VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter
Robert Mickens | Jun. 2, 2014
ANALYSIS
ROME Cardinal Gerhard Müller enjoys recounting a humorous episode that occurred some months ago when Pope Francis stopped into the office Müller heads, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The pope immediately noted a small statue in the entrance hall, which depicts a bishop in full regalia sitting on a horse and holding aloft the Blessed Sacrament in a gold monstrance.
“I sat in a saddle like that for six hours,” Müller told the pope, alluding to the 600-year-old annual Pentecost Ride he sometimes led when he was bishop in Bavaria. With a chuckle, Francis replied: “The poor horse!”
Unfortunately, there’s also a dark side to this lighthearted humor. Horses aren’t the only ones that have had to bear the heavy weight of the 66-year-old Müller. Most recently, he came down hard on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the largest and oldest of the two associations of nuns in the United States, during a meeting with its leaders April 30 in Rome. But many and varied are the Catholic clerics (even a few cardinals), religious and laity who have gotten pressure from this Joseph Ratzinger protégé in the little less than two years he has been in charge of what was once called the Holy Office.
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