Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has questioned the interventions of some German bishops regarding the vote for Alternative for Germany (AfD) and has defended that the spiritual authority of pastors cannot be used to favor or harm a political party.
In an article published this Monday by Kath.net under the title Exhortation to Political-Partisan Neutrality, Müller maintains that “some disconcerting statements by German bishops on the occasion of federal, regional and municipal elections require clarification from a theological point of view.”
The intervention comes after statements by various members of the German episcopate against AfD. Among them, the Archbishop of Berlin, Heiner Koch, recently stated that the Church should assume the risk of losing members who vote for this party.
The issue has taken on a new dimension following AfD’s result in Saxony-Anhalt, where the party obtained 44% of the vote. InfoVaticana analyzed on Sunday both the episcopal interventions and the possible consequences that the party’s electoral advance could have for the Kirchensteuer, the German system of church financing through a tax collected by the State.
Müller starts from the proper mission of the episcopate to establish the limits of its political intervention. The apostles and their successors, he recalls, were instituted to proclaim the Gospel, call sinners to conversion and communicate the life of grace through the sacraments.
For this reason, he maintains that bishops and priests “must in no case place their spiritual authority on the scales” in the legitimate competition for the electoral majority of a democratic State “for or against a particular political party.”
“That would be an abuse of spiritual authority for political purposes”, Müller states.
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