ROME — Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, has slammed the Vatican’s opening to blessing gay couples as “relativizing the truth and cheapening grace.”
In an interview with the National Catholic Register published Monday, Cardinal Müller lamented the Vatican’s Dec. 18 publication of the declaration Fiducia Supplicans, which allowed for the blessing of same-sex couples for the first time in the Church’s history.
“You can betray yourself, you can betray the others, but nobody can betray God,” the German cardinal stated.
The Vatican text, which sparked widespread consternation and opposition from faithful and prelates all over the globe, notably the entire African continent, reversed the clear position of a 2021 Vatican document declaring that the Church has no authority to bless gay couples since God Himself “does not and cannot bless sin.”
In the face of reactions to the new text, the new prefect of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, Argentinean Cardinal Víctor “Tucho” Fernández, issued a 5-page explanatory “press release” of the document, despite having stated that no further explanations would be given.
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“I think with all these interviews and interpretations of the interpretation of interpretations, things are not getting better,” Cardinal Müller said in the Register interview. “Go back to the clarity of the word of God, and what is said in the Catechism, and not this bowing down to this absolutely wrong LGBT and woke ideology.”
“That is not modern; that is a falling back to the old paganism,” he added. “You see it in the old pagan Greek, Roman and Persian world: Everybody, everywhere allowed homosexual acts and sexual relations with minors, and they had not this high standard of morality given in the Ten Commandments.”
Asked whether such a document was necessary to reach homosexual Catholics and bring them back to the Church, Müller said that they “are not brought to the Church by relativizing the truth and cheapening grace, but by the unadulterated Gospel of Christ.”
“What is needed is a real turning away from sin and a full conversion to the Lord,” he said.
In the interview, given in Rome on Jan. 29, the cardinal, who was appointed by Benedict XVI as the Vatican’s doctrinal chief in 2012, reiterated his conviction that offering blessings to same-sex couples “trivializes sin.”
