Cardinal Gerhard Müller said that moves to replace a hierarchical system of governance with that of a democratic process which allows even for regional variations of doctrine was a “sin against the Holy Spirit”.
The remarks of the cardinal, who served as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith between 2012 and 2017, coincide with Pope Francis announcing that the new system of synodality will be enforced throughout the Catholic Church globally.
Cardinal Müller said: “Factions with ulterior motives have hijacked the traditional principle of synodality, meaning the collaboration between bishops (collegiality) and between all believers and shepherds of the Church (based on the common priesthood of all those baptised into the faith), to further their progressive agenda.
“By executing a 180-degree turn, the doctrine, liturgy and morality of the Catholic Church is to be made compatible with a neo-gnostic woke ideology,” he wrote in First Things.
Cardinal Müller said supporters of the Vatican’s three-year Synod on Synodality, the final session of which was completed in October, often invoked an alleged “direct communication between the Holy Spirit and Synod participants” when attacking or undermining Catholic doctrine.
But he warned readers that “anyone who, by appealing to personal and collective inspiration from the Holy Spirit, seeks to reconcile the teaching of the Church with an ideology hostile to revelation and with the tyranny of relativism is guilty in various ways of a ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’.”
He said the most contemporary sin against the Holy Spirit “is when the supernatural origin and character of Christianity is denied in order to subordinate the Church of the Triune God to the goals and purposes of a worldly salvation project, be it eco-socialist climate neutrality or Agenda 2030 of the globalist elite”.
He said it was a sin against the Holy Spirit to reinterpret “the history of Christian dogma as an evolution of revelation, reflected in advancing levels of consciousness in the collective Church, instead of confessing the unsurpassable fullness of grace and truth in Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh”.
He also said it was a sin against the Holy Spirit “when the unity of the Church in the teaching of the faith is handed over to the arbitrariness and ignorance of local bishops’ conferences (who allegedly develop doctrinally at different paces) under the pretext of so-called decentralisation”.
In a direct challenge to the authority of the Pope to make such changes, the cardinal said the petrine teaching office “is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on”.
In a possible reference to the Pope’s removal of critical prelates such as Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, Cardinal Müller added: “It is a sin against the Holy Spirit, who, through the sacrament of Holy Orders, has appointed bishops and priests as pastors of the Church of God, to depose them, or even secularise them, purely at personal discretion, without a canonical process.”
He continued: “It is a sin against the Holy Spirit when the political and ideological division of society since the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution is incorporated into a restorative or revolutionary philosophy of history and when the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church is thereby paralysed by internally pitting ‘progressive’ against ‘conservative’ factions.”
He said: “Anyone who really wants to hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church will not rely on spiritualistic inspirations and woke-ideological platitudes, but will place all their trust, in life and death, solely in Jesus, the Son of the Father and the Anointed One of the Holy Spirit.”
Just days earlier, Pope Francis had released a 900-word statement in which he committed the Catholic Church to an ongoing synodal process.
It would include a duty on the world’s bishops to explain and demonstrate in a report, ahead of their five-yearly ad limina visits to Rome, how they have implemented the final document of the Synod on Synodality in their dioceses.
The Pope explained that the final document will give room for local interpretation of doctrine by individual bishops through a synodal process, citing his statement in Amoris Laetitia in 2016 that “not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium”.
“Unity of teaching and practice is certainly necessary in the Church, but this does not preclude various ways of interpreting some aspects of that teaching or drawing certain consequences from it,” the Pope said in a note published on the Solemnity of Christ the King on 24 November.
“This will always be the case as the Spirit guides us towards the entire truth…Each country or region, moreover, can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs.”
The synod’s final document, asserted the Pope, will form part “of the ordinary Magisterium of the Successor of Peter…and as such I ask that it be accepted”.
“It represents a form of exercise of the authentic teaching of the Bishop of Rome, with some novel features,” he said.
“Synodality is the appropriate interpretative framework for understanding the hierarchical ministry.”
The text, the Pope explained, was “not strictly normative” but would “require several forms of mediation” in its application.
“This does not mean that it does not commit the Churches as of now to make decisions coherent with its indications,” Francis said.
“The local Churches and Church groupings are now required to implement, in the various contexts, the authoritative indications contained in the document, through processes of discernment and decision-making envisaged by law and by the document itself.”
The first of 10 study groups established by the Synod will report next year on several contentious issues, such as the ordination of women to the diaconate and the selection of bishops. Other topics may be added later.
The intervention of Cardinal Müller represents the second time in three months that he has severely criticised the synodal process.
On the eve of the October session of the synod, he denounced a “penitential celebration” at the Vatican because it allegedly reinvented sin as a checklist of offences against “woke and gender ideology”, “newly invented by humans”, and which promoted “un-Catholic ideologies”.
It emerged later, however, that the list of sins and the prayers offered in atonement for them were written personally by Pope Francis.
Among the sins God was asked to forgive were “sin against creation”, the “sin against migrants”, the “sin of using doctrine as stones to be hurled” and the “sin against synodality – the lack of listening, communion and participation against all”.
In an article for Kath.net, a German Catholic website, Cardinal Müller said: “There is also no sin against a form of synodality that is used as a brainwashing tool to discredit so-called conservatives as yesterday’s men and disguised pharisees, and to make us believe that the progressive ideologies that led to the decline of the Churches in the West in the 1970s are the completion of the reforms of Vatican II that were supposedly stopped by John Paul II and Benedict XVI.”