Interview With Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller

In December the St. Boniface Institute conducted a video interview with Cardinal Gerhard Müller. Rembrandt Clancy has translated the interview, and includes these contextual notes:

The interview caused a great deal of controversy at the time of its release. His analysis of the vaccine mandates is clearly still applicable, and his remarks about denying the Mass and sacraments to their faithful during the lockdowns may still speak very much to the experience of some readers.

Perhaps the most controversial part of the interview was his direct and poignant remarks about the “Big Reset”. The mere mention of the world “Soros” brought about the widespread accusation, in both English and German sources, of anti-Semitism. And the attack on the “Big Reset” itself drew the charge of his being a conspiracy theorist. But it is precisely here where Müller goes beyond all the pseudo-medial distraction and aims right at the heart of the tyranny.

St. Boniface Institute Interviews Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller

Cardinal Müller speaks about the vaccine mandate, the sacraments and the Great Reset

“I really would not like to be newly created and redeemed in the image and likeness of Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates or Soros.”

— Cardinal Gerhard Müller

Video Source: Kathnet
Film Interview by St. Boniface Institute
Translation by Rembrandt Clancy

December 14, 2021

Your Excellency, you have just returned from the USA! What was your impression there?

I was unable to see everyone, but I met very many who are firmly grounded in the Catholic faith, especially young people at the universities —Notre Dame, Hillsdale College — who are very engaged. They not only participate outwardly, but are grounded in their faith in God and in Jesus Christ, who came down to us in the Incarnation and who brings orientation to our lives; for He is the way, the truth and the life. And that is the testimony of Jesus Christ Himself.[1] And it is in this sense that I have returned actually very much gladdened and strengthened in my faith. Not everywhere is everything so sad, as is sometimes the case with us in Europe.

Unfortunately it has come to pass that bishops and priests are closing their churches and have denied the sacraments to the faithful during the pandemic. What is your position on this?

Christ gave the apostles the Commission to preach the gospel and to confer the grace of God through the seven sacraments. That is the essential mission of the Church. Certainly, in the event of a catastrophe we must also accommodate to the circumstances and avoid danger to physical life and health. And we always do that. But to absolutely refuse access to the sacraments is, of course, a direct offence against Christ. Often I have the impression of the Church, seen from her most important representatives on down, that if she is only a human organisation spreading human solace and imparting only human help, then ultimately there is also a lack of faith in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the Son of God who came into this world and is the universal Redeemer of all men.

The Church, to be precise, is the sacrament of the world’s salvation in Jesus Christ. For that reason, in earlier times of pestilence, good priests never refused to expose themselves to personal danger, for they maintained that eternal life is even more important than temporal life.

Certainly we can prolong this in some ways, perhaps by the avoidance of illnesses. But we can never do away with the mortality of man; and the answer to this is given in Jesus Christ, the victor over sin and death. That is why one could indeed say that the bishops are acting against the Holy Ghost, against their own better judgment, against their conscience and contrary to their mission, when they keep the faithful from the sacraments on principle.

There is also the commandment governing the Sabbath: Remember thou keep holy the Sabbath day and Do this in remembrance of me, which is what we celebrate on Sunday, keeping the Sabbath holy by means of the Eucharist. This, too, is directly commissioned by Christ, the head of the Church; therefore, a bishop can never, as it were, provide a dispensation from the Sunday obligation; rather, he can make only a general statement, that if the external circumstances are so serious that a person cannot attend, he is exempt from attendance; but then he is obligated once again to make up for Sunday Mass at the next opportunity. This applies to all healthy people.

Of course, if a person is sick, he can remain at home, in which case it is reasonable to participate in the Mass, virtually, via Zoom or the media. But in that situation there is no efficacious grace [Gnadenwirksamkeit] conferred ex opere operato, by virtue of the work performed in the Mass, but rather by virtue of the aid conferred by personal faith, by actual grace [helfenden Gnade]. That is what a bishop or a priest actually has to know from Theology, unless he slept during his Theology studies or he has otherwise culpably forgotten it.

A conspicuous split is emerging between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, the latter being made increasingly into scapegoats. What do you have to say to that?

It is always a terrible thing when a society is ideologically split. Hence within the meaning of the class-struggle rhetoric, the enemy-class or the dissenters must be annihilated or otherwise put completely out of commission.

