Pope Names German Bishop As Leader of Doctrinal Office

By Rachel Donadio
New York Times
July 2, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/world/europe/german-to-run-vaticans-doctrinal-office.html?_r=1

Pope Benedict XVI has appointed a fellow German theologian, Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Muller, to lead the Vatican’s doctrinal office, which is responsible for enforcing orthodoxy, the Vatican said in a statement on Monday.

As the prefect of the office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Bishop Muller, 64, of Regensburg, Germany, will also oversee a continuing investigation of the social justice work of nuns in the United States as well as the handling of clerical sexual abuse cases. He was simultaneously promoted to archbishop.

He replaces Cardinal William J. Levada, 76, the highest-ranking American in the Vatican hierarchy, who is retiring. On his watch, the Congregation issued a scathing rebuke of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the central coordinating group of American nuns, and contended with a resurgence of accusations of clerical sexual abuse in 2010.

Vatican experts said that Archbishop Muller’s appointment showed that Benedict, 85, is seeking to forge a core of theologically like-minded and loyal advisers as he contends with a scandal over leaked documents that has revealed the dissent and disarray within the Vatican hierarchy. The pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was charged in May with possession of secret documents.

“Levada was more of an executor, whereas Muller, because of his own theological training and experience, is more in sync with Ratzinger,” said Sandro Magister, a Vatican expert, referring to the pope, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who held the doctrinal post for 25 years.

Mr. Magister said that Archbishop Muller would become part of a “small nucleus” of cardinals in whom the pope could have complete confidence, including Cardinal Marc Ouellet, a Canadian who leads the Congregation for Bishops; and Cardinal Kurt Koch, who is Swiss and directs the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

“In the Roman curia, they can play an important role in making decisions,” Mr. Magister said.

A longtime friend of the pope, Archbishop Muller oversees the Benedict XVI Institute, which is publishing a 16-volume “Collected Writings of Joseph Ratzinger.”

Although still an orthodox theologian, he is best known for his sympathy for liberation theology, a movement that grew in Latin America in the 1980s and that Benedict, when he led the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, harshly criticized for its Marxist leanings. Archbishop Muller was co-author of a book with the Rev. Gustavo Gutierrez, the Peruvian priest considered the founder of liberation theology.

It was Archbishop Muller who hosted the pope’s 2006 visit to Regensburg, where Benedict delivered a speech in which he outraged Muslims by quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who connected Islam with violence.

In his new post, the archbishop, who oversaw the Vatican’s theological talks with Lutherans, will also be responsible for overseeing talks with the Society of St. Pius X, a group that split from the Vatican to protest the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

Three years after Benedict prompted international outrage by revoking the excommunication of the group, one of whose members turned out to have denied the scope of the Holocaust, talks are at an impasse. Last month, Benedict offered to give the group a special status if its members were to become in full communion with Rome — which would require them to accept the teachings of Vatican II — but the group’s leader has refused.