ROME, February 27, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — Organizers of the recent Vatican sex abuse summit deliberately avoided the issue of homosexuality in order to advance a “homosexual agenda” in the Church and protect homosexual networks that thrive in a “climate of complicity and a conspiracy of silence,” a cardinal has said.
In a new interview with Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register, German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller said that “discussing the problem of homosexuality would have become dangerous for them, because it’s evident there is a network of homosexuals within the Vatican.”
“That’s the problem, there’s no question,” he said.
Cardinal Brandmüller, who is president emeritus of the Pontifical Academy of Historical Sciences, said “this is a silence that calls out to be broken.”
He said the “work of journalists” plays a crucial role in breaking through this wall and therefore urged them to “be strong, decisive, and clear” in exposing scandals, even when these revelations meet with no concrete consequences or punitive measures.
Cardinal Brandmüller’s remarks come one week after he and US Cardinal Raymond Burke co-signed an open letter to bishops attending the Vatican summit on the protection of minors in the Church to end their silence on moral corruption in the Church and return to upholding the divine and natural law.
The two cardinals, who also signed the 2016 dubia asking Pope Francis to clarify his moral teaching in Amoris Laetitia, called on bishops to raise their voices against moral corruption in the Church.
“A decisive act now is urgent and necessary,” they said, calling for an end to the “plague of the homosexual agenda” in the Church, organized networks of protection, and a “climate of complicity and a conspiracy of silence.”
In his Feb. 25 interview with the Register, Cardinal Brandmüller said he was “very disappointed” at the outcome of the meeting, and that the root causes were not discussed.
“We’ve said all that needs to be said,” he said. “It all depends on what will be done now, but the silence about homosexuality is a real problem. We have written our letter as observers from the outside; neither Cardinal Burke nor myself are involved.”
Asked how much of the problem is due to a collapse in the Church’s moral doctrine, Brandmüller said the lack of moral doctrine is the “root” and can be traced back decades.
“In the late 1960s early 1970s, the teaching of morals at the [Pontifical] Gregorian University [in Rome] was heretical,” he said. “That was the time of [dissenting] lecturers: [Jesuit Father Josef] Fuchs, [Father Bernard] Häring, and [Father Charles] Curran. They were offering their teaching, the boys listened to these lectures, and then began practicing [homosexuality].”
“The North American College at that time was a center of homosexuality,” Cardinal Brandmüller said.
The cardinal praised lay initiatives like last week’s silent protest in Rome, which brought together 100 men and women to “oppose the Vatican’s policy of silence about homosexuality,” ahead of last week’s Vatican summit on clerical sex abuse.
“Everyone is authorized to express his opinion, and this was a good protest,” he said. “We live in hope and trust in divine Providence.”