Catholic Abuse News - Bash the Gays

Cardinal Müller. Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (2012-2017)
"Nobody told me!"

Catholic Cardinal: LGBTQ People Are to Blame for Sex Abuse Scandal

The latest senior Catholic cleric to jump on the bandwagon and join the growing tendency to externalise the child sex abuse scandal by blaming it all on others, is Cardinal Gerhard Müller.

Cardinal Müller is the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In other words, the Pope's enforcer who job it is to make sure the church's dogma and Papal diktats are complied with. He joins a growing list of senior Catholics and Catholic apologists who have formed an alliance with the extreme right and are taking the opportunity to simultaneously try to dissociate the Catholic Church from culpability in the world-wide clerical sex abuse scandals and victimise and stigmatise the LGBT community.

According to the far right website, LifeSite, to which Cardinal Müller had granted an interview concerning Cardinal McCarrick's resignation:

In this discussion about the abuse crisis, Müller does not shy away from pointing out that the Church needs to address the problem of practiced homosexuality in the ranks of the clergy, saying that "homosexual conduct of clergymen can in no case be tolerated."

He states, however, that leaders in the Catholic Church still underestimate this problem. The prelate states: “That McCarrick, together with his clan and a homosexual network, was able to wreak havoc in a mafia-like manner in the Church is connected with the underestimation of the moral depravity of homosexual acts among adults.”

Cardinal Müller also challenges the Vatican for its lack of earnest investigations — early on — into the rumors concerning McCarrick, saying that a public apology is needed. He writes that “there should very clearly come out a public explanation about these events and the personal connections, as well as the question as to how much the involved Church authorities knew at each step; such an explanation could very well include an admission of a wrong assessment of persons and situations.”

Cardinal Müller criticizes as a “disastrous error” the changes in Canon Law that have been made in the 1983 Code of Canon Law which, when dealing with priestly offenses against the Sixth Commandment, does not even mention homosexuality as an offense anymore, and which contains a less rigorous set of penalties against any abuser priests.

Returning to the matter of the abuse crisis, the German prelate explains that in the Church, “it is part of the crisis that one does not wish to see the true causes and covers them up with the help of propaganda phrases of the homosexual lobby. Fornication with teenagers and adults is a mortal sin which no power on earth can declare to be morally neutral.” He calls the “LGBT” ideology within the Church “atheistic,” and adds, in light of the recent Youth Synod in Rome, that the "LGBT" term “has no place in Church documents.”

Moreover, Cardinal Müller, in light of his stricter handling of sex abuse cases at the CDF, wonders whether there was a homosexual lobby in the Vatican which was glad to see him being dismissed: “But it could be so that it has pleased them that I am no longer tasked in the Congregation for the Doctrine to deal with sexual crimes especially also against male teenagers.”

After twice claiming he knew nothing of the abuse scandals during his time as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (2012-2017) because no-one told him, and in reply to a suspiciously pre-agreed looking question, designed to emphasis the alleged homosexual nature of the offences (and minimise the paedophilia), Müller again presented the child abuses as homosexual rather than paedophile in nature. The interviewer for LifeStyle had asked:

In your work as the Prefect of the CDF, you had the oversight over many clerical sex abuse cases that the CDF investigated. Is it true that the majority of the victims in these cases were male adolescents?

Müller replied:

More than 80% of the victims of these sexual offenders are teenagers of the male sex. One cannot conclude from this, however, that the majority of the priests are prone to homosexual fornication, but, rather, only that the majority of the offenders have sought out, in their deep disorder of their passions, male victims. From the entire crime statistics, we know that the majority of offenders of sexual abuse are one's own relatives, even the fathers of their own children. But we cannot conclude from this that the majority of fathers are prone to such crimes. One has always to be very careful not to make generalizations out of concrete cases so that one does not thus fall into slogans and anti-clerical prejudices.

Waving aside reference to a study (the 2011 John Jay College of Criminal Justice study^PDF, commissioned by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops) which showed that children are no more at risk from homosexual men than from heterosexual men, Müller launched into an attempt to demonise homosexuals as unnatural fornicators and and abusers of sexuality, who intensify sin and lack self-control with:

In my view, there do not exist homosexual men or even priests. God has created the human being as man and woman. But there can be men and women with disordered passions. Sexual communion has its place exclusively in the marriage between a man and a woman. Outside, there is only fornication and abuse of sexuality, both either with persons of the opposite sex, or in the unnatural intensification of sin with persons of the same sex. Only he who has learned to control himself fulfills also the moral precondition for the reception of priestly ordination (see 1 Tim 3:1-7).

