Second Vatican Cardinal gets the boot
Pope dismisses doctrine chief who questioned his views
Vatican City, July 1: Pope Francis has dismissed the church’s chief of doctrine, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, one of the most powerful cardinals at the Vatican, and appointed a Spanish archbishop to the role, the Vatican said on Saturday.
German conservative Mueller, 69, who served a five-year posting as head of the powerful department responsible for church doctrine, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), had clashed with the pope over key reform issues. He was one of several cardinals who questioned Francis’ determination for the Catholic Church to take a softer line on people traditionally seen as “sinners”, including remarried divorced people who want to take communion.
“In space of three days, two leading Vatican cardinals out of their posts,” said Vatican watcher Christopher Lamb after Vatican finance chief George Pell was charged with historical sexual assault this week.
Francis may not have liked the Mueller’s “excessive media exposure” and “interventions... that almost always sounded like he was distancing himself from the pope”, Vatican expert Andrea Tornielli wrote in the Vatican Insider.
The German was dragged into the row over Francis’s attempt to shift Church attitudes after the pope intimated last year that some believers who have remarried should be able to take communion.