SW News: 'The current crisis in the Church is man-made and has arisen because we have cozily adapted ourselves to the spirit of a life without God,' Cardinal Gerhard Mueller said.

Cardinal Mueller, the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, cautioned that a number of people in the Church are 'longing' for a kind of a Catholicism without dogmas, without sacraments, and without an infallible magisterium. The Cardinal spoke to thousands of Catholic youth gathered at the Phoenix Convention Center in Arizona, for the Student Leadership Summit hosted by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS).
In his homily, Cardinal Mueller reflected on the human desire to embrace substitute gratifications when God is set aside.

'The poison of paralyzing the Church is the opinion that we should adapt to the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, and not the spirit of God, that we should relativize God's commandments and reinterpret the doctrine of the revealed faith,' he said. Cardinal Mueller cautioned that this post-Christian approach 'rejects the idea that we could actually know the truth, and presents itself as a guarantor of peace between all word views and world religions.'

'For some, the Catholic Church is lagging behind by 200 years compared to where the world is today. Is there any truth in this accusation?'

Calls for secularization and modernization demand that the Church should relativize the truth for the sake of building a 'new religion of world unity.' These efforts are to reconstruct the Church 'as a convenient civil religion' and not of the Church of Christ.

'The antidote to secularization within the Church is a life of faith, living in the enduring truth of Christ. God, who is eternal, cannot be changed by the whims of the society' the Cardinal stressed.