Cardinal Müller: Mass migration could make Europeans ‘marginalized in their own country’

(LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Gerhard Müller has blasted mass migration and stressed the right of nations to defend and preserve themselves and their distinct culture.

In an interview with the European Conservative, the former Prefect of the Congregation (now Dicastery) of the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) said that European citizens and Western nations need to “decide if they want to be marginalized in their own country,” given the radical demographic shifts occurring.

According to the European Conservative, Müller expressed discontent that some observers interpret the progressive political views of Pope Francis as authentic teachings of the Church. He criticized an exaggerated devotion to the pope and a “cult of personality” surrounding Francis. He condemned the view “that says every private meaning of the pope is a dogma or is an interpretation of the revealed truth.”

He acknowledged that papal infallibility does exist under very specific and rare circumstances, but that it does not apply to a pope’s “private understanding about migrants, and so forth.”

“He has to defend the human rights of everybody,” Müller stated. “But it is another question entirely whether there should come, in ten years, millions and millions of Muslim migrants to change, totally, the culture and provoke civil wars, as happens in majority Muslim countries.”

“It is impossible, integration, if a big majority do not become Christian,” he stressed.

“In nearly all the Muslim countries, there is an oppression of Christian communities,” the former DDF prefect noted. “When I ask ChatGPT, and AI, it says Muslims are tolerant. The next question I ask is, can you tell me one [Muslim majority] country where Christians have the same rights? And they can say nothing.”

“There is no good answer,” the 78-year-old cardinal said. “In this question, it is the responsibility of the politicians and the citizens of the countries to decide if they want to be marginalized in their own country.”

He observed that in all countries where there is mass Muslim migration, “Attacks against the church buildings and against Christian values and ideas.”

READ: Arson attacks on European churches have doubled in one year: report

“But it is also our fault,” Müller acknowledged, citing the low birth rates in nearly all Western nations.

“I remember when I was young, there was harsh politics against the family, matrimony, against children. This demographic catastrophe is man-made. Like in China with their stupid one-child policy,” he stated.

In addition to the political obstacles, Müller said he believes there were also spiritual anti-family and anti-natalist forces let loose on populations.

“It’s a natural feeling to have children if you are living in matrimony,” he said. “It’s against nature and against grace not to.”

Müller explained that the states have overstepped their competence and acted against their mission to serve the common good.

“The state is only there for the common good, for infrastructure,” he noted. “But it has no right to interfere in the natural law and the moral life.… States [oftentimes] feel like gods who can instrumentalize the lives of people only for the interests of the powerful.”

He said that “now we also have to defend the right of the nations” to exist and sustain their culture.

The German prelate said that “nations developed in the West after the Roman Empire” and the arrival of Christianity. While he believes that there were excesses in nationalism and imperialism in the past, he sees nations and ethnic differences as something to be preserved and not destroyed.

“Because we are not isolated individuals, we are persons,” he stated. “We are families. We share language, the same culture, the same schools, the same legends. We have the beginnings here of certain identities, of literature and arts, and so on.”

This is necessary, he explained, to form lasting attachments, as “nobody can learn all the languages [or] realize all the possibilities.”

Nationalities have an ancestral and ethnic component, Müller noted, which have historical and cultural ideational forms and expressions, i.e., “We can say, ‘I’m a typical Englishman or German,’ without absolutizing it.”

“Jesus became flesh in all human contexts,” he added. “Therefore there is a right for all nations to continue with their special culture without contradiction to the others. It is a good image to say we are a family in mankind. But we are in a European family, and so on.”

Müller also recalled that the fourth commandment, “Honor thy father and mother,” has traditionally been interpreted by Catholic theologians to extend to one’s ancestors and, by extension, to one’s nation.

“We are against globalism,” he stressed. “We are a universal Church. But a universal Church in the house of my father. There are different habitations for everyone.”