Cardinal Gerhard Müller said the new Pontiff will work to heal the divisions between conservatives and progressives.
By Catholic for Catholics
After weeks of speculation and fears that a Francis-stacked conclave full of his hand-picked Cardinals was going to elect a progressive Pope, conservatives and traditionalists have reasons to be hopeful.
According to a story in Newsmax, the election of Pope Leo XIV brings conservatives some hopes that he will bring a new doctrinal strictness to the chair of St. Peter. This, despite the sense among progressives that he will continue with Francis’ reformist outline.
Among those conservative Cardinals who said he was pleased with Pope Leo’s election was Gerhard Müller, who told the Associated Press that he expected the new Pontiff to heal the church divisions that escalated during Francis’ papacy. Francis fired Müller as the church’s doctrinal chief and went on to clamp down on the traditional Latin Mass.
Müller believes Leo will restore the Latin Mass to the place where Pope Benedict placed it during his papacy.
“I am convinced that he will overcome these superfluous tensions (which were) damaging for the church,” Müller said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We cannot avoid all the conflicts, but we have to avoid the not necessary conflicts, the superfluous conflicts.”
The Newsmax story said that Müller’s hopes are significant, since the conservative cardinals went into the Conclave completely outnumbered, since Francis, who is considered by traditionalists as a progressive, appointed 108 liberal cardinals of the 133 electors.
Still, in the internecine underlying forces of the conclave, Leo, a Chicago native who became an Augustinian missionary in Peru, garnered much more than the two thirds majority that were needed to win the papacy in the fourth ballot.
“I think it was a good impression of him to everybody, and in the end, it was a great concordia, a great harmony,” Müller said. “There was no polemics, no fractionizing.”
Muller spoke to the Associated Press in his apartment library, located just off of St. Peter’s Square. He said that Francis’ suppression of the growing traditionalist movement and the Tridentine Mass provoked divisions in the church that Leo knows he must heal.
For centuries, the Latin Mass was the liturgy the Church used, but during the Vatican II Council it was substituted for the Novus Ordo, with the Mass in the vernacular and with different rites. Pope Benedict restored the Latin Mass and allowed any priest who wanted to say it to do so, but Francis cracked down on it, saying it was creating divisions within the church.
“We cannot absolutely condemn or forbid the legitimate right and form of the Latin liturgy,” Müller said. “According to his character, I think (Leo) is able to speak with people and to find a very good solution that is good for everybody.”
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