(Maike Hickson, Life Site News – June 8th, 2020) Bishop Athanasius Schneider has once more raised his voice concerning the controversial February 4, 2019 Abu Dhabi Statement on Human Fraternity where Pope Francis and a Grand Imam jointly declared, among other problematic statements, that God wills a “diversity” of religions.
Bishop Schneider’s intervention (read full text below) comes after Cardinal Gerhard Müller wrote an extensive interpretation and explanation of that document. While Cardinal Müller presents an “interpretative key” with the help of which one might be able to read this document in a less controversial manner, Bishop Schneider points out those aspects of the document which are not in accordance with Catholic Tradition and thus need to be criticized.
Writing for the Catholic journal Communio (3/2020), Cardinal Müller stated that it is “sensational” that, “for the first time in the eventful and conflict-ridden history of the two largest faith communities of the world – comprising together of 3 billion people – the highest authority of the Catholic Church and a high-ranking religious and academic authority of the Islamic world present a common text” which expects from their faithful “a consent which binds them in their consciences.”
The German prelate explained that he wishes to present a “reading aid” for this document, which he assesses as being “not an act of the Magisterium” with regard to the revealed faith and morals, but still a document by the highest authority in the Church interpreting the natural moral law.
For the German prelate, this document “corresponds in its intention with the General Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations (1948),” beside its dealing with faith in God and His Grace. He continued to explain that both in the Christian and in the Islamic tradition, the “faith in God” calls for “fraternity as a vocation and a demand upon man in his conscience.”
Modern ideologies which aim at destruction and which have a sort of social-Darwinist world view, Cardinal Müller wrote, have to be opposed by “those who believe in God the almighty and benevolent Creator,” and this with the help of “the principle of the universal brotherhood.” While insisting upon the importance and essential element of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Trinity, he thinks still that there can be, on the natural level and by virtue of our creation, a “natural brotherhood of all people.” Cardinal Müller, later on, added that “any violence and any force” with regard to matters of faith is unacceptable. Here, he stressed the important duty of “any religious or civil authority” of accepting “the fundamental, supranational human right to religious freedom,” while at the same time insisting that this does not mean a relativism with regard to the revealed truth.
Cardinal Müller, who endorsed the Abu Dhabi document in its essential claims while at the same time providing some fundamental Catholic principles involved, added that neither Pope Francis nor the Grand Imam “abandoned their individual confessions of faith which stand, in important matters, in contradiction to one another by virtue of their content.” This document, he continued, “is not rooted in a relativism concerning God’s claim to truth, nor does it go into the direction of a unified religion as it is being favored by progressive and socialist elites.”
Touching upon the criticism of the Abu Dhabi statement as it has been expressed by bishops and theologians, the German prelate stated that one “can” interpret the one sentence of the document regarding the “diversity of religions” as “willed by God” in a relativistic manner, but that it “must” not necessarily be done. Here, he insisted that one has rather to “interpret” the text and its hermeneutic and terminology (which had passed in the process through numerous hands) “with a view on the good intention of their authors rather than with a view on the academic precision in its expressions.”
“It seems obvious,” Müller continued, “that one wanted to formulate in a positive manner and in view of the authority of God the Creator that which otherwise would have been formulated in a negative manner, namely, that no one may be discriminated because of his religion, skin color and so on.”
Further commenting on the Abu Dhabi statement, Cardinal Müller goes on to say that “the irritation about the above-mentioned sentence” could have been “avoided if one not simply had talked of the (absolute) will of God, as it is part of His Being with His Eternal Wisdom and Reason,” but, rather, in light of “His universal salvific will as it unfolds itself throughout history” which aims at leading all “pagans to the obedience of the Faith.” (Rom. 16,25ff) Here, Müller speaks of the “permissive will of God,” which stands in relation to the “evil as a defect of nature or evil as contradiction to the intended good.”
Important in this context is that the German cardinal questions whether a Pope can at all sign a document with a Muslim “in the name of God,” as the Abu Dhabi statement does, since Muslim monotheism is opposed to the Catholic belief in the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation. Catholics cannot speak about the Father without His Son. However, according to the German prelate, in spite of these differences, “the dignity of man and the human rights can be founded in the transcendence and majesty of God.” While we cannot “pray together to God in prayer, since a Christian can only speak to the Father through Christ in the Holy Ghost,” Müller wrote, we still can “begin the dialogue and the collaboration and assure us of the most fundamental elements that we have in common – that God exists, that He is One (Deum esse unum), that He, in His Benevolence, created the world and that men are, based on their freedom, accountable before Him for their deeds.”