In another obvious feeder question designed to focus attention on homosexuality and away from paedophilia, the interviewer commented:

We seem to have a situation in the Church right now, where there is not yet even a consensus present that acknowledges that homosexually active priests have a large part in the abuse crisis. Even some Vatican documents still speak of “pedophilia,” or of “clericalism” as the main problem.

Müller dutifully launched into another demonising diatribe against 'the homosexual lobby', even managing to allude to Pope Francis' recent attempt to blame Satan not for the paedophilic abuses but for revealing them to a wider public, with:

It is part of the crisis that one does not wish to see the true causes and covers them up with the help of propaganda phrases of the homosexual lobby. Fornication with teenagers and adults is a mortal sin which no power on earth can declare to be morally neutral. That is the work of the devil – against whom Pope Francis often warns – that he declares sin to be good. “Some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error, and doctrines of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy, and having their conscience seared.” (1 Tim 4:1f) It is indeed absurd that, suddenly, ecclesial authorities utilize the Jacobin, Nazi, and Communist anti-Church combat slogans against sacramentally ordained priests. The priests have the authority to proclaim the Gospels and to administer the Sacraments of Grace. If someone abuses his jurisdiction in order to reach selfish goals, he himself is not clerical in an exaggerated form, but, rather, he himself is anti-clerical, because he denies Christ Who wishes to work through him. Sexual abuse by clergymen is then, at most, to be called anti-clerical. But it is obvious – and can only be denied by someone who wishes to be blind – that sins against the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue stem from disordered inclinations and thus are sins of fornication which exclude one from the Kingdom of God, at least as long as one has not repented and made atonement, and as long as there does not exist the firm resolve to avoid such sin in the future. This whole attempt at obfuscating things is a bad sign of the secularization of the Church. One thinks like the world, but not as God wills it.

He even managed to work in those other devil figures, Jacobins (sic), Nazis and Communists, finally switching the blame to 'secularization' (which includes decriminalizing homosexuality, legalising same-sex marriages and giving full human rights to women and minorities against the Catholic Church's teaching).

And of course, Atheists get a sideswipe in an interview dripping with hate for anyone who dissents from church dogma. Atheists are behind it all, obviously:

The LGBT ideology is based upon a false anthropology which denies God as the Creator. Since it is in principle atheistic or perhaps has only to do with a Christian concept of God at the margins, it has no place in Church documents. This is an example of the creeping influence of atheism in the Church, which has been responsible for the crisis of the Church for half a century. Unfortunately, it does not stop working in the minds of some shepherds who, in their naive belief of being modern, do not realize the poison that they day by day drink in, and that they then offer for others to drink.

Nowhere in his interview does Müller accept that there is a problem with the Catholic Church itself and its recruitment and training procedures that recruits paedophile, fails to detect them, or even tolerates them during training and still instinctively protects them to defend the church against ensuing scandals. And nowhere is there any acknowledgement of the Church's responsibility for the welfare and compensation of the victims of abusive priests and nuns.

Cardinal Müller's sole concern was to externalise the problem and blame it on forces and movements outside the Church and the inevitable societal changes as the Church loses its influence in an increasingly secular and inclusive society, freeing itself from the Medieval dogmas and superstitions of an increasingly irrelevant church.

It's all their fault! Nothing to do with us!

And so, other than a redoubled attempt to persecute and demonise the current minority selected to be the scapegoat, nothing will be done to prevent abuses and probably little will be done to compensate the victims who have been dismissed as someone else's victims.

According to Müller's Wikipedia entry, In 2012, Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests criticized Müller's appointment to the CDF because he had reinstated Peter Kramer, a convicted paedophile, to the priesthood and had failed to inform his new parish of Kramer's history. In 2016, Fritz Wallner, a former chair of the lay diocesan council in Regensburg, Germany, alleged that Müller as Bishop of Regensburg had "systematically" thwarted the investigation of abuse in the "Regensburger Domspatzen" boys' choir. Georg Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI's brother, led the choir from 1964 to 1994. Müller insisted that neither the church nor its bishops were responsible for abusers.

He had been appointed to the CDF by Pope Benedict XVI but was not re-appointed by Pope Francis in 2017, who instead appointed Luis Ladaria Ferrer, a Spanish Jesuit to the post. In the LifeSite interview, Müller claimed he was not told told of the reason for the non-renewal of his appointment.

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