Especially in crisis situations, the point is to stand together. Even now, in this situation, it is a question of listening to the professionals, so as to take the correct measures to lessen the danger to life and limb.

However, I think that no politician has the correct recipe, as it were, to overcome Corona as a disease. We indeed have a certain chaos, a confusion of measures. On the one hand, these are born from ignorance about the potency and danger of this virus; on the other hand, they are born also out of the will to exploit the opportunity to now bring man into line [gleichschalten][2]; to subject him to total control and to establish a surveillance state, as the proponents of the Big Reset [sic] have themselves said: Klaus Schwab, “Corona is an opportunity”. Many people are dying, sick and severely restricted in their lives; the economy is severely damaged and children are unable to go to school, which will result in traumatic, long-term damage to their souls and spirits.

And then their are people who sit on the throne of their riches and remain untouched by all these everyday difficulties and proclaim in grand style that they now have an opportunity to force through their agenda. It is an agenda based on a confidence racket; namely, the opinion ‘we can now, with the help of modern technology or the communications system, call forth a new creation; we can create a New Man’, but exactly in their own image and likeness. I really would not like to be newly created and redeemed in the image and likeness of Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates or Soros and all these people who have accumulated a great deal of money, whilst calling upon others to cut back to a modest life, and who thunder toward Glasgow in their private jets whilst imposing severe austerity measures and restrictions on the rest of mankind, or on “the masses”, to speak in their locution.

From a political point of view, that no longer has anything to do with democracy, where every person is equal before the law. Instead, it is the old pattern we have always seen: that people are divided into a small elite; a self-proclaimed elite of owners, commanders, rulers and the privileged; and then comes the great mass who have only to obey; and they, with every stirring of their own thinking, are severely punished and threatened with utterly disproportionate fines and even prison terms.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has clearly stated that there must be no vaccine mandate imposed (cf. “Note on the morality of using some anti-Covid-19 vaccines”, § 5).

Such a vaccine mandate is to be introduced now in Austria. What is your opinion on that?

In an extreme emergency, where all consequences are manageable, I believe the public authorities, that is, the state, can perhaps ethically introduce compulsory vaccination, as has already been done with smallpox vaccination, and so on. However, in that instance, it was clear there would be no unmanageable side effects and long-term sequelae. But that is not the situation we are in. Instead, everything is all unclear. The politicians themselves have caused tremendous chaos with their information as well as their measures. None of the promises they made have materialised. They make excuses about how they could not have foreseen the events at the time. But if one cannot foresee something, one should not make firm promises, but instead say ‘we are working somewhat in the dark here and are doing what we can be responsible for at the moment. But we simply cannot go so far as to reduce the entire society into subjects’.

Civil liberties and human rights are after all defensive rights vis-à-vis the state. Therefore, it is highly problematic that the powerful, against whom the defensive rights were formulated, rights which belong to the nature of man, that these same people determine when, how and to what extent fundamental rights are to be limited or even abolished.

And unfortunately, even our constitutional courts are no longer reliable, because the people on them are dependent on the very same politicians who appoint them in the first place. And whilst we very strongly approve of the three independent branches of government, nevertheless we unfortunately have to realise that this tripartite division is very much lacking in practice. The courts must be genuinely independent, adjudicate according to law and justice and not according to how they wish to enforce social trends and opinions.

Of course, the feminist ideology, the emancipation ideology, the LGBT ideology and the Big Reset agenda are also very much dominant in the universities and have penetrated well into the law faculties. And the people are placed under so much pressure that freedom of thought is hindered; it is punished by the pensiero unico, by uniform thinking, political correctness, cancel culture and by whatever name attaches to all these functionally neo-fascist and neo-Communist measures, these totalitarian mindsets. Unfortunately, it is precisely in the universities, public institutions, the mass media and the press where this way of thinking is at home. And there remains scarcely a single journalist who is able to report freely; on the contrary, unless he feels his way, as it were, into the realm of general expectations, he is terminated or otherwise finds himself under so much pressure from his colleagues that he resigns voluntarily.

Hence in this respect, we face not only a health crisis, but also crises in democracy and freedom of thought. And it can scarcely be expected, that people cast in this mould, who are on Forbes’ list of the richest men in the world; that they could be the redeemers of the world, as it were; that they could take over the function of philosopher, philosophy or theology and present a single ruling image of humanity oriented only toward consumption and profit, which no longer has anything to do with the dignity of man, who was created by God for freedom and reason.

