By MAIKE HICKSON
Part 1
(Editor’s Note: We will be publishing this commentary from Gerhard Cardinal Mueller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as reported by Maike Hickson, in two parts. The second part will appear in next week’s issue.
(OnePeterFive graciously gave The Wanderer reprint permission for this article. All rights reserved. See: www.onepeterfive.com/cardinal-muller-reminds-church-marriage-doctrine/.
(Dr. Hickson, born in Germany, studied history and French literature at the University of Hannover.)
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As I reported elsewhere earlier, on May 4, Gerhard Cardinal Mueller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, allowed himself to make several very important statements while he was visiting Spain at the beginning of May. The most important words he spoke in Spain I then summed up as follows:
“It is not possible to live in God’s grace while living in a sinful situation,” he [Mueller] said, and continued by saying that people living in sin “cannot receive Holy Communion unless they have received absolution in the Sacrament of Penance.” Mueller importantly added that the “Church has no power to change the Divine Law” and that “Not even a pope or council can change that.”
In addition to the talk given in Madrid — from which these words stem — Cardinal Mueller also gave a speech to seminarians in Oviedo, Spain. The full transcript has just been published by the German Catholic newspaper, Die Tagespost, on May 6.
Since many substantive and striking statements of Mueller had not been reported in an earlier, shorter article published by the Tagespost, I shall try in the following to present some of the major aspects of this Oviedo talk in which Cardinal Mueller makes it amply clear what parts of the Church’s teaching and discipline on Marriage and the Sacraments are unchangeable in light of the Divine Laws and Truths.
The title of Mueller’s talk is: “What May We Expect From Families?” In the beginning of his presentation, which is interwoven with many references to Amoris Laetitia, the German cardinal compares the family to Noah’s Ark. At that time, Mueller says, “the threats against the family and the whole society were omnipresent.” In the words of an old Jewish legend, moreover, the generation of the deluge had “lived in excess and was turned only toward itself.”
Mueller continues: “These self-sufficient people did not belong to any family.” And he concludes that, therefore, “the deluge does not appear so much as a Divine punishment, but, rather, as a logical consequence of the sin.” Out of the deluge, according to the cardinal, “a new people was born, purified from evil.” God, therefore, “expressed His Mercy through a family and in its dwelling — the Ark.”
In a powerful way, Cardinal Mueller compares our own current situation with that of Noah’s times, when he compares the “sea of the deluge” with “the relationships of post-modernity which — always being unreliable, deprived of any enduring form, and always unstable — start again and again anew in manifold and disconnected relations.”
Cardinal Mueller concludes: “If the man of today does not have any further [higher] reference, his desire to have a family will wind up being reduced — and in a crooked way — to himself.” But, it is God Himself Who offers us here help and rescue. Without remembering God’s love, says Mueller, “men would in vain try to escape from the deluge of a nonbinding love.”
Mueller speaks here of “the Church’s great duty and challenge with regard to the family.” He continues: “The Christian tradition has seen in Noah’s Ark an image of the Church: She is rest, Sacrament of Salvation, and shelter for all who have been rescued from the deluge.”
In keeping with this image of an ark, the German cardinal proceeds to say that “the family has to live within the Church” and that Christ Himself is the foundation for this ark: “In giving Himself up at the Cross, in order to save us, He passed through the waters of death, in order to build a new people. The wood which passes the waters, was interpreted [by the Church Fathers] in view of the Cross and Baptism: The Love for mankind which Christ confesses at the Cross, touches us in Baptism and in the other Sacraments and gives us a new capacity to be loved by others, as well as to be able to love others.
“St. Augustine saw in the Sacramental Order of the Church the foundational architecture of Noah’s Ark — which is the Body of Christ — with Baptism as the great door. The Church can drive on the sea because the hull, the mast, and the sails take the form of the Love of Christ which is communicated to us through the Sacraments.”
For Cardinal Mueller, it is from there — from Christ — that there comes hope for the family. “This hope subsists in the great gift, which each family has received in the Sacrament of Marriage, through which the spouses become effective signs of the Love of Jesus and His Church,” he adds. “If the family has hope, then because of this gift which it has received from God and which itself brings forth manifold relationships.”
The Sacrament of Marriage takes the love of the spouses, and, according to Mueller, “transforms it.” In spite of the sinfulness of the spouses, God can, with the help of the Sacrament, become the “bond of such an indissoluble love.” Such a bond then will also be open to bring forth children, according to God’s plan.
Mueller insists that “in this bond, the individualism of the spouses or of the couple will be overcome and a culture of the family will grow, an area in which love can further blossom — that is to say, Noah’s Ark in which they can drive together in the deluge of the nonbinding post-modernity.”
Cardinal Mueller interprets Pope Francis’ words about the “ideal of marriage” as an “incarnate ideal, because the Word, the Logos, became flesh and accompanies her [the Church] life in the Sacraments. This living and transforming presence of the perfect love of Jesus consists especially in the Sacraments. As already said, they [the Sacraments] contain the architecture of Noah’s Ark.”
