Cardinal Walter Brandmüller says people who insist on ordaining female priests “fulfil the elements of heresy.”
He says they will be excommunicated from the church.
Brandmüller is one of the four “dubia” cardinals who has repeatedly asked Pope Francis to provide doctrinal clarity about some elements of Amoris Laetitia.
He was responding to comments by German politician Annegret Kramp-Karrenbaue.
Kramp-Karrenbaue, who is the General-Secretary of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told the Die Zeit newspaper on 10 May: “It is very clear: women have to take positions of leadership in the church.”
She also said although she hoped for the ordination of female priests, a more realistic goal might be to concentrate on a “female diaconate.”
Brandmüller says the question of female priests was authoritatively ruled out by Pope John Paul II.
In his opinion, the persistent demand for female priests, celibacy, intercommunion and remarriage after divorce will not bring about a revival of Catholics as is expected.
He notes that the German Evangelical Church – “where all these demands have already been actually fulfilled” – shows that “such demands have had the effect of emptying out the churches.”
He also reminded Kramp-Karrenbauer (who is widely regarded as the frontrunner to succeed Angela Merkel as German Chancellor) that the Catholic Church is not “a human institution” but a community of those who believe in Jesus Christ, and it is “founded through the Sacraments.”
Brandmüller pointed out that the Church lives according to the “forms, structures and laws as given to her by her Divine Founder about which no man has power [to change] – also no pope and no council.”
He commented that it is “astonishing” that certain themes were being kept alive within the German Church.
In his view they are “always the same: female priesthood, celibacy, intercommunion, remarriage after divorce. Just recently there has been added the Church’s ‘yes’ to homosexuality.”
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