirms that the love of God and neighbor is the summary of all commandments and the driving force of our spiritual and moral life.

The Second Vatican Council defines the lay apostolate (i.e. according to Lumen Gentium 31 “all the faithful except those in holy orders and those in the state of religious life specially approved by the Church”) as “a participation in the salvific mission of the Church itself. Through their baptism and confirmation all are commissioned to that apostolate by the Lord Himself.” (Lumen Gentium 33)

The Council then goes on to explain this as follows: “By the sacraments, especially holy Eucharist, that charity toward God and man which is the soul of the apostolate is communicated and nourished. Now the laity are called in a special way to make the Church present and operative in those places and circumstances where only through them can it become the salt of the earth. Thus every layman, in virtue of the very gifts bestowed upon him, is at the same time a witness and a living instrument of the mission of the Church itself ‘according to the measure of Christ’s bestowal’.” (Lumen Gentium 33).

(Editor’s note: This interview was translated for CWR by Frank Nitsche-Robinson and is published here with kind permission of kath.net and Mr. Rilinger.)