Cardinal Gerhard Müller recently denounced “neo-socialist wokism” and warned against efforts to reduce the Catholic Church to a mere “humanitarian organization,” according to a detailed report based on a transcript of his remarks published by AdVaticanum.
Earlier this week at the Sturzo Institute in Rome, the former prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith linked the sufferings of the early Christian martyrs to modern ideologies hostile to the Catholic faith, such as Nazism, communism, “political Islamism,” and “the neo-socialist wokism of our times.”
Regarding contemporary Western Christianity, Müller criticized those who confuse the faith with Enlightenment achievements in an attempt to avoid the “scandal” of the Cross.
“Some Christians in the West, unfortunately, still confuse their faith with the achievements of the Enlightenment, thinking they can circumvent the scandal and shame of the cross that the evidence of faith evokes in people today, by defining Christianity merely as a phenomenon arising from bourgeois Christian civilization, with humanist and immanentist aims,” he stated.
The German cardinal warned that such a reduction would leave the Church deserving “recognition by any state or institution only as a humanitarian aid organization,” an idea “cherished and often promoted by certain news networks.”
In contrast, he affirmed, “the Church of Christ, however, has as the sole goal of its journey through time to follow God in Jesus Christ, the Teacher and Lord who is despised, persecuted, and shamefully executed as a criminal of the world.”
‘We cannot be a good Catholic and accept the Woke Ideology’
The remarks serve to reaffirm themes Cardinal Mūller has been emphasizing in public addresses in recent years. In a March 2024 interview, he slammed synodal efforts that seek “to change the Church to another worldly health organization like an NGO.” In a November 2025 homily he declared: “The Catholic Church neither is nor may become an NGO, a religious social organization directed to the earthly paradise.”
He has repeatedly linked such trends to “woke ideology.” In an November 2024 essay he accused synodal factions of seeking to make Catholic teaching compatible with a “neo-gnostic woke ideology” and of subordinating the Church to worldly projects such as Agenda 2030.
In October, he stated there is “no place for rainbow flags in the Church” and criticized the German Synodal Way for focusing on “this modern ideology of wokism” rather than Christ.
Earlier, in 2023, he described the German Synodal Way as “worse than schism” because it has abandoned “the very essence of Christianity” for a “materialistic and nihilistic woke culture,” and he stated plainly last year, “We cannot be a good Catholic and be a Communist … or accept the Woke Ideology.”