Says ‘no one believes everything’ Church teaches…
“It’s Nonsense”: German Novus Ordo Priest Brazenly Denies Virgin Birth Dogma in Public Interview
The social activist ‘worker priest’ Franz Meurer is pastor of a parish in Cologne
‘Father’ Franz Meurer (b. 1951) is a Novus Ordo priest in Cologne, Germany, in good standing with his archdiocese, which is headed by the supposedly conservative ‘Cardinal’ Rainer Maria Woelki.
Known for his social activism and care for the poor, Meurer has been the pastor of the hideous St. Theodore’s church in the city’s Vingst district since 1992. As can be seen here, the church, newly-built in the early 1990s, has all the architectural charm of a sewage treatment plant.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with a priest caring for the temporal needs of his fellow-men. After all, we are commanded to practice not only spiritual but also corporal works of mercy.
There is, however, a slight problem of a different sort with ‘Fr.’ Meurer: He does not believe in Roman Catholicism. For someone who claims to be a Catholic priest — and is recognized by his (Modernist-occupied) diocese as one — that is a problem indeed.
A Brazenly Candid Interview
Meurer does not seem to be shy about announcing his rejection of Catholicism to the world. He was being interviewed for his take after a prominent retired politician, Franz Müntefering (formerly the head of the Social Democrat Party), had stated publicly that he’s not sure he’s still welcome in the Catholic Church since he doesn’t believe in everything the Church teaches, especially not in such things as God, heaven, creation, sin — you know, the minor and secondary stuff (irony off).
The response Meurer gave was as shocking for its content as for its frankness:
What he [Muntefering] says is the most normal thing in the world. Everyone believes in something; no one believes in everything. For example, I do not believe, biologically, in the virgin birth — that’s just nonsense. But the virgin birth as a mythology, a narration meant to highlight something special, that’s something you will find in all religions.
And I would like to tell him, also, that the fundamental principle is that if you want a good man to do something evil, lead him to religion. Religion is the most dangerous thing there is in the world. All you have to do is watch the news, and you’ll see what religion is capable of: to incite wars, and so on and so forth. That is, one has to pick and choose.
And, secondly, faith is always a personal matter. Pope Benedict, the conservative, was asked by a child, how many paths to God there are. And thankfully, he answered correctly, “As many as there are people.”
(Rev. Franz Meurer in interview with Frank Überall, KiVVON, posted on Feb. 14, 2024; our translation.)
Later on in the same interview, Meurer was asked to confirm that Muntefering would still be welcome in the Catholic Church, then. To which the apostate pseudo-priest responded:
Well, he is still a Christian [sic]. Whether the Catholic, the Lutheran, or the Anglican Church — the Lord God laughs about that! The Lord God laughs about it.
By the way, we deal a lot with Muslims here — we Christians are in the minority here. There is something wonderful [stated] in the Koran: Just why did God permit the different religions in the first place? And the response [given] is: so that they would outdo each other in competing for [doing] good. And that, I think, is a wonderful thing.
For those who understand the language, here is the full interview as it was published on Kivvon, a new, Berlin-based social media platform for woke-friendly journalism:
By the way: In November of 2013, Meurer was in the news because he had announced that the following Sunday’s church collection would be used to help fund the building of a local mosque. (Such insanity was topped only in 2021 in Yola, Nigeria, where the diocese itself built the mosque!)
Putting Man before God
For Meurer, the chief purpose of religion apparently is, or at least ought to be, assisting others in their temporal needs and making one’s own life more bearable. Supernaturally-revealed truth has no place in his view of religion, nor does he care about the supernatural love of God.
He may think he loves his neighbor, but he does not love God, whom he has been commanded to love not only with his whole heart, soul, and strength, but also with all his mind (see Lk 10:27). Thus any good he does to his neighbor will be worthless before God, that is, it will have no supernatural merit, for “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb 11:6), and Faith he has none.
In order to love our neighbor rightly, our love must be animated by love for God and subordinated to the same. After all, the love of God is the first and greatest commandment; the love of neighbor is only the second greatest, albeit “like to” the first:
And Jesus answered him: The first commandment of all is, Hear, O Israel: the Lord thy God is one God. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength. This is the first commandment. And the second is like to it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is no other commandment greater than these.
(Mark 12:29-31)
Pope St. Pius X explained this very well in his 1910 Apostolic Letter against the Sillonist movement in France, which was portraying Christian charity as a mere natural love of neighbor, rather than a supernatural love for the sake of God:
We wish to draw your attention, Venerable Brethren, to this distortion of the Gospel and to the sacred character of Our Lord Jesus Christ, God and man, prevailing within the Sillon and elsewhere. As soon as the social question is being approached, it is the fashion in some quarters to first put aside the divinity of Jesus Christ, and then to mention only His unlimited clemency, His compassion for all human miseries, and His pressing exhortations to the love of our neighbor and to the brotherhood of men. True, Jesus has loved us with an immense, infinite love, and He came on earth to suffer and die so that, gathered around Him in justice and love, motivated by the same sentiments of mutual charity, all men might live in peace and happiness.
But for the realization of this temporal and eternal happiness, He has laid down with supreme authority the condition that we must belong to His Flock, that we must accept His doctrine, that we must practice virtue, and that we must accept the teaching and guidance of Peter and his successors. Further, whilst Jesus was kind to sinners and to those who went astray, He did not respect their false ideas, however sincere they might have appeared. He loved them all, but He instructed them in order to convert them and save them.
Whilst He called to Himself in order to comfