Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 13, 2024 / 16:46 pm (CNA).
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller — the former head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) — said there is “no proof” that he mishandled money during his tenure and referred to allegations of financial improprieties as a “defamation strategy” in an EWTN interview that aired on Thursday, Aug. 8.
“They have no arguments against my ideology, and therefore they want to disavow or make defamation of my person,” Müller said on “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo.”
Pope Benedict XVI appointed Müller as the prefect for the CDF in July 2012, but Pope Francis declined to renew the appointment in 2017.
The Vatican did not disclose why the pontiff would not allow Müller to continue serving in the CDF. However, a report published by the Catholic website The Pillar on July 31, citing anonymous sources, claims the cardinal and the CDF were investigated for “charges of significant financial improprieties” prior to the decision. This report comes more than seven years after his departure.
According to the sources, tens of thousands of euros of the CDF’s funds were kept in office drawers and used as unreceipted discretionary funds. The report claims that Secretariat for the Economy officials witnessed CDF officials moving large sums of cash in plastic bags. It further alleges that 200,000 euros’ worth of CDF funds were deposited into the cardinal’s personal bank accounts, which Francis ordered him to pay back.
In his interview with Arroyo, Müller said these claims date back to “nine years ago” but that there was “no money missing” and that everything “was clarified with Cardinal [George] Pell,” who led the Secretariat for the Economy at the time. According to Müller, “there were no accusations against myself.”
According to Müller, the cash in the office was “in the hands of our administrator” and was never put into “private pockets.” He said: “They cannot give [any] proof that [there] was any disappearing of money.” The cardinal added that “nobody … took away a penny.”
Müller also denied any money was put in a “personal account.” He said that “there was an account for the mission … but it was absolutely clear that it was money of the congregation and not my personal money.”
“It was on the responsibility of the prefect, in my function as prefect, and not in a private way,” the former CDF prefect said, adding that “this account [was] in the service of the congregation [and] it was all documented.”
Müller said “the pope was not involved” in any investigation and that the pope never instructed him to return any money.
“I came to Rome with … Pope Benedict and he asked me to lead the congregation … as an expert of theology and [it had] nothing to do with finance,” the cardinal said. “I didn’t come to Rome to make money. As a German bishop, as a priest, we have our livelihood, and the rest of our money [is] for giving, making charity, and not making money to become a rich man.”
Earlier this month, Müller referred to the article as “cheap tabloid literature.”
In his interview with Arroyo, Müller said the timing is likely related to the Synod on Synodality concluding in October. The cardinal, one of 52 delegates personally chosen by Francis to attend the synod, has since criticized some of the attendees for using it as an avenue to promote homosexuality and the ordination of women and advance other ideas contrary to Church doctrine.
“I don’t know who is behind [these allegations] because this was an anonymous strategy,” he told Arroyo. “I asked [myself] if these people have nothing to do in their working time [other than] to arrange strategies of defamation instead of doing their work for the Church.”
After Müller was out at the CDF, he was replaced by Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, a Spanish Jesuit. The Vatican changed the name of the office to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2022, and it is now led by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández.
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As the shadow Church lines up its ducks in anticipation for elevation to the next papacy they stealthily smear would be opposition, cardinals like Müller who’ve had nothing but grief from His Holiness, beginning with Francis’ sudden ad hoc dismissal of then prefect CDF Müller’s finest clergy assistants in prosecuting abusive homosexual clergy. His response to the Cardinal’s question Why?, Pope Francis abruptly responded, It is not necessary for me to explain my actions. I’m the pope. So much for collegiality, never mind listening.
It was pope Francis who dismissed the civil conviction of child rapist [convicted on eight counts] Fr Inzoli. Then reversed his decision when the abuse scandal continued with cries of outrage. Should we be at a loss in finding rationale for Archbishop Cordileone being withheld appointment to Cardinal of major diocese San Francisco while McElroy Bishop of San Diego is? Should we expect more of the same suffered by Cardinal Müller for other viable orthodox papal candidates?Robert Burns may have said it best,
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!
The same people accusing Cardinal Muller of corruption are also responsible for hollowing out the Vatican Bank and wasting the Holy See’s finances to pay for gay sex orgies and a biopic about Elton John. Let that sink.
Like the current character assassination, the Synod on Synodality itself might also be a side-show…
A decoy to distract the Church from back-room work on “hot-button themes” by the ten study groups. Their paperwork will come several months after the Synod of October 2024 has possibly self-destructed. About which (and repeating from a recent posting), these ten questions from a peasant-layman in the back bleachers:
1.About the “East,” will the Eastern Orthodox Churches (estranged by Fiducia Supplicans) be sacrificed to a secularist/homosexualized church-within-a-Church?
2. About the “cry of the poor,” how to not exclude those who are impoverished spiritually and culturally (Centesimus Annus, n. 57), and how to respect “the right of the faithful to receive Catholic doctrine in its purity and integrity” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 113)?
3. About the “digital environment,” how to preserve analogue reality—like the Reality of the incarnate Jesus Christ—over a Nominalist digital cosmos and Kantian/Rahnerian theology?
4. About a “missionary perspective,” how to not displace the Deposit of Faith with more of a plebiscite sociology?
5. About “ministerial forms,” how to respect the “hierarchical communion” (Lumen Gentium) and not split from sacramental ordination a non-ordained female diaconate–as an unwitting stepping stone toward an Anglican-style (c)hurch, just as civil unions were a stepping stone toward the oxymoron “gay marriage”?
6. About “ecclesial organizations,” how to not dilute or eclipse the institutional/personal accountability of each Successor of the Apostles (Apostolos Suos,1998)?
7. On the selection, judicial role and meaning of “ad limina visits for bishops,” how to transcend zeitgeist intrusions into the particular (more than “polyhedral”) Churches?
8. On “papal representatives” in a missionary synodal perspective, how to conform a missionary “style” of listening to the prior and inborn natural law (!) about which the Church is neither the author nor the arbiter (Veritatis Splendor, n. 95)?
9. About the use of “theological criteria,” how to housebreak self-anointed theologians who would, procedurally, elevate their criteria/opinions above the Magisterium?
10.About the “ecumenical journey/ecclesial practices,” how to outreach, surely, but without eroding the contours of the sacramental Mystical Body of Christ, or the internal and serving “hierarchical communion” (Lumen Gentium, Chapter Three, plus the integral Explanatory Note)?