(LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, the former prefect of the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), has written a strong rebuke (full statement below) of the ongoing attempt of the Church’s synod groups and discussions that are coming out of Rome, as well as the from the German bishops, and that are promoting the LGBT agenda. He calls the blessing of homosexual unions “fake blessing” and describes such blessings as “deceitful and blasphemous.”
On May 5, Group 9 of the Synod on Synodality published its final report and openly promoted homosexual relationships. As LifeSite reported, the study group claims that “it is “necessary to address with parrhesia the currently recurring question of whether one can speak of ‘marriage’ in relation to persons with same-sex attractions.” It then adds the question whether homosexual “relationships” can be thought of as equal “to heterosexual conjugal union,” despite “the evident impossibility of procreation.”
Last year, the German bishops published a liturgical “blessing” for homosexual “couples” and other non-marital, irregular “couples.”
“Nowhere in Holy Scripture nor in the entire tradition of the Church,” the German cardinal now writes in response to these new publications, “is there anything to be seen or heard about a blessing of people in adulterous relationships, and certainly not about the authorization of bishops to order or permit deceitful and blasphemous blessings.”
Cardinal Müller calls upon the Catholic Church to abandon such adaptations to the zeitgeist and its materialism and to return to a true conversion to Jesus Christ as the Good Shepherd. For him, it is clear that we are dealing now within the Church with heretical tendencies. He writes:
“In the reactions of the homo lobby within the Church to the publication of the synodal working group dealing with this issue and to the blessings of non-marital sexual unions even ordered by bishops, the heretical relativization of natural and sacramental marriage is openly welcomed.”
Here, he is referring to the recently published report of the synod working group that openly promotes homosexuality, as well as the German bishops’ liturgical “blessing” of homosexual “couples.”
In a recent foreword written for The Trojan Horse, a strong critique by Fr. Enoch of the ongoing Synod on Synodality, Cardinal Müller, who was a participant of the 2023 and 2024 Synod of Bishops on Synodality in Rome, observed about the synodal discussions: “One of the main goals was to further the normalization of homosexuality.”
Please see here Cardinal Müller’s full statement. We thank him for providing it to us.
On God’s Blessing and the World’s Fake Blessing
By Gerhard Cardinal Müller, Rome
The study groups appointed by Pope Francis during the Synod on Synodality in the year 2024 are now gradually publishing their – albeit heavily disputed – consultation results. They are fatally similar in two points: 1. Through their mistrust of the central contents of Catholic doctrine, which they confuse with a historically-conditioned system of thought, instead of recognizing them as the undiminished and complete transmission of God’s Revelation to the present and future generations; and 2. in the attempt, with a so-called “paradigm shift from rigid dogmatics to a people-friendly pastoral approach,” to connect with the prevailing ideologies in order to gain recognition among their protagonists. They do not openly deny revealed truths. But they leave them aside and build alongside them their own edifice of a comfortable Christianity that is conformed to the world. To confuse the naive fellow believers, they garnish this edifice with biblically and spiritually sounding, but empty, phrases: “what the Spirit says to the churches,” discernment instead of condemnation, a merciful and all-approving Jesus against the rigoristic teachers of the law and the conservative theology professors trapped in their systems, who supposedly care more about fidelity to the letter and rigid doctrine than about people in their weakness and vulnerability. In disregard or out of ignorance of Catholic tradition, this leads to the sophistically contrived statement that sin does not consist in a conscious and freely willed action against God’s commandments, but rather in the refusal to extend 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 live in the futility of their thinking.… You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old man, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new man, created according to 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 theme of certain bishops, theologians, and zeitgeist-driven laity keeps coming up. Instead of leading people to the God-man Jesus Christ, the one and true Mediator between God and men, they see – in a monothematic and intellectually limited way – the future of the Church in the adoption of the gender and rainbow ideology. Therefore, they even risk the visible unity of the Church in the truth of Christ as the Lord Himself entrusted it 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 man as male and female. And Jesus, Who in His person is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, against the Pharisees’ casuistry with regard to divorce confirmed the original Will of the Creator and definitively revealed that man and woman become one flesh only through the marital “yes” (cf. Mt 19:3-9). Thus, in marriage, man and woman form a personal and sexual two-in-one unity in mutual love, in common life, and in openness to the children whom God wishes to give them. And only man and woman in a marital union are blessed by God to be fruitful, multiply, populate the earth, and (wisely) rule over all other creatures of the earth (cf. Gen 1:28). Nowhere in Holy Scripture nor in the entire tradition of the Church is there anything to be seen or heard about a blessing of people in adulterous relationships, and certainly not about the authorization of bishops to order or permit deceitful and blasphemous blessings. The liturgical or private blessing (benedictio = approval), with which we are blessed in Christ, is a prayer of the Church based on trust in God’s help and assistance for people, so that they may be supported 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 denies to no one who seriously asks Him for it (cf. Rom 8:26). But of those who “exchanged the truth of God for a lie” and replace God’s order with their own ideologies and self-made 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, and yet, knowing their false action, they also approve of those who so act in contradiction to God (cf. Rom 1:25-32).
In the reactions of the homo lobby within the Church to the publication of the synodal working group dealing with this issue and to the blessings of non-marital sexual unions even ordered by bishops, the heretical relativization of natural and sacramental marriage is openly welcomed. It is presented as the first step toward recognition of LGBT ideology, which represents nothing other than a materialistic image of man without God, the Creator, Redeemer, and Perfecter of man. Whoever, as a teacher of the faith and shepherd of the faithful appointed by Christ, is truly interested in the inner peace of souls and the eternal salvation of the faithful entrusted to him, does not make people in difficult situations playthings of a godless ideology or instruments of his own need for self-promotion in the woke milieu, but personally points them 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 in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” (Heb 4:15f). For He alone is the true Messiah and He alone can help every person without exception out of every spiritual distress and all tensions of the soul, in contrast to the worldly saviors who with their doctrines of self-redemption have so often brought calamity upon mankind. Gender ideology directly contradicts Christian anthropology. And with its arbitrarily invented 60 to 80 different genders it stands in direct contradiction to biological science. It violates common sense, which knows that every individual human being comes from the union of his own father with his own mother. With the originally atheist-materialist woke ideology, a destructive heresy and a schismatic source of division has penetrated into the Catholic Church, which in the dimension of its contradiction to God’s revealed truth corresponds to Manichaeism or Pelagianism. And the study of Church history teaches us: Only through the continuous resistance of the Magisterium of the Popes and Councils, the intellectual power of the great Church Fathers from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman, could these and other existential dangers for the Church be warded off. All man-made world empires and atheistic fortresses of thought must sooner or later fall. But the gates of hell cannot prevail against the Church, because Jesus, the Son of the living God, built her on the rock of St. Peter.
It is not the rebuilding of the Church into a philanthropic movement with a religious-social touch that leads 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 with the Council Fathers of Vatican II: “the desire is to illuminate all people with His glory, which shines on the face of the Church, as she proclaims the Gospel to every creature.” (Lumen gentium 1)
The true disciples of Jesus do not seek approval from men and the fake blessing of the “powerful, prominent, and opinion leaders of this world” (cf. 1 Cor 2:6). For in love and truth “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in our communion with Christ.” (Eph 1:3)
