Former Top Vatican Official Claims LGBTQ Movement Seeks to “Destroy Marriage and Family”

Cardinal Gerhard Müller

A former top Vatican official has said the intent of the LGBTQ movement is to “to relativize and ultimately destroy marriage and family,” comments he made while encouraging the Polish people to stymie equality further.

Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who was Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith until 2017, made his LGBTQ-negative remarks in an interview with Polish media, reported Do Rzeczy:

“‘What else is the so-called LGBT ideology, which is not about standing by these people and showing them solidarity. What they really mean [to do] is to relativize and ultimately destroy marriage and family. Poles are too intelligent for the LGBT ideology to become established in Poland,’ the cardinal said.”

“The clergyman emphasized particularly strongly that he hoped that, as during World War II, Poles contributed to breaking the Enigma codes, Polish theologians ‘will decode this falsely encrypted, dangerous system, and will say an unequivocal “yes” to a marriage of a man and a woman, to a family[,] composed of father, mother and children – children who live with their parents and have the right to do so’.”

Müller was responding, in part, to a recent open letter by 50 ambassadors to Poland which criticized the country’s failing record on LGBTQ equality, emphasizing the need to work toward “non-discrimination, tolerance and mutual respect” and that LGBTI people deserve “full enjoyment” of universal human rights due to them. A 2020 report by ILGA-Europe identified Poland as the worst nation in the European Union when it comes to LGBTQ rights.

Finally, the cardinal suggested that, against alleged LGBTQ “aggression,” opponents of equality could not respond likewise, but “must act as clearly as Jesus did when he was struck before the Supreme Council. Jesus then said in the fullness of His divine majesty to this evil man: ‘If I said wrong, prove it. If that’s right, why are you beating me?'”

Müller has a strong anti-LGBTQ record, as well as becoming one of Pope Francis’ most high-profile opponents. He has previously linked the sexual abuse of children to homosexuality, said that LGBTQ issues have “no place in Church documents” because they are “an example of the creeping influence of atheism in the Church, which has been responsible for the crisis of the Church for half a century,” and listed the term “LGBT” as among the “propaganda phrases of the homosexual lobby.” In 2018, Müller denied the reality of homophobia, saying it was rather a “hoax that serves threaten people” and “an instrument of totalitarian dominion over the minds of others.” He has compared the movement for LGBTQ equality to Nazism and the totalitarian regimes of North Korea and the Soviet Union. More broadly, Müller was extremely critical of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, and was a central figure in the Vatican’s early-2010s investigation of U.S. women religious, in part over their support for LGBTQ people.

As Bondings 2.0 reported more fully yesterday, Müller’s charged rhetoric only adds to the precarious and deteriorating situation for LGBTQ people in Poland, to which church leaders there have been main contributors. Multiple Polish bishops have made harmful comments, not unlike the cardinal’s statements, and the nation’s episcopal conference recently published a document that falsely claimed church teaching on homosexuality was “infallible” while seemingly endorsing conversion therapy.

Given this context, it is recklessly dangerous and irresponsible of Müller to intervene when the stakes in Poland are increasingly about not merely civil rights, but about people’s very lives.

Robert Shine, New Ways Ministry, October 9, 2020

7 replies
  1. John Hilgeman
    John Hilgeman says:

    One of my grand nephews married his girlfriend the week before last, and one of my grand nieces married her boyfriend last weekend. Somehow the marriages of lesbian or gay couples didn’t deter them from committing their lives to each other. This “sky is falling” warning by churchmen over the course of the last decades has not had the predicted result. One would think they would have learned by now.

    Reply
    • John Hilgeman
      John Hilgeman says:

      I first read this blog early this morning and had not noticed the reference the Cardinal made to the Enigma Code. Has he never heard of the gay man Alan Turing’s role in breaking the code, and his subsequent punishment for his sexual behavior?

      Reply
  2. Richard Rosendall
    Richard Rosendall says:

    Reading Cardinal Müller’s unhinged rantings in my insomnia, I note that he uses the word “hoax,” like another over-promoted agent of hate, Mr. Trump. In my four decades as an activist, I have waited in vain for a plausible explanation of how my happiness imperiled straight people’s marriages. Could His Eminence, an honorific I use ironically, possibly stray further from the spirit of Christ? Tertullian wrote, “See how they love one another.” That love is hard to spot among the cardinal’s slanders. When I read such hysterical rantings, they remind me of nasty letters from lovers after a breakup. Not a good look. Meanwhile, Pope Francis, who so stirs the reactionaries’ ire, is the most Christlike pope since John XXIII. Perhaps I should reread Amoris Laetitia.

    Reply
  3. Tom Bower
    Tom Bower says:

    The Cardinal just can’t get his facts straight. He should recall that it was the English particularly, Allen Turing, a homosexual who committed suicide because of his persecution, who enhanced the Polish pre-war work to crack the Enigma code. That is just the start of the Cardinal’s lies. Interestingly since same sex marriages have been allowed in the US and other countries there has been no reduction in heterosexual marriage. To those who complain about the new norm, where are the problems they worry about so much?

    Reply
  4. Mel Kitchen
    Mel Kitchen says:

    Why are we giving these old men a platform to speak? It’s like giving Donald Trump a platform. Of course they’ll take it to spew their tired, stagnant, reductive, hateful thoughts and then get published. It’s not worth the time it took to write about his backwards thoughts.

    Reply
  5. Richard Rosendall
    Richard Rosendall says:

    I disagree, Mel. The cardinal already has a platform. He and other bishops have done a great deal of harm, not just by slandering LGBTQ people and thus inspiring violence against them, but by putting a drag on social discourse that makes it all the harder to everyone to move forward together. I very much admire New Ways and this blog. Keeping track of those who persecute us is only one part of what appears here, but I find it valuable.

    Reply

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