The Church can offer hope to all men, says Mueller, also to those who are far away, “as long as she remains loyal to this dwelling which she has received from Christ, as long as she fosters this general culture of Christ’s love which becomes known to us in and through the Sacramental signs. They themselves are the architecture of the ship which gets us safely to the secure haven [i.e., heaven].” The Sacraments, therefore, support and strengthen us in spite of our own weaknesses.
In the following, the German cardinal explicitly discusses the question of the eighth chapter of Amoris Laetitia, that is to say, the question of those “who have suffered shipwreck in the deluge of post-modernity and who have forgotten their marital vow with which they, in Christ, once had sealed a love for ever.”
Cardinal Mueller, while quoting Pope Francis, makes it clear that there is a way for these people to return to the Noah’s Ark as built by Christ: namely, by returning to their fidelity in the marital bond. While keeping with the references to Noah’s Ark, Cardinal Mueller quotes St. Augustine, who points out that the pure and the impure animals [i.e., the just as well as the sinners] all entered the Ark through the same door. “They all lived under the same roof.”
However, says Mueller, “Here, the bishop of Hippo refers to the Sacraments with Baptism as a door, as well as referring to the change of life which is demanded from him who desires to receive them. He has to give up sin.” Only if the Church insists upon the concordance between the Sacraments and the visible life of the Christians, can she show “not only how Christ Himself lived, but also how the members of the Body of Christ are called to live.”
Only when the Church remains on this path, “can she welcome the sinners, to receive them immediately and invite them to a certain path, so that they overcome sin.” And here the cardinal becomes insistent:
“However, what the Church can never lose — because then she would lose the original gift which preserves her — is the Sacramental Order. Otherwise, she would not any more make visible the love of Jesus, nor the way and manner in which this love changes the Christian life. Exactly with the help of her acceptance of the Sacramental Order, does the Church then avoid two paths that would lead to a ‘Church of the pure’: namely, by either excluding the sinner or by excluding the sin.”
Therefore, Mueller holds firm to the teaching that the harmony between the celebration of the Sacraments and the Christian life is “the key for the path of accompaniment.” As is visible here, the cardinal uses notions that Pope Francis also uses in his Amoris Laetitia, and gives them a principled doctrinal foundation, and thereby attempts to block any heterodox understanding of them.
Here Mueller says: “Herein [in this harmony] lie the reasons for the discipline with regard to the Eucharist, as it has always been preserved by the Church. Thanks to it, the Church can be a community which accompanies the sinner and welcomes him, without thereby approving the sin. Thus, she offers the foundation for a possible path of discernment and of integration. John Paul II has confirmed this discipline in Familiaris Consortio [FC] 84 and Reconciliatio et Paenitentia 34. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has also confirmed it in its document of 1994; Benedict XVI has deepened it in Sacramentum Caritatis [SC] 29. We are dealing here with the consolidated teaching of the Magisterium which is based upon Holy Scripture, as well as upon the Church’s teaching: namely, the harmony of the Sacraments necessary for the salvation of souls, the heart of the ‘culture of bonding’ as it is lived by the Church.”
Here now we shall quote Cardinal Mueller extensively:
“There have been different claims that Amoris Laetitia has rescinded this (previous) discipline, because it allows, at least in certain cases, the reception of the Eucharist by remarried divorcees without requiring that they change their way of life in accord with Familiaris Consortio 84 (namely, by giving up their new bond or by living as brothers and sisters).
“The following has to be said in this regard: If Amoris Laetitia had intended to rescind such a deeply rooted and such a weighty discipline, it would have expressed itself in a clear manner and it would have given the reasons for it. However, such a statement with such a meaning is not to be found in it [Amoris Laetitia]. Nowhere does the pope put into question the arguments of his predecessors. They [the arguments] are not based upon the subjective guilt of these our brothers and sisters, but, rather, upon the visible, objective way of life which is in opposition to the words of Christ.”
Moreover, the German cardinal also discusses the question as to whether there is not a certain change to be found in footnote 351 of the papal document, where it says “that the Church could offer the help of the Sacraments to those who are living in an objective situation of sin.”
He responds to this question with the following words: “Without entering into this question in a deeper way, it is sufficient to point out that this footnote refers in a general way to objective situations of sin, and not to the specific cases of the civilly remarried divorcees. Because this latter situation has its own distinctive characteristics which differentiate it from other situations.”
Here Cardinal Mueller repeats the Church’s teaching that the “remarried” divorcees live “in opposition to the Sacrament of Marriage and therefore also in opposition to the Discipline of the Sacraments.” Therefore, in Mueller’s own words, the footnote 351 does not “touch upon the earlier discipline. The norms of FC 84 and SC 29 and their application in all cases continue to remain valid.”
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