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POPE FRANCIS HAS dismissed the church’s chief of doctrine, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller — one of the most powerful cardinals at the Vatican — and appointed a Spanish archbishop to the role.
German conservative Mueller, 69, who served a five-year posting as head of the powerful department responsible for church doctrine, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), had clashed with the pope over key reform issues.
He was one of several cardinals who questioned Francis’s determination for the Catholic Church to take a softer line on people traditionally seen as “sinners”, including remarried divorced people who want to take communion.
Mueller had also been caught up in the controversy surrounding the church’s response to the clerical sex abuse scandal after his department was accused of obstructing Francis’s efforts to stop internal cover-ups of abuse.
“In space of three days, two leading Vatican cardinals out of their posts,” said Vatican watcher Christopher Lamb, after Vatican finance chief George Pell was charged with historical sexual assault this week.
The Vatican said Mueller’s five-year term would not be renewed and he would be replaced by CDF secretary Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, a 73-year-old Spaniard.
Ladaria was appointed to the CDF by former Pope Benedict in 2008, and was asked last year by Francis to head up a new papal commission studying the possibility of having women deacons in the Church.
‘Neither angel, nor pope’
Francis may not have liked the Mueller’s “excessive media exposure” and “interventions… that almost always sounded like he was distancing himself from the pope”, Vatican expert Andrea Tornielli wrote in the Vatican Insider.
The German was dragged into the row over Francis’s attempt to shift Church attitudes after the pope intimated last year that some believers who have remarried should be able to take communion.
Traditionalists were horrified; Roman Catholic marriage is for life, so divorcing your first partner and marrying someone else is considered adultery.
Four conservative cardinals accused the pope of sowing confusion and publicly demanded an answer to “doubts” about family guidelines Francis published in April. The pontiff has yet to respond.
Mueller said the cardinals were within their rights to challenge the guidelines and in February said marriage was a “sacrament, and no power in heaven or on earth, neither an angel, nor the pope… has the faculty to change it”.
In March a prominent church reform group called for Mueller’s resignation after accusations that senior officials had wilfully ignored Fancis’s decision to create a new tribunal to judge bishops who cover up sexual abuse.
Irish survivor of abuse Marie Collins, who quit the pope’s commission on the protection of minors in disgust, singled out Mueller’s ministry, which is in charge of the clerical abuse dossier.
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A hardline German…well I never
Good footballer though
@Paul P O’Sullivan: He was brilliant in his day , I suppose he can go back to coaching at Bayern Munich if the priesthood gig pans out .
The Journal.ie which usually has a couple of abortion stories on the go daily isn’t reporting today’s Rally 4 Life. There’s a fine line between ‘fake news’ and plain refusal to report news.
@Barry Kelly: They can’t be expected to report every time an extremist organisation decides to hold a march, especially an anti-woman protest.
@Atheos Euripides:
Excellent turn out for the pro life march, attended no less by thousands of….women, just look at all those “extremist” happy women and men in the photo…https://www.rte.ie/news/2017/0701/887020-march-for-life/
@Rowe: must cost them a fortune to fly them into Ireland,
Forgive me if I don’;t trust anything the so called pro-life do, they previously were caught using a pro-life activist who dressed up in Repeal the 8th clothing calling for baby’s to be killed with the sign she held.
She was caught in the act however and even many pro-life supporters condemned them for such underhanded tactics.
@Barry Somers:
#BusToDublin
From all over Ireland for your info.
@Rowe: Most of them are American students, a lot of them work in the Pro-Life Campaign’s offices.
@Barry Kelly: So angry… so sad. #lolantis
((extremist)) i think you mean george soros who has backed islamic fundamentalists and a wide variety of groups seeking to interfere and undermine certain countries sovereignty
Funny how the Catholic Church comes down hard on people who are divorced & remarried but tried to hide clerical sexual abuse of children. They really need to get their priorities straight.
@Cindy Crawford: I wonder when they realised they couldn’t protect Pell from justice anymore? Francis brought him in to the sanctuary of the Vatican in the first place, continuing on the good work in protecting abusers of his predecessors.
Other hardliners will now probably point to the pope’s earlier saying that he’s fallible and a sinner. Which is a lovely paradox since the pope is infallible by doctrine. Let’s see if Francis gets that doctrine changed too with the next guy on that job. Would help bring the church down to earth.
@Mick Tobin: Infallibility is a lot more subtle and circumscribed than generally portrayed. In pretty much everything, the Pope is leader of the cardinals and bishop of Rome.
The only time that this infallibility has actually been invoked is in the assumption of Mary, in 1950, not whenever he speaks, as many seem to think.
BTW, I’m not defending or criticising this doctrine at all.
But Pope Francis is a Roman Catholic, ergo he is Satan incarnate and incapable of any good sayeth the hysterical liberal overlords who comment on the Journal.
@Thomas McGilly: It’s so annoying that Liberals don’t like child abusing organisations and don’t believe in fairy tales isn’t it? I mean, what is wrong with them?!
@Thomas McGilly: He’s not Satan incarnate. He’s just another idiot who’s wasted his one life on a fairy tale.
@Atheos Euripides: Good ol atheists who are always obsessed with commenting on religion.
@Mick Power: Surely we’re at the very least allowed to comment on religion after you lot burnt us at the stake for so long, a bit of give and take Mick.
@Atheos Euripides: Stop playing the victim card , they haven’t burnt any of you in centuries , didn’t they let you have a go with communism :-)
@Mick Power: Why not. Atheists know more about religion than the religious. That’s why we are atheists. It’s a con job and thankfully dying on its knees as each year slips by.
This year 500th anniversary of Pope Leo clashing with that other German monk Martin Luther…..Still have trouble with German clerics….
@John003: Mind you , isn’t there still another German Pope hanging around somewhere
Any chance someone in TheJournal might stick their head out the window and tell us what’s going on in Dublin City Centre. Traffic been muck on the south side.
@Andrew Eager: Antichoicers keeping you falsely imprisoned?
@Andrew Eager: What has that to do eith the Sacking of a Csrdinal
The biggest sinners of them all pontificating, gas stuff altogether! Good to see Borgoglio bringing the Church into the 18th century though.
I don’t understand liberal Catholics. They don’t believe the dogma of the Church and they are opposed to all the rules. So why stay. It’s not as if changing the Church will bring the rest of us back. We don’t have to get out of bed on a Sunday morning to believe in people making their own choices in life.
Even if one were to look at these things from a liberal point of view, it is clear that Pope Francis is proving to be quite a divisive and dictatorial Pope, intolerant of the views of those who maintain Church teaching as it always was. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pope Francis leads the Church to a situation where there is another formal split.
@John Reid: Although I hope it doesn’t happen.
Very poorly written article.
Borgoglio in Buenos Airres supported Fr. Grassi even when he was sentenced to 15 yrs.
Pope Francis is leading the church out of the medieval time warp that it remains in and has to be commended for it .
A ripple of consciousness just ran through the collective atheist mindset.
I am confidently predicting that Pope Francis will join. Pope Emeritus Benedict in retirement before the Christmas. He is not a happy bunny, Jesuits hate publicity…the long grass is their milieu and apparently the long grass has been cut back on the banks of Tiber. Any odds?
Like nerds arguing over changes to D&D rules…
Francis is trying to modernise the church without losing its essence not an easy task when you have over 1 billion catholics in the different parts of the globe
The Vatican changing its beliefs all the time according to the pope of the day as well as it being a business that is a religion?
have your say