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Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the FaithDiane Montagna/LifeSiteNews

VATICAN CITY, November 21, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – An influential cardinal says that pro-homosexual terminology such as “LGBT” has no place in the documents of the Roman Catholic Church. 

In a recent interview with LifeSiteNews, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, formerly the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), stated that LGBT ideology is based on a false, atheistic anthropology.

“The LGBT ideology is based upon a false anthropology which denied God as the Creator,” Müller said. 

“Since it is in principle atheistic or perhaps has only to do with a Christian concept of God at the margins it has no place in Church documents,” he continued. 

When asked about the insertion of “LGBT” into the recently concluded Youth Synod’s working document, the cardinal called it an example of “the creeping influence of atheism in the Church, which has been responsible for the crisis of the Church for half a century.” 

The Cardinal likened this influence to a poison without taste. 

“Unfortunately, it does not stop working in the minds of some shepherds who, in their naive belief of being modern, do not realize the poison that they day by day drink in, and that they then offer for others to drink,” Müller lamented. 

The Cardinal sees the presence of atheism at work also in the recent granting of a Nihil Obstat to the dissident pro-homosexual rector of a Jesuit philosophical and theological college in Frankfurt, Germany. 

Father Ansgar Wucherpfennig, S.J. temporarily stepped down from his position after it emerged that he blesses homosexual partnerships and advocates for the ordination of women. Wucherpfennig received the Vatican’s official permission to return to his post despite stating frankly that he will continue to work for these “developments” in Church doctrine. 

“This is an example of how the authority of the Roman Church undermines itself and how the clear expert knowledge of the Congregation for the Faith is being pushed aside,” said the former Prefect of the CDF. 

“If this priest calls the blessing of homosexual relationships the result of a further development of doctrine, for which he continues to work, it is nothing but the presence of atheism in Christianity,”  Müller continued. 

“He does not theoretically deny the existence of God, but, rather, he denies Him as the source of morality by presenting that which is before God a sin as a blessing.” 

The Cardinal told LifeSiteNews that part of the ongoing sexual misconduct scandal in the worldwide church is a reluctance to confront the “true causes.”

“…It is part of the crisis that one does not wish to see the true causes and covers them up with the help of propaganda phrases [from] the homosexual lobby,” the cardinal asserted. 

“Fornication with teenagers and adults is a mortal sin which no power on earth can declare to be morally neutral.”

The former doctrinal chief even vetoed the use of the expression “homosexual persons,” saying that they “do not exist”. Instead, there are men and women with “disordered passions.” 

“In my view, there do not exist homosexual men or even priests,” he told LifeSiteNews. 

“God has created the human being as man and woman. But there can be men and women with disordered passions. Sexual communion has its place exclusively in the marriage between a man and a woman. Outside, there is only fornication and abuse of sexuality, both either with persons of the opposite sex, or in the unnatural intensification of sin with persons of the same sex.”

While the phrase “homosexual persons’ appears in the English-language version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Catechism also points out that the homosexual inclination is “objectively disordered.” 

As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Cardinal Müller was considered a hardliner on the discipline of priests guilty of the sexual abuse of minors. He was appointed the Church’s doctrinal chief in 2012 by Benedict XVI, who himself had served as Prefect of the CDF from 1981 until 2005, when he was elected pope. In 2017, after a number of his staff were fired by Pope Francis, Müller himself was dismissed. 

Müller later protested the way in which he had been relieved of his duties, saying it was “unacceptable.” Since his firing, he has become an unusually outspoken defender of Catholic orthodoxy and staunch critic of Pope Francis’ advisors, whom he deems “sycophants and careerists.”

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