‘Typical intrigue’: Card. Müller responds to Pillar report

The former DDF prefect did not address reports he was ordered to repay hundreds of thousands of euros to his department following a ‘clerical error’

Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, has issued a series of statements following a report by The Pillar detailing a financial inspection and investigation of his former department in 2015.

The cardinal acknowledged that the Vatican department he had led kept “unusually large” amounts of cash in the office, but did not address reports of the large sums transferred into his personal bank account, or that Pope Francis ordered him to repay the funds.

Cardinal Gerhard Müller. Image via YouTube/University of Notre Dame.

The cardinal, who left office in 2017 following the decision by Pope Francis to not renew his five-year term of office, sent different statements in different languages to media outlets, though none directly to The Pillar.

Prior to publication of its original report, The Pillar sent detailed questions to Cardinal Müller, offering to hold publication pending any response the cardinal wished to make, but received no response. 

In an English-language statement, not originally sent to The Pillar, Cardinal Müller said his former department had “not lost a single penny” during his tenure, and called The Pillar’s report “artfully mounted, as in cheap investigative literature.” 

“I am very regretful that someone felt compelled to tell the relevant press organs an old story dating back to 2015, when I was at the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” said the statement, which was sent to various publications on Friday, August 2.

Müller said the events detailed in The Pillar’s report had “long since been clarified,” and the then-prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, Cardinal George Pell, had concluded “that the Congregation had never lost a single penny in the budget.”

“There are the papers to prove it,” the cardinal said. “To claim otherwise and speciously divulge it is to violate the Eighth Commandment.”

Only July 31, The Pillar reported that during an inspection of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith by the Secretariat for the Economy in 2015, secretariat officials discovered DDF officials attempting to remove several plastic bags containing tens of thousands of euros in cash from the office ahead of their inspection.

The Pillar also reported that hundreds of thousands of euros in cash were left to accumulate in the office of a single departmental official, without proper records kept of where it originated or how it was used.

The statements from Cardinal Müller did not address the attempt to remove bags of cash from the DDF offices immediately prior to an inspection, but said that an official whom he called “a figure of great rectitude and proven experience” had inventoried “in a somewhat confused way, we would say haphazardly compared to the standards later adopted,” incoming money related to the dicastery’s work.

The cardinal said that the funds were kept in a safe and, although the money “should have gone immediately into the congregation's accounts,” “there was never anything illegal about it.”

“He had kept an unusually large amount of cash, but he had not allowed the smallest part of the Congregation's assets to be lost,” said Müller. “And this is the truth.”

In a differently worded Spanish-language statement, printed in full by the website InfoVaticana, Müller said that “The resurfacing of this story, which was already clarified nine years ago, obviously has no informational purpose, but is clearly defamatory.”

In all of the statements seen so far by The Pillar, Cardinal Müller did not address The Pillar’s report that Vatican financial authorities had discovered large sums of departmental money in his personal bank accounts and that, following a report by the Office of the Auditor General and the Secretariat for the Economy, Pope Francis had ordered the cardinal to repay some 200,000 euros to the department.

The Pillar also reported, citing multiple sources familiar with the situation, that Müller had explained that the situation was the result of a “clerical error” involving account numbers. 

The cardinal did not address those reports in his statements.

Cardinal Müller separately told the German news agency DPA that The Pillar’s report amounted to “typical intrigue” and an “extraordinarily hurtful campaign,” which he said “falls on the conscience of those who use reputational damage as a means of their Church politics.”

In his English language statement, the cardinal said the events reported by The Pillar “[give] the reader, who does not have the totality of the information, the impression that I got rich with Church money. This is untrue, totally untrue and unrelated to any of my actions and convictions.”

Citing sources close to the Secretariat for the Economy, The Pillar reported that no evidence was discovered that Müller attempted to enrich himself with curial funds. 

Instead, The Pillar reported, officials concluded the attempt to remove large sums of cash from the DDF’s offices and the depositing of large sums of office money in the cardinal’s accounts were the result of a “panic” ahead of a possible financial inspection.

“I don’t think Cardinal Müller was looking to get rich from the dicastery,” The Pillar quoted a senior source close to the secretariat saying, “but I think the aim was to get all the cash, and it was a lot of cash, out of the office and out of sight.”

In his Spanish-language statement, Cardinal Müller claimed that The Pillar’s report, which cited independent sources across three Vatican departments, had been constructed to explain Pope Francis’ decision not to renew Müller’s term of office at the CDF in 2017. 

“Since we are often confronted with the question of why the former professor of theology of Munich and bishop of Regensburg, appointed by Pope Benedict XVI at the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was not re-elected in office after only five years, we have to build a financial scandal, as in a cheap detective novel,” Müller said.

The Pillar’s report cited sources close to the DDF, the Office of the Auditor General, and the Secretariat for the Economy, who all concluded that the results of the 2015 financial inspection could have led to Müller’s dismissal from office but that instead he was allowed to complete his five-year term.

“[Cardinal] Müller wasn’t fired, though perhaps strictly speaking he should have been,” a senior DDF official told The Pillar. “The politics of the day kept him from being removed; but the financial mess was substantially why he was not renewed in office.”

A senior Secretariat for the Economy official told The Pillar that in 2015, as broad curial financial reforms were getting underway, “there was a preference for ‘looking ahead not looking back.’” And that there was an understanding that even serious issues regarding financial administration were not dealt with by summary dismissal from office.

“If heads started rolling everywhere it would have made it harder to get people to come clean about where we really were,” The Pillar was told. Instead, the source said, it was “normal” for a cardinal to be moved on after evidence of maladministration.

“Generally speaking, when we [the secretariat] found a serious issue that couldn’t be overlooked, there was a default to the Roman tradition of ‘promoting to remove’ — this is what happened with [Cardinal] Becciu at the Secretariat of State. It wasn’t up to [the secretariat], but that’s often how it went.”

News reporting at the time of Müller’s departure suggested that the cardinal had turned down another Vatican role because, after leading the DDF, any other position would have appeared to be a demotion. 

Cardinal Müller said in 2017 that he had been given no explanation for Pope Francis’ decision not to renew his term of office, a situation he called “unacceptable.” 

Francis’ decision not to extend Müller’s term was widely interpreted as a reflection of theological differences between Müller and Francis.

One specific instance detailed in The Pillar’s report which Cardinal Müller did address directly in his English and Spanish language statements concerned the replacement of an antique conference table which was the centerpiece of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s main meeting hall, in which the members of the dicastery meet formally.

Citing sources in both the DDF and the Office of the Auditor General, The Pillar reported that the antique table had been disposed of by Müller, who gave it to an antique furniture restorer and dealer, allegedly a personal friend of the cardinal. In its place, the cardinal commissioned a modern table, priced at tens of thousands of euros.

Sources at both the DDF and the auditor general’s office told The Pillar this incident had been flagged because the antique table was the property of the Holy See, managed by APSA, and not the dicastery.

In his statement, Cardinal Müller said he had independently raised money for the new table and claimed he had APSA’s permission for the removal of the antique table, which he called “dilapidated,” though he did not address directly claims that it was given as a gift to a friend.

“I hope to have unraveled every aspect of this alleged mystery, shedding light in total transparency and honesty on what happened,” said Müller in the English-language statement seen by The Pillar. 

“I thank you for the opportunity to have been able to clarify everything.”