Gerhard Ludwig Müller

Early life

Müller was born in Finthen, a borough of Mainz, then belonging to West Germany. After graduating from the Willigis Episcopal High School in Mainz, he studied philosophy and theology in Mainz, Munich, and Freiburg. In 1977, he received his Doctorate of Divinity under Karl Lehmann for his thesis on the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Priestly ministry

He was ordained a priest for the diocese of Mainz on 11 February 1978, just after his 30th birthday, by Cardinal Hermann Volk. After his presbyteral ordination, he worked as a chaplain in three parishes.

In 1986, Father Müller received a call to become the chair in dogmatic theology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he is still an Honorary Professor.

Episcopate

Pope John Paul II on 1 October 2002 appointed him Bishop of Regensburg. He was consecrated on 24 November 2002, with Cardinal Friedrich Wetter serving as Principal Consecrator. Among the Principal Co-Consecrators were Cardinal Karl Lehmann, Bishop Vinzenz Guggenberger, and Bishop Emeritus of Regensburg Manfred Müller. For his episcopal motto, Müller chose "Dominus Iesus" (Jesus is Lord, Romans 10:9).

On 20 December 2007, Bishop Müller was reappointed by Pope Benedict XVI for another five years as a Member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. On 17 January 2009, he was also appointed to serve as a Member of the Pontifical Council for Culture. On 12 June 2012 Bishop Müller was appointed a member of the Congregation for Catholic Education for a five-year renewable term. On the same day he was also appointed a member of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

In the German Bishops' Conference, Bishop Müller was Chairman of the Ecumenical Commission, Deputy Chairman of the Commission of the Doctrine of the Faith and member of the World Church Commission. He was also vice-chairman of the Association of Christian Churches in Germany (ACK) and first president of the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Church Institute in Regensburg.

As a personal friend of Pope Benedict XVI, he was charged with preparing the publication of the “Opera Omnia”: a series of books that will collect, in a single edition, all Benedict's writings. Müller has written more than 400 works on dogmatic theology, ecumenism, revelation, hermeneutics, the priesthood and the diaconate.

Roman Curia

On 2 July 2012 Müller was appointed prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Pope Benedict XVI. At the same time he was appointed Archbishop ad personam. As a result of his new role, he is also ex officio president of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, the International Theological Commission, and the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei.

Müller succeeded Cardinal William Levada who was appointed in May 2005 by the newly elected Pope Benedict. Müller was informed of the decision of Pope Benedict on 16 May at the Vatican. He stressed the need for Church unity and aims to halt the "growing polarization between traditionalists and progressives [which] is threatening the unity of the Church and generating strong tensions among its members". He went on to say "Traditionalists against progressives or whatever you would call them. This must be overcome, we need to find a new and fundamental unity in the Church and individual countries. Unity in Christ, not a unity produced according to a program and later invoked by a partisan speaker. We are not a community of people aligned to a party program, or a community of scientific research, our unity is gifted to us. We believe in the one Church united in Christ". He was received for the first time for the usual Friday meeting on 21 September 2012. On 24 November 2012 he was appointed a member of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts. In November 2012 Müller said traditionalist and progressive camps that see the Second Vatican Council as breaking with the truth both espouse a "heretical interpretation" of the council and its aims. What Pope Benedict XVI has termed "the hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in continuity" is the "only possible interpretation according to the principles of Catholic theology," Müller said. On 6 December 2012 Pope Benedict named Rudolf Voderholzer as bishop of Regensburg, filling the vacancy left by Müller.

On 19 February 2014 he was appointed a member of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches.

A controversial multi-year investigation initiated in 2012 by Müller and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith focused on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious was closed by the Vatican in April 2015. J. Peter Sartain, archbishop of Seattle was appointed to work with the conference. The investigation embittered many American Catholics "against what they perceive as heavy-handed tactics by Rome against U.S. sisters who provide critical health care, education and other services for the poor." While Pope Francis reaffirmed the canonical investigation and the organization's members were ordered to review their statutes and reassess their plans and programs, the Vatican in its conclusion was effusive in its praise of the nuns' work.

July 2012 interview

On 25 July 2012 in an interview with L'Osservatore Romano Müller was asked for his initial impressions in working in the Curia, he said that "As a member [of the CDF] I studied the documents prepared by the Congregation and participated in the consultations. Now, instead, I must carry out and guide the work every day with those who work in the dicastery, preparing and acting on the decisions correctly. I am grateful to the Holy Father for having given me his trust and for having entrusted this task to me". Speaking on his upbringing he said that "For almost 40 years my father was a simple worker of Opel at Russelsheim. We lived close by, at Mainz-Finthen, a small locality founded by the Romans and still today there are ruins of an aqueduct built by them. From this point of view, our fundamental stamp is Roman". On his role at the CDF Müller said, "The Church is first of all a community of faith; hence the revealed faith is the most important good, which we must transmit, proclaim and protect. Jesus entrusted to Peter and to his Successors the universal magisterium, and it is this that the dicastery must serve. Hence the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has the responsibility for what concerns the whole Church in profundity: the faith that leads us to salvation and to communion with God and among ourselves".

When questioned about liberation theology Müller noted that "I believe that every good theology has to do with the freedom and glory of the children of God. However, certainly a mixture of the doctrine of Marxist self-redemption with the salvation given by God must be rejected. On the other hand we must ask ourselves sincerely: How can we speak of the love and mercy of God in face of the suffering of so many people who don't have food, water, health care, who don't know how to offer a future to their children, where human dignity is truly lacking, where human rights are ignored by the powerful? In the last analysis this is possible only if we are also willing to be with the people, to accept them as brothers and sisters, without paternalism from on high".

2013 Interview

In an interview with Die Welt, Müller addressed the growing criticism the Catholic Church has been facing both in Europe and America for its mishandling of sexual abuse cases by clerics, and its continued condemnation of contraception, same-sex marriage and women's ordination. Müller was quoted as saying the attacks on the Church copy arguments used by Communists and Nazis against Christianity. He likened their attacks to pogroms against Jews.

Cardinalate

On 22 February 2014 he was created Cardinal-Deacon of Sant'Agnese in Agone by Pope Francis.

Müller has been considered to be papabile, that is, a likely candidate for election as pope.

2014 interview

In an interview in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Cardinal Müller said Pope Francis “is not so much a liberation theologian in the academic sense, but as far as pastoral work is concerned, he has close ties with liberation theology’s concerns. What we can learn from him is the insight that there is no pastoral work without profound theology and vice versa”. In the 1980s the CDF under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger attacked liberation theology as borrowing “from various currents of Marxist thought“. But a visit to Peru in 1988, when the then professor Müller met Fr Gustavo Gutiérrez OP, regarded as the father of the movement, convinced him of its orthodoxy. “Liberation theology wants to make God’s liberating actions visible in the Church’s religious and social practice... It would stop being genuine theology if it were to confuse the Christian message with Marxist or other social analysis,” he explained. Asked by FAZ if liberation theology was meanwhile recognised as a form of thought on an equal footing with the other traditional forms of theology, Cardinal Müller explained that liberation theology’s basic concern was congruent with the Gospel for the Poor – “for those on the periphery”, as Pope Francis never tired of emphasising, he said.

Secularism

In November 2014 Cardinal Müller says that bishops have been "blinded by secularized society" and are being pulled away from the teachings of the Catholic Church. He said that "unfortunately, representatives of the Church, including bishops," have been so influenced by secular society that they have been "pulled far from the central question of the faith and the teachings of the Church." He blamed the media, international organisations, and various governments for the growing crisis in the Catholic faith, saying they had been "sowing confusion in people's minds." Müller said, "In many countries, relationships are destroyed, and this also applies to the Christian model of marriage and family. The truth of marriage and the family is relativized."

Papal theological architecture

In an interview with La Croix in 2015 (English translation here), Cardinal Müller suggested a new area of work for the CDF: theological architecture. The cardinal was asked how he viewed his role under Pope Francis, especially given that Benedict XVI was a theologian. "The arrival of a theologian like Benedict XVI in the chair of St. Peter was no doubt an exception," Müller replied. "But John XXIII was not a professional theologian. Pope Francis is also more pastoral and our mission at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is to provide the theological structure of a pontificate."