As can be seen in this short summary of the new intervention of Cardinal Müller, he tries to interpret the Abu Dhabi document in a less controversial manner, similar to how he had approached, in 2017, the post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia. At the time, he insisted that this document, which was used by shepherds in various places around the world as a justification to give Holy Communion to “remarried” Catholics currently living in adulterous unions, is not heretical. Or, as a title by the Website Crux put it in 2017: “Müller’s defense of ‘Amoris Laetitia’ reads it in Church tradition.”
With regard to Müller’s statement on the Abu Dhabi text, both Katholisch.de – the German bishops’ new website – as well as Vatican News reviewed it in a positive way.
However, there are different positions on how to approach some of these controversial documents by Pope Francis. Bishop Athanasius Schneider has chosen to directly confront the errors or ambiguities that are to be found in the Abu Dhabi statement. Only a few days ago, he already made a statement on the Abu Dhabi document opposing the view that God positively wills the diversity of religions. In that statement, Schneider discussed some problems regarding the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on religious freedom which might need a future correction, just as it has been done in the past with other conciliar statements of previous centuries.
In his new statement as sent to LifeSiteNews, the Kazakh bishop of German origin points out that the same above-mentioned sentence – namely, that the diversity of religions is willed by God, just as the diversity of color, sex, and more – is “the most erroneous and dangerous affirmation” of the text. Bishop Schneider also criticizes the document’s formulation about a common faith in God. By quoting Holy Scripture, he insists: “There is only ‘one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism’ (Eph. 4:5), ‘for all men have not faith.’ (2 Thess. 3:2)” In essence, there is only one true Faith, the Catholic Faith, and the other religions are false religions.
Further distinguishing between the Catholic Faith and the Muslim faith – and pointing to the Second Vatican Council’s ambiguous teaching in this specific matter – the German prelate writes: “To state that Muslims adore together with us the one God (‘nobiscum Deum adorant’), as Vatican II Council did in Lumen Gentium n. 16, is theologically a highly ambiguous affirmation. That we Catholics adore with the Muslims the one God is not true. We do not adore with them. In the act of adoration, we always adore the Holy Trinity, we do not simply adore ‘the one God’ but, rather, the Holy Trinity consciously—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Islam rejects the Holy Trinity. When the Muslims adore, they do not adore on the supernatural level of faith. Even our act of adoration is radically different.”
Moreover, he adds, we Catholics have a “supernatural faith,” while Muslims might adore God on a natural level; they “can adore God on the level of the natural knowledge of the existence of God. They adore in a natural act of adoration the same God, whom we adore in a supernatural act and with supernatural faith in the Holy Trinity.” “But these are two essentially different acts of adoration, Schneider concludes.
The prelate further explains the many other differences between the Catholic and Muslim understanding of God’s nature, of who Jesus and Mary are (they do not believe Jesus is the Son of God, therefore they cannot adore Him properly).
Bishop Schneider also insists that Muslims have a different conception of mercy than Christians.
“According to Surah 9:29,” he writes “Muslims are to ‘fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture—[fight] until they give the tribute [jizyah] willingly while they are humbled.’”
“One cannot agree,” Schneider continues, “with the thesis that says that a proper reading of the Koran is opposed to every form of violence. First, this is not true simply based on a plain reading of the Koran. The later Surahs of the Koran are very violent toward non-Muslims and call for the occupation of non-Muslim countries by violence. Even in our days, this is well understood by many Muslims to be the legitimate method to read the Koran.”
In this sense, the Muslims have a different understanding of fraternity. For us Catholics, the fraternity of Christ is the basis of our own understanding of fraternity.
Says Bishop Schneider: “The only stable universal fraternity is the fraternity in Christ. Only in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit He sent, people can truly be children of God and truly say to God ‘Father’ and consequently be truly brethren: ‘For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and, if children, then heirs – heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ’ (Rm. 8:14-17).
Therefore, the author comes to a clear conclusion with regard to the Abu Dhabi document: “From the theological point of view it is, therefore, misleading and confusing that the Roman Pontiff signed a common document with an Islamic religious authority using the terms ‘God’, ‘Faith’, ‘pluralism and diversity of religions’, ‘fraternity,’ though these terms have substantially different meanings in the teachings of the Koran and in the Divine Revelation of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Read the Full Statement Here.
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