December 10, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – In an interview with LifeSiteNews to be aired Friday, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former head of the Vatican’s powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said “politicians don't have the right to forbid the Holy Mass and celebration of the sacraments.”
While the cardinal did say that the Church willingly accepts some security measures to guard against the coronavirus, he noted that some governments and politicians are taking this as an “opportunity to suppress the Catholic Church.”
The cardinal criticized the approach of various governments as “incoherent” since while allowing mass gatherings and tightly-packed public transit, they are forbidding Masses in large churches.
“We must fight for our basic rights, the rights of freedom of religion in order to practice our religion,” he said. “We must be very firm to give priority to the worship to God and to come together as the members of the body of Jesus Christ which is the Church.”
And in response to politicians who would counsel Catholics to just “pray at home,” the former Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith said that Christ Himself called on the Church to come together in memory of Him.
“We are not a spiritualistic religion,” he said. “The Word became Flesh, and we are beings of flesh and blood and soul. We are living in the reality of the material world – also created by God – and therefore we need this corporal visible mediation by the sacraments within the community of the believers.”
The full interview with Cardinal Müller, which addressed the scandal of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Pope Francis’s controversial phone call to Joe Biden, Communion for Joe Biden, and the Pope’s comments on homosexual civil unions, can be watched below.
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