A Painful Division in the Heart of the Church
A new report is alleging that one of the Vatican’s top defenders of orthodox theology was dismissed from his post due to mismanagement of Church’s finances, but the truth of the matter may be more complicated. Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller...
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A new report is alleging that one of the Vatican’s top defenders of orthodox theology was dismissed from his post due to mismanagement of Church’s finances, but the truth of the matter may be more complicated.
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller was appointed to lead what was then called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican’s doctrine office, by the late Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 and was dismissed from the role by Pope Francis in 2017.
Although it has been alleged for years by traditionalists and theological conservatives that Müller was pushed out of the office to make way for Pope Francis’s more heterodox allies, a report from The Pillar now claims that Müller was dismissed due to the financial mismanagement of his department.
Citing anonymous senior sources from various Vatican departments, including the CDF and Secretariat for the Economy, The Pillar claims that, under Müller’s leadership, the CDF kept hundreds of thousands of euros of cash on hand and used this cash fund to avoid receipts.
One story related says that CDF officials were caught loading cash into plastic bags when members of the Secretariat showed up for a surprise inspection. “Here we were counting out thousands, thousands of euros in cash, in the office which they were trying to move out the back door in plastic bags,” one source recounted. “It was just surreal.”
The Pillar is careful to note that while the CDF’s alleged financial mismanagement was highly suspicious and certainly unusual, it may not have been criminal. In addition to large amounts of cash, there were also substantial sums of money deposited into non-CDF bank accounts, allegedly including Müller’s own.
One source cited by The Pillar claimed that the moving of all the money was part of a “panic” in response to news of surprise inspections. “I don’t think Cardinal Müller was looking to get rich from the dicastery, but I think the aim was to get all the cash, and it was a lot of cash, out of the office and out of sight,” the source stated.
Müller, of course, has denied the charges of impropriety and even upbraided The Pillar for a lack of charity in repeating parts of an event that occurred nearly a decade ago and has since been, as the Cardinal put it, resolved. “I am very regretful that someone felt compelled to tell the relevant press organs an old story dating back to 2015, when I was at the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” Müller wrote in a statement sent to journalists on Friday.
The German Cardinal noted that the Secretariat for the Economy, then led by the late Cardinal George Pell, another outspoken theological conservative, concluded in its investigation “that the Congregation had never lost a single penny in the budget.”
Although Müller admitted that the CDF’s management of funds under his tenure, including the large amounts of cash kept on hand, was unusual, he insisted that “there was never anything illegal about it.”
Müller argued that, rather than “clarifying” any situation, The Pillar’s report served to provide a reason that the Cardinal was dismissed from his curial role other than his orthodoxy. “Since we are often confronted with the question of why the former professor of theology of Munich and bishop of Regensburg, appointed by Pope Benedict XVI at the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was not re-elected in office after only five years, we have to build a financial scandal, as in a cheap detective novel,” Müller said in a statement.
The truth of the matter may never be known to the wide world and may never be confirmed to the satisfaction of concerned Catholics, but the whole ordeal serves to demonstrate the divisive and polarizing influence that Pope Francis has exerted over the Catholic Church.
While The Pillar’s reporting is clearly not a fabrication, it is not, as Müller noted, a complete and total account of all that transpired. Yet there are those who will take what facts were reported and fill in the gaps in a manner most uncharitable to Müller, championing the story as proof that he was not pushed out of his office by a vindictive pontiff who didn’t appreciate his theology but rather by a reformer who values transparency and competency.
There are those, too, on the other end of the spectrum, who will dismiss any charge against Müller and other theological conservatives simply on the grounds that those charges are brought against a theological conservative.
This has been readily seen in the response to Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò being excommunicated: the punishment was just, and the grounds for it are there for all to see, but a sect of Catholics insist that the prelate was silenced for opposing the heterodox theology running ever more rampant in the upper echelons of the Church under the rule of Pope Francis.
Will the Church Seek Answers?
In short, the truth of the matter may never be known because, quite frankly, it may never be sought; there may be precious few who care enough for truth to seek it out or accept it when it reveals itself. This is in no small part due to the influence of Pope Francis, who has consistently sidelined and even penalized those Princes of the Church who dare to ask questions about his apostolic exhortations, encyclicals, or (far less sacrosanct and far more prone to human error) his personnel decisions.
On the one hand, it seems unlikely that accusations of unusual (though not criminal) financial management would result in a respected and high-ranking prelate being dismissed from his post. After all, Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra is still serving as the Substitute for the Secretariat of State (essentially the third of the Vatican’s top three positions) despite being implicated and even named in one of the most significant criminal trials in Vatican history, centered around financial crimes involving millions of dollars.
And the dismissal of Cardinal Müller did eventually make way for the alarmingly left-leaning Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández to be installed as head of the CDF.
In most cases, the “penalties” imposed by Pope Francis have, in fact, been just, but they have not been altogether fair. Those penalties have typically only been imposed upon those who could be classified as theologically conservative, as hindrances to the heterodoxy seemingly being promoted from the top down. Those who preach heterodoxy, openly question or even contradict the Church’s perennial moral teachings, and do the bidding of Pope Francis, are rarely penalized and, more often than not, shielded when allegations arise of their own wrongdoing.
To put it simply, the actions of Pope Francis are, more often than not, just, but the present Pontiff’s inactions are injustices. This seemingly willful division in the application of justice has consequently rent a great division in the heart of the Catholic Church, a deep wound that is in need of healing. It may be that the most arduous task of the next Pope will be the healing of that very wound.
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