In a new interview with Italian newspaper La Stampa, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Muller has criticised the severity and peculiarity of the harsh restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass in 2021.
He told them:
"the Pope has committed imprudence, because he has not taken into account some sensitivities within the Church, those of the faithful fond of the ancient liturgy.
We have more than 20 rites of the same Mass: I would have been more tolerant, so as not to cause problems that in this time in my opinion are superfluous, given that these are not dogmatic themes, and that we already have many and more important problems.
It was not prudent to insist with intransigence in disciplining the so-called traditionalists.
It would have been enough to maintain Pope Benedict's 2007 Motu Proprio, which was more prudent because it kept the whole ecclesial panorama within it.
That of being more attentive to every sensitivity, even those furthest from his, in order to try to keep everyone united. Listen to everyone, including those who don't think like him. Also because sometimes some of those who are defined as enemies of the Pope are not really enemies.
He also denied that he is an ‘enemy’ of the pope:
It is not so. I am not an enemy of the Pope. Making suggestions does not mean being hostile. In the coming weeks with the publisher Cantagalli I will publish a book on "the Pope and his mission", with the theology of the papacy. For me, the Pope is the Pope, the highest authority. No one can say that I am an enemy of the Pope
Where there is a risk of a split is in Germany, with the synod of the so-called progressives. They deny revealed doctrine. It is not only a question of pastoral care or liturgical reforms, but of the substance of the faith. Francis has already intervened several times to try to stem this movement."
