Category: News

Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller (left) and Cardinal George Pell / Credit: Bohumil Petrik/ACI Press and Matthew Rarey/CNA

Rome Newsroom, Jan 18, 2023 / 09:13 am (CNA).

Cardinal George Pell was the best theologian on Pope Francis’ Council of Cardinals and a good papal counselor, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, former head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, said on Wednesday.

Müller commented on the Australian cardinal’s theological prowess following Pell’s sudden death in Rome at age 81 from cardiac arrest.

The pope’s former economy chief will be buried in Sydney, Australia, on Feb. 2 following a requiem Mass in St. Mary’s Cathedral. His funeral was held at St. Peter’s Basilica on Jan. 14.

Pope Francis is surrounded more by politicians than by good theologians, Müller said in a Jan. 18 interview with EWTN. “I think [Pell] was the best counselor of Pope Francis.”

“I hope that we have in him a good intercessor in heaven for all the needs of the Church and all the challenges that we have,” said the prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Pell was an inaugural member of Pope Francis’ Council of Cardinals, a group of originally nine cardinals established in September 2013 to advise the pope.

The other original members of the council were Cardinals Pietro Parolin, Seán Patrick O’Malley, Reinhard Marx, Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, Oswald Gracias, Giuseppe Bertello, Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa, and Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya.

Müller, who lived in the same apartment as Pell in Rome, noted the cardinal’s strong intellectual formation in Oxford and his knowledge of patristic and systematic theology.

After his ordination as a priest in 1966 in Rome, Pell earned a licentiate degree in sacred theology from the Pontifical Urban University. He then took up doctoral studies at the University of Oxford and earned a doctorate in 1971 in Church history.

Pell “met us regularly after he came back from Australia, where he was in a very brutal way, against all the evidence, sentenced for six years in prison,” Müller said, and “suffered 400 days and more in the prison, isolated.”

The cardinal “has testified with his life, and his great patience, to salvation in Jesus Christ,” Müller said, “because Jesus Christ redeemed us by his suffering on the cross; he didn’t protest it, he didn’t make a revolution with arms.”

“He is a very good witness and example for Christian life, in the intellectual dimension, but also in his suffering of this injustice” of trial and imprisonment, Müller said, adding that in his suffering, Pell imitated Jesus Christ and the martyred apostles St. Peter and St. Paul.

Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn (left) and Archbishop Georg Gänswein, longtime personal secretary for Pope Benedict XVI. / Daniel Ibañez/CNA

CNA Newsroom, Jan 18, 2023 / 08:00 am (CNA).

Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn on Wednesday confirmed he was the person who encouraged Joseph Ratzinger to accept the conclave’s decision — if elected — to become the successor to Pope John Paul II as supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church.

Benedict’s longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, revealed Schönborn’s identity in his book titled “Nothing but the Truth” (“Nient’altro che la verita”), which was published in Italy last week.

CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner, reported that Schönborn on Jan. 18 confirmed Gänswein’s assertion that Schönborn had written Cardinal Ratzinger “a little letter just in case.” 

At the same time, the archbishop of Vienna accused Gänswein of committing an act of “unseemly indiscretion” with his book by publishing “confidential things,” according to the Archdiocese of Vienna’s website.

Schönborn said he had “so far deliberately kept silent” about his note to Benedict, noting “it happened within the context of the meeting of the cardinals, and not at the conclave itself.” 

Benedict’s ‘guillotine speech’

Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the letter on April 25, 2005, during an audience with pilgrims from Germany. 

The address is famous among German Catholics as the “guillotine speech” — in German Fallbeilrede. 

In it, Benedict compared the experience of his election to that of having the axe of a guillotine dropping down on him. The guillotine blade in German is called a fallbeil.

Speaking just as openly about what swayed him to accept his election, the then newly elected pope revealed he had been “very touched by a brief note written to me by a brother cardinal.” 

Benedict said: “He reminded me that on the occasion of the Mass for John Paul II, I had based my homily, starting from the Gospel, on the Lord’s words to Peter by the Lake of Gennesaret: ‘Follow me!’ I spoke of how again and again, Karol Wojtyła received this call from the Lord, and how each time he had to renounce much and to simply say: ‘Yes, I will follow you, even if you lead me where I never wanted to go.’”

“This brother cardinal wrote to me: Were the Lord to say to you now, ‘Follow me’, then remember what you preached. Do not refuse! Be obedient in the same way that you described the great pope, who has returned to the house of the Father. This deeply moved me. The ways of the Lord are not easy, but we were not created for an easy life, but for great things, for goodness.”

Benedict added: “Thus, in the end I had to say ‘yes.’”

In his book, Gänswein also addressed the fact that Schönborn and Ratzinger were on a first-name basis. 

Apart from Benedict’s childhood friends, Cardinal Schönborn, a member of Ratzinger’s circle of students, was one of the few who addressed his former teacher as “Du” (the informal “You”), Gänswein wrote.

Another episode covered in Gänswein’s book — a brief but very personal conversation between the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI and Schönborn — also took place as described by Gänswein, the Viennese archbishop confirmed on Jan. 18.

Schönborn, a Dominican friar descended from the Austrian nobility, tendered his resignation as archbishop of Vienna before his 75th birthday on Jan. 22, 2020. 

Around the same time, the archdiocese said Pope Francis had declined the resignation, asking Schönborn to stay on for “an indefinite period.”