Curial officials live in fear that “spies” will denounce them to the Pope, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has said.
In an interview with National Catholic Register, Cardinal Gerhard Müller said that Pope Francis was surrounded by “false friends” who acted like children in a boarding school by privately attacking people they disagreed with.
“I heard it from some houses here, that people working in the Curia are living in great fear. If they say one small or harmless critical word, some spies will pass the comments directly to the Holy Father, and the falsely accused people don’t have any chance to defend themselves,” the cardinal said.
“These people, who are speaking bad words and lies against other persons, are disturbing and disrupting the good faith, the good name of others whom they are calling their brothers.”
Cardinal Müller said this was happening not just in the Curia, but also in colleges and universities, where people who questioned Amoris Laetitia, particularly footnote 351 – which seemed to cast doubt on Church teaching about Communion for the divorced and remarried – put their careers in jeopardy.
“A certain interpretation of the document’s footnote 351 cannot be criteria for becoming a bishop,” the cardinal said.
In earlier comments to the National Catholic Register last week the cardinal proposed that the Pope appoint a group of cardinals to begin a “theological disputation” with critics over Amoris.
The Church, he said, needs “more dialogue and reciprocal confidence” rather than “polarisation and polemics”.
Pope says Amoris Laetitia is built on teaching of Aquinas
Pope Francis has urged people to read his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia in the context of St Thomas Aquinas’s moral theology.
The Pope was speaking at a private meeting with Jesuits and lay people in Cartagena, Colombia. His remarks were published in La Civiltà Cattolica last week.
He said he wanted to address the “many comments” about Amoris which, though “respectable because they were made by children of God”, were wrong. He said that, to those who maintain that the morality underlying the document is not “a Catholic morality” or a morality that can be certain or sure, “I want to repeat clearly that the morality of Amoris Laetitia is Thomist” – that is, built on the teaching of St Thomas.
The Pope said that philosophy, like theology, could not be done in “a laboratory”, but rather “in life, in dialogue with reality”. Seeing, understanding and engaging with people’s real lives does not “bastardise” theology, rather it is what is needed to guide people towards God, he said.
“The theology of Jesus was the most real thing of all; it began with reality and rose up to the Father,” the Pope said.
Cardinal: Let’s discuss ‘correction’
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin has said it is “important to dialogue even within the Church” after 62 lay Catholics and clergy issued a “filial correction” of the Pope last week.
Italian news agency Ansa quoted the cardinal as saying: “People who disagree express their dissent, but on these things we have to reason, to try to understand one another.”
Cardinal Parolin is the most senior Vatican official to have commented on the document.
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