In spite of the statement by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Lackner has spoken of a moral obligation to be vaccinated. What can you say to the Archbishop in response?

I think it is his personal opinion, for he should not use the bishop’s office to exert his moral pressure in this way. The episcopate is there for the purpose of proclaiming the Gospel and also for speaking about ethical principles in the public sphere: the fight for life against abortion, against euthanasia: the killing of old people because they are no longer needed. Supposedly, they no longer have meaning if they do not share in the enjoyment of life. These are the great challenges facing the Church and the society as a whole.

It is on these matters that one should concentrate, and not persist in morally cloaking, as it were, what the politicians have also squandered and fouled up. There is no moral duty toward democracies and people’s democracies. Many of them have introduced compulsory military service. On the one hand, the people have to be defended; hence, when Napoleon attacked Russia, then the entire French nation had to stand behind him, albeit resisting it. And so modern democratic states have claimed there is also a duty to defend the homeland. On the other hand, the individual must decide in conscience whether he defends his country by force of arms or whether he says ‘I cannot answer to my conscience if I shoot other human beings’.

Therefore, with conscription we have reservation of conscience; the same must now also apply to this question of compulsory vaccination, because the preconditions are likewise entirely unclear; namely, the side effects and the health consequences. I think what the individual does now, he must be able to discuss with his personal physician.

What is truly a health matter cannot be decided in the final analysis by politicians who have just as little understanding of medicine and pharmacology as any bishop. I do not think a bishop has direct medical knowledge or that he can act as a biologist who is professionally active. Here we are reliant on experts. And these moral obligations which arise for us as citizens, but which we weigh very carefully, relate to us in the form of conscience. And to put conscience under pressure is, I think, the wrong way. We want to form consciences in such a way that each person can make his decision before God with freedom of conscience.

Federal Chancellor Karl Nehammer[3] presents himself as a Catholic, but advocates dictatorial measures. Are these two positions mutually compatible?

I do not know him personally; and likewise personally, I cannot say anything now for or against anyone publicly. That is not the mission of a pastor. It is a very good thing when those in politics also publicly profess their faith. And from that should follow that they conduct themselves in ways corresponding to Catholic principles. We do not expect Catholic politicians to lobby for the Church, only that they bring to bear the general first principles of morality, the applicable morality of the natural moral law. In addition, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, says that engagement of Christians, including politicians and many others in public life, must likewise have minds formed in the Christian spirit: respect for neighbour, defence of fundamental human rights and also commitment to a democracy; a democracy, however, which does not say “what the majority says is good”, but rather, “the majority should do what is good”.

In this sense, engagement is a very good thing; but it is also very important that Catholic politicians allow themselves be schooled, and not, like Biden in the USA, have the Pope issue him a certificate which claims he is a good Catholic; but in reality, then expose the lives of many unborn children to murder and not devote himself to opposing it; rather, he positively advocates in favour of the murder of young human beings in the womb. That is precisely the opposite of being a Catholic. And when a person receives Holy Communion, he is reconciled with Christ and can only be for life and can do nothing evil.

Strikes are becoming ever more frequent in Austria due to the immanent vaccine mandate. Is it legitimate for a Catholic to participate in such a strike?

Yes, it is the legitimate right of every citizen of a democracy to raise his voice against government policy. Naturally, it must be ensured that no new acts of injustice occur; no violent acts and no injury to people, either in actions or in words. And of course we must, in our reactions, conduct ourselves as Christians in thought, word and deed. And we are certainly bound in a special way to present our ideas, our opinions and our faith in such a way that no further division arises. We profess our faith with firmness and certainty. We also suffer for our faith, even to the point of martyrdom. We accept many evil words, but we do not wish to act like our opponents, so to speak, for we surely have to love our enemies.

Thus far, that is the aim. And that is why it would be important on the one hand to very clearly represent our own position with arguments and to be aware of our own rights as citizens. On the other hand, it is also important to organise our actions in such a way that they do not become a reproach to others, hence causing the situation to escalate out of control: it is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice[4] — that is our guiding principle. But in any case, every citizen, whether Christian or non-Christian, Catholic or non-Catholic, has the fundamental right to rebel against measures of the government.

