The German Cardinal sent a greeting to the ‘Le Tavole di Assisi’ in the fall of 2025
Newsroom (06/02/2026, Gaudium Press) In England, one can end up in prison for praying in front of an abortion clinic for the lives of the unborn. This is like in Nazi Germany when the dean of Berlin Cathedral, Lichtenberg, died in 1943 in Gestapo custody simply for praying for persecuted Jews.
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller sent a greeting to the ‘Le Tavole di Assisi’ Conference on 6 September 2025 on the proposed theme: ‘The new US presidency. Throne and altar together again? An opportunity for the Christian West?’
Below is the greeting, in the version published by Infocatólica:
Dear friends:
Unfortunately, I am unable to be present in person at your important event in Assisi on 6 and 7 September 2025. This week I am in Poland on pastoral duties, celebrating Mass and preaching at a major jubilee commemoration in the diocese of Lyck, and giving a lecture in Białystok on transhumanism and its anti-human consequences.
From a Catholic point of view, there can be no marriage between throne and altar, as was the case in the model of the German Empire dominated by Protestantism in Bismarck’s time, and as befits the Lutheran conception of the prince as bishop of a regional church.
The Catholic Church, which as an invisible community of grace with God and as a visible and sacramental institution—founded on the God-Man Christ as its head—is inseparable, owes itself exclusively to God in its origin, in its actions and in its mission, and is therefore completely independent of any earthly power. But when the State fulfils its duty to serve the common good and when State power recognizes inalienable human rights as the foundation and limit of its actions in the executive, legislative and judicial branches, then there can be cooperation between Church and State, for example in the areas of education and training, in social and charitable institutions.
In modern states, people of different religions and worldviews coexist peacefully, provided that the constitution, specific jurisprudence and legislation are guided by natural moral law, which allows for an infallible distinction between good and evil in the conscience of each person. Nazi ideologues knew in their conscience that killing innocent people was a crime before God and man. But they numbed their conscience with their racial ideology, according to which Jews and other peoples (such as the Slavs, for example) were not fully human beings and therefore the law inscribed in the heart of every rational being did not apply in that case: “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex 20:13; Deut 5:17). The same is true of the ideologues of abortion, who know that the child in the womb is an individual human being who must not be killed. But to cover up the crime, they claim that children in the womb are not yet persons with full rights, and that they can therefore be killed if deemed necessary. To silence their own remorse, they criminalize defenders of the right to life of the unborn. In England, one can end up in prison for praying in front of an abortion clinic for the lives of the unborn, just as in Nazi Germany the dean of Berlin Cathedral, Lichtenberg, died in 1943 in Gestapo custody simply for praying for persecuted Jews.
The same applies to gender madness, which convinces adolescents in the throes of puberty that they can change sex and pushes them, with assisted self-mutilation, into physical misery and lifelong psychological suffering. For this reason, every Catholic in the United States, and especially the episcopate, should be grateful to the Trump administration, because in the leading power of the free West, natural moral law, which is recognizable in the reason of every conscious human being as an ethical norm, is once again being taken as the foundation of state action.
Pope Leo XIV has recently made it clear that the conscience of Catholic politicians cannot be divided (in the sense of the false doctrine of double truth) into a private sphere, in which they obey God and follow the teachings of the Church of Christ, and a public sphere, in which they are governed by the logic of their parties’ power struggles. In both private and public life, Catholics are responsible to our conscience, in which God directly calls us to do good and avoid evil. We do not expect a secular government or the Catholics who work in it to promote Christianity as a supernatural faith in God’s revelation in Christ through state means or to lobby on behalf of the Church as an institution. But we do demand that every state base all its actions in administration, legislation and jurisprudence on natural moral law, the core of which is the inviolability of the dignity of every human person. And we are willing, as a Church as a whole and as individual Catholics in our professions and areas of responsibility, to collaborate in the construction of a just, free, social and supportive community, both in our own country and in the global community of peoples, as described by the Second Vatican Council in the pastoral constitution “The Church in the Modern World. Gaudium et Spes,” and as the social doctrine of the Church has guided us since Leo XIII.
Therefore, we follow Jesus’ words: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’ (Mt 22:21). But in case of conflict, the authentic interpretation of this word of Jesus by the supreme magisterium of St. Peter before the Sanhedrin prevails: ‘We must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5:29).
Cardinal Gerhard Müller
Compiled by Sandra Chisholm with files from Kath.net
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