(Maike Hickson/LifeSiteNews) — In a homily delivered yesterday at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, during the English Speaking Clergy’s International Conference (Jan 13-17), Gerhard Cardinal Müller addressed the crisis in the contemporary priesthood. He stated that there exists a “Christological heresy” that weakens the work of the priests. “Within the idea that the Christian dogma is no longer the ground and criterion of morality and no longer pastoral, a Christological heresy appears.” the cardinal said, adding that this heresy “consists in setting Christ the teacher of divine truth and Christ the good shepherd in opposition to one another.”
Speaking thus about an intellectual and doctrinal error that has crept into the Church, the German prelate and former Prefect of the former Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith, pointed out that “the root of evil is not clericalism, whatever that may be, but rather rejection of truth and also moral licentiousness.” In short, it is the very “corruption of sound doctrine” that “always entails and manifests itself in the corruption of morality.”
The prelate pointed out that intellectual corruption has preceded the moral corruption that we have today in the Church. Therefore, to correct this dire situation, he warned us not to seek false solutions, saying, “The true reform of the Church in the spirit of Christ is not the secularization of the Church and her submission of her leaders to woke ideology, but the sanctification of the Pope, the bishops, the priests and deacons and all believers by God’s grace for the service of Kingdom to come.”
LifeSite thanks Cardinal Gerhard Müller for giving us his kind permission to print his homily here…
Funeral procession of Cardinal Joachim Meisner in Cologne. Elke Wetzig, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