And no government that calls itself democratic can claim that its measures are, so to speak, of metaphysical necessity, blessed by salvation history or invested with divine authority. After all, they too only cook only with water[5], like anyone else who holds a different position. It is for that reason that we also must call the government to moderation. Also the politicians, when it is a matter of power, always have the temptation to abuse it. And the powerful do abuse their power. And they cannot simply say that “we are a democracy, therefore everything that we do is legitimate from the outset”; rather, the inverse is true; precisely because we are a democracy, the exercise of power must always be justified before the people, elections must be held, and the respective constitutions of our democratic states in the West must likewise be observed.

And our democratic Constitution does not simply proclaim what the majority, the policy or the press says must occur; and then everyone has to submit and otherwise shut up, hold closed the eyes, ears, mouth, nose and tie on a mask. On the contrary, the Constitution says the state is built from the citizens upward, and the citizens stand above the politicians; and our conscience stands above the political power, which is a temporal power, a limited power. And the world to which that power relates cannot place man’s conscience under obligation in the same way God binds man, for God is infinite love and eternal life. And in relation to God we become free; in relation to man we often have to fight for our freedom.

We are now in Advent. What advice can you give to Catholics, but especially to non-believers, on how to prepare for Christmas?

In my opinion, there are no unbelievers, because every person who thinks [jeder Mensch, der denkt] is called into question by his finiteness and longs in his heart for the infinite, the eternal and the true, which, however, he is often unable to find, partly because the representatives of the churches stand in the way of the faith, the Gospel and the authenticity of God’s word. However, reality shows that every man knows that he must die, that he experiences this absurdity of suffering, of dying, of death and evil in the world and that this yearning for eternity is inborn in man: “Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee”, said St. Augustine.[6] I think that is a description of the situation of man, “la condition humaine” as Blaise Pascal says[7]. Well, for that reason, one can really only invite each person to engage with Christ who is the Way, the Truth and the Life and the Light of the world. Whoever recognises Christ as the Light of the world and follows His path and walks not in darkness, so will he not perish in darkness.

Therefore, Advent is just such a major invitation; the preparation for the coming of God into our hearts, into our lives, into our world and also into the Church. That is the great message of Advent. And although sometimes accompanied by a little kitsch, it expresses itself after all right through to the externals, that the people somehow hope that in the darkness a light may shine forth. Because of that, the soul senses she is being addressed by the Light of Christmas.

Notes:

1   John 14:6
2   geboren aus dem Willen … die Menschen jetzt gleichzuschalten”. The verb gleichschalten lacks a historical, parsimonious English language equivalent. It is a derogatory term specific to the National Socialist period, a connection which will not be lost on the German reader trained to recent history. Central to all its applications, gleichschalten refers to “bringing into the same, uniform, centrally determined line” (Duden). The term often represents the falling into line of institutions, such as the press, with the centrally controlled Weltanschauung; Cardinal Müller’s application refers to the levelling down of the citizenry into a uniform mass.
3   Karl Nehammer became Austria’s third Chancellor in two months on 3 December 2021.
4   Socrates. Cf. Gorgias, 469c ff.
5   Sie kochen auch nur mit Wasser. The literal English translation can hardly be improved upon by replacing it with the equivalent English idiom, which is “They also put their trousers on one leg at a time’.
6   Confessions, Book I
7   Relating to “every thinking person”: “But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute” Pensées, VI, 339
 

5 thoughts on “Interview With Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller

  1. Thank you, Baron, for posting this interview. I’m a great admirer of Cardinal Muller, one of the many good men in the Church kicked to the curb by our current Pope.

    And I suspect the interviewer for the St. Boniface Institute is the young Austrian Mr. Alexander Tschugguel, the courageous Drowner of the Pachamama idol. The deplatformers and slanderers are now calling him a Nazi.

    Their playbook is growing shopworn, and their narrative stale.

  2. This Cardinal, along with the conservative wing, are now the power brokers behind the Papacy once this current commie jesuit false Pope dies. The next Pope, the chances are they will get a conservative one.

    • I pray you are right, but I doubt it.

      The current pope has appointed most of the cardinals who will be voting in the next conclave for his successor. There really isn’t a ‘conservative wing’ to speak of.

      But Divine Intervention is always a possibility. And in the Final Analysis, it is a certainty …

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