“The word ‘abortion’ is too much a soft word. The reality is killing, murder of a living person,” said Gerhard Cardinal Müller. “There’s no right to kill another person. It’s absolutely against the Fifth Commandment.”
The cardinal made his comments condemning President Joe Biden during an extensive interview with LifeSiteNews in Rome. {Parts I and II can be found here and here.}
His forthright critique of Biden’s very public and consistent pro-abortion stance came shortly after the president used his 2024 State of the Union Address to promise to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.”
Cardinal Müller likened the killing of the unborn and the elderly to the “Nazi” times, saying that “it’s absolutely unacceptable that you can say you are a Catholic and promote and justify killing of human persons, human beings [from] the beginning in the mother’s womb, until the last respiration [with] euthanasia… Killing of ill people, like in the Nazi times, is euthanasia.”
Biden is very public about his self-professed Catholic faith, but Cardinal Müller suggested that while Biden is “nominally a Catholic, in reality he is a Nihilist. It’s cynicism and absolute cynicism.”
The prelate contrasted Biden with Catholics and other Christians throughout America who “know and accept as everybody also, the nonbelievers, with their own mere reason, they can understand that it’s not possible that one human being has a right to kill another one.”
Drawing on the example of St. Ambrose of Milan and his excommunication of the Emperor Theodosius, Cardinal Müller commented how “in other times people like this would be excommunicated. In former times the Popes and the bishops had no fear to excommunicate, like St. Ambrose of Milan.”
He stood up and also we should stand up and without looking to the consequences for us we have to stand up and to open our mouth for the innocent people and to protect their life. St. John the Baptist said to Herod, “It is not allowed for you to take the wife of your brother to be your own wife.”
It is not allowed to you to kill persons or to justify [this], to open the legislation as if it was legal or legitimate. To kill the people is not a form of regulation of birth and so on, but it is absolutely immoral to kill other people.
And today all the Western world, Western leaders, the great majority of Western leaders also in Germany and France, as they made the right to kill their people, they lost their credibility. They cannot, on the one hand, protest against the killing of innocent people in Ukraine, while on the other hand allow the killing of their own children.
Reiterating the truth that God is “creator of every body and we humans are only the administrator of the good will of God,” Cardinal Müller observed that humanity was called to care for fellow men, since “we cannot distinguish or separate the love of God for us and our love for God, from the love of us to our neighbor and the love of our neighbor to us.”
Promoters of infanticide are excommunicated
Following Biden’ State of the Union address, LifeSite has launched a public action call for the U.S. bishops to excommunicate the pro-abortion president. Questioned directly by this reporter about the endeavor, Cardinal Müller stated that “the first step must be that we [must] have the unanimous U.S. bishops conference, probably together with other Christian religious, other religious leaders, [give] an absolute, clear, strong statement that this [abortion] is against all the standards and principles of humanity.”
Such a statement would be along these lines: “That they [would say] absolutely clearly that everybody in public responsibility who, as a Catholic, is promoting this infanticide, that they are excommunicated.”
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is always wrong, because it kills an innocent human being, thus violating the Church’s prohibition on murder. (CCC 2270-2272.) The CDF’s 2004 memo states that a politician “consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws” manifests “formal cooperation” with grave sin, and must be “denied” the Eucharist. Additionally, Canon 915 of the Catholic Code of Canon Law says that those who “obstinately” persevere “in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”
The Code of Canon Law 915 also explicitly forbids those in mortal sin from receiving Communion: “Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”
Expanding on the theme of a pro-abortion politician, Cardinal Müller further noted that even if there is no formal process of excommunication, a person is not to be excused from the gravity of his actions in supporting abortion.
So [even] in the case if one is not formally excommunicated, if these people receive Holy Communion, they don’t receive the Holy Communion only with their mouth, [as] they don’t receive the grace. They receive it, according to the words of Saint Paul, for their own condemnation, and Biden and all these people, they must know that in the ultimate judgment, when they appear after their death before the tribunal of God, that this is a mortal sin, what they are doing. Even if they are not personally doing it, but they are cooperators, direct cooperators of the murders of innocent people.
Biden says that he has had been in the Catholic schools, but I want to ask what did he learn there? For what is this religion?
It’s not only a certain feeling of belonging to, or a little sentimentality, or a little spirituality of inner good feeling, to read some poems or some books, and so you are feeling well, looking at nature and the apples… all nice. It’s not religion. Religion is a clear confession of all your person, of all your being, to give yourself as a sacrifice to God and for the others. That is our Christian religion.
Pro-abortion mindset is killing humanity
In addition to his comments on the intrinsically evil nature of abortion, Cardinal Müller further noted the “narrow-minded ideas” of the pro-abortion movement that is resulting in the destruction of humanity.
The pro-abortion mindset, he said, holds that “only my happiness is important, that it is an ultimate criteria of definition of happiness and pleasure, of my sense of my life.”
In contrast, Cardinal Müller noted that “we as individual humans, we have to understand ourselves in the context of our family, of our group of our friends, of our classmates, of our culture, of our nation, and of mankind.”
Pointing to the inter-generational nature of teaching the Catholic Faith, the German cardinal highlighted that the pro-abortion mindset of individual happiness is fundamentally against religion.
In closing, Cardinal Müller praised and supported the recently launched nine-month novena from Cardinal Raymond Burke, which is directed towards Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas and the unborn.