Last updated on December 9th, 2021 at 12:53 pm
iFamNews: The Pope calls abortion “murder” and abortionists “murderers” and even “hired killers.” These are the sharpest words ever used by the papal magisterium. This is a serious moral matter, and his words have been repeated many times, they seem to be of the utmost importance; they are even treated as “infallible”. Could you comment on his remarks?
Cardinal Müller: In the past, too, the killing of a child in the womb was called murder. Vatican II spoke of a heinous crime. The astonishing clarity with which Pope Francis calls this inhuman cruelty to a living human being at the beginning of its bodily existence by its name should make the politicians and ideologues who use abortion as a means of their environmental and overpopulation theories turn around.
iFamNews: Pope em. Benedict XVI famously spoke of a “dictatorship of relativism”. More than a decade later, does this still apply to society? What do you see for the near future in relation to this diagnosis?
Cardinal Müller: The “Cancel Culture” with its absolute mania of control over the thinking, speaking and acting of every single human being without exception is only the inhuman implementation of this dictatorship of relativism. However, the relativization of the truth orientation of every created mind was only the prelude to a globalist totalitarianism of a will to power. In its abyss lurks nihilism as the mother of all barbarities of the anti-Christian image of man with the negation of being as the likeness of God. Fascism and Soviet Communism were not relics of a prehistoric worldview, but products of a humanism without God and harbingers of the hell of transhumanism, that is. Humans without a soul, a technical product that functions faultlessly but does not think, feel, hope and love.
iFamNews: What role does the Catholic Church play in the ongoing culture war? How can it effectively side with people – including politicians – who are fighting for a good cause without getting caught up in the dialectic and rhetoric of politics?
Cardinal Müller: We must not fall into the trap of the conservative-progressive scheme. Certainly man is always advancing because his eyes are forward. But it is his realization and decision in which direction he wants to go forward. God is the origin, purpose and goal of all created being. The Son of God revealed the mystery of his person, in which his divinity and humanity are united, by saying: I am the way and the truth and the life (Jn 14:6). Where Christ is, that is progress in the right direction. He is the most modern man. The absolute novelty he brought cannot be overtaken. Whoever walks his life’s journey with him is the most modern man, because through baptism into his name, the Son from the Father and Anointed of the Holy Spirit, we have become a new creation that can never become obsolete or outdated. At best, we can fall behind and be caught up by eternal death, the cold death of love, through sin.
iFamNews What importance do you attach to the family as a core institution of society?
The marriage of a man to a woman is an expression of God’s loving creative will. By procreation, pregnancy, birth and education of their children, parents creatively participate in God’s will of salvation for these sons and daughters of God, beloved from eternity, and thus testify to the goodness of creation and the predestination of every human being to eternal life, which, however, each individual must accept in free will.
iFamNews: When Judeo-Christian anthropology and worldview is removed from society, it always seems to be replaced by increasingly totalitarian measures: (a) do you agree? b) Why is this so? c) How can we stop this process?
Cardinal Müller: This is not a natural process. The doom of modern atheism is the result of errors in thinking in philosophy and theology. With the spread of Christianity, paganism was overcome by the connection to the search for truth in the great philosophies of antiquity through the higher insight into the Logos of the personal God, who revealed Himself in the history of Israel and finally in His Word, in Jesus Christ.We should not look fatalistically at the de-Christianization of social consciousness like the rabbit before the snake.
It depends on the strength of our faith and the power of the theological logos whether the witness of the apostolic Church and of individual Christians is convincing. Even as a numerically small flock, we in Christ are signs and instruments of God’s universal will for salvation, who wants all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim 2:4). The light of Christ has shone forth in the darkness of God’s remoteness, and is not a light beside other lights. Let us ask for the grace for all that they may recognize Christ as the light of the world and thereby take hold of their divine calling. For the goal of life is that we see ourselves as children of God and become friends of God in the Holy Spirit.