Cardinal Brandmüller on German Catholics' Calls for Reform as "Insult to Jesus Christ"

Cardinal Walter Brandmüller

In the German paper Spiegel, Frank Hornig, Anna Loll, Ulrich Schwarz, and Peter Wensierski report that when Bundestag President Norbert Lammert and Education Minister Annette Schavan recently sent a letter to German bishops along with other reform-minded Catholics calling for open dialogue about the requirement that priests be celibate, Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, a close associate of Pope Benedict, responded by saying that the letter was "an insult to Jesus Christ."

And I wonder, as I always do when top Catholic prelates try this ploy of equating themselves or the pope with God, when they claim they are an alter Christus being crucified by Catholics calling for reform: I wonder when the memo went out to faithful Catholics about all of this.  When did someone die and turn the pope into Christ?  

I seem not to have gotten that memo.  And so I think I'll go on assuming that the pope is not God, and that no earthly ruler (including the inimitable Mr. Rick Perry) is God.

Because I have decided a long time ago that my salvation and the salvation of many others--the salvation of the planet itself--does not lie in the hands of these ruling men who want us to imagine they are God.  Or the perfect reflection of God.  Or placed over us by a God who is made in their image.

My salvation lies, I have long since decided, with a God who stands against all these types of men.

P.S. For valuable background reading about what's happening in German Catholicism now, don't miss Bart's recent posting at Terry Weldon's outstanding Queering the Church blog.