Changing teaching

Müller has spoken out against adapting the Church’s teaching to today’s lifestyles (aggiornamento), saying such an approach introduces subjectivism and arbitrariness. In an interview with Die Tagespost he claimed that placing lived realities on the same level as scripture and tradition is nothing more than the introduction of subjectivism and arbitrariness, wrapped up in sentimental and smug religious terminology. His comments have been seen as a criticism of the shadow council when bishops and experts from Germany, France and Switzerland met in Rome to discuss how the Church could adapt its pastoral approach to today’s current experiences, especially regarding sexual ethics. Bishop Franz-Josef Bode of Osnabruck, a participant at the meeting and one of the German episcopate’s representatives at the Synod on the Family was reported to say that the lived realities of people should be a source of information for dogmatic and moral truths.

Amoris Laetitia

Following the publication of the post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia by Pope Francis, Cardinal Muller said the pope was not in need of correction, interviewed on 9 January 2017, Cardinal Müller said Pope Francis’ document on the family, Amoris Laetitia, was “very clear” in its teaching. Muller said, Pope Francis asks priests “to discern the situation of these persons living in an irregular union — that is, not in accordance with the doctrine of the church on marriage — and asks for help for these people to find a path for a new integration into the church according to the condition of the sacraments (and) the Christian message on matrimony.” In the papal document, he said, “I do not see any opposition: On one side we have the clear doctrine on matrimony, and on the other the obligation of the church to care for these people in difficulty.”

However, in a second interview, Cardinal Muller appeared to overturn his previous views, Cardinal Müller, was asked whether the teaching reaffirmed by Pope St John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio, which linked the Eucharist to marriage, is still valid. John Paul said that the divorced and remarried cannot take Communion, except possibly when they try to live “in complete continence”. Cardinal Müller said of this condition: “Of course, it is not dispensable, because it is not only a positive law of John Paul II, but he expressed an essential element of Christian moral theology and the theology of the sacraments.” Cardinal Müller says: “Amoris Laetitia must clearly be interpreted in the light of the whole doctrine of the Church.” He added: “I don’t like it, it is not right that so many bishops are interpreting Amoris Laetitia according to their way of understanding the Pope’s teaching. This does not keep to the line of Catholic doctrine.”

Abuse cover-up controversy

Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests has criticized Mueller for having reinstated a priest, Peter Kramer (priest) in parish work after he had been convicted in 2000 for child sexual abuse crimes. Mueller has apologized for his mishandling of the case.

In 2016 Fritz Wallner, a former chair of the lay diocesan council in Regensburg, Germany, alleged in an interview with the German weekly Die Zeit that Müller "systematically" thwarted the investigation of abuse in the "Regensburger Domspatzen" boys' choir while he served as bishop of Regensburg. The choir was run from 1964 to 1994 by Msgr. Georg Ratzinger, the brother of Pope Benedict XVI. Müller insisted that neither the church nor its bishops were responsible for abusers. In February 2012 he told the news agency dpa: "If a schoolteacher abuses a child, it is not the school nor the Ministry of Education that are to blame." Rather, he maintained, it is only the perpetrator who is to blame. In 2016 a 12-member commission was created to address the history of abuse and cover-up in the boys' choir, which critics view as a long-overdue effort by the church to address a scandal that has been most troublesome to the Vatican in the last decade because it is associated with the brother of former Pope Benedict. Fritz Wallner is calling for the church to purge anyone linked to Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who oversaw the handling of the allegations.

Cardinal Müller is also being sued in France for his supervisory role in an abuse cover-up case that primarily involves the Lyon archbishop, cardinal Philippe Barbarin.

Status of Protestant communities

In a speech he gave in October 2011, while quoting the Second Vatican Council's document on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, he said that "the Catholic Magisterium is far from denying an ecclesial character or an ecclesial existence to ‘the separated Churches and ecclesial Communities of the West".

Liberation theology

He was also a pupil and friend of Gustavo Gutiérrez, the “father” of Latin-American liberation theology. Commenting on Gutierrez, Archbishop Müller stated: "The theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez, independently of how you look at it, is orthodox because it is orthopractic and it teaches us the correct way of acting in a Christian fashion since it comes from true faith." Gutiérrez was not censored by the Holy See although he was asked to modify some of his writings.

Orders

Academic

Other