Cardinal Müller on the Conclave

The Conclave took place in great harmony. Reality is always different from what is depicted in movies. God mercifully used the conscience and competence of the Sacred College of Cardinals of the Roman Church to elect Peter's successor. We believe in the Holy Spirit, who guides the Church of Christ. And we ask that same Spirit of God to strengthen the new Pope, Leo XIV, so that he may unite the Church in the confession of "Christ, the Son of the living God" (Mt 16:16).

His predecessor in name, Leo I the Great, wrote a famous letter to the Council of Chalcedon (451), in which he emphasized the inseparable unity and unconfused distinction of the divine and human natures in the person of the Son of God. This is the basis and foundation of the Catholic faith. With his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), Pope Leo XIII laid the foundations for the Social Doctrine of the Church, which, wherever it has been taken as a guide, has formed the foundation of a just and free modern society.

A brother of the new Pope, Martin Luther, unwittingly provoked division (1521) during the era of the bad popes of the Renaissance, during the pontificate of Leo X. We hope that the new Pope, who bears the same name and is also an Augustinian monk like Luther, will, 500 years later, collaborate—following in the footsteps of the good and holy popes of the past 250 years—in overcoming the divisions in Christianity and the tensions in the world, so that all Christians may be united in Christ, the Son of the living God, and that, with the help of the moral authority of the papacy, the peace of God may dwell in the hearts of men and that hatred and war may be overcome in the world.

May all Christians and people of good will accompany Pope Leo XIV with their prayers, so that his pontificate may be a blessing for the Church and the world.

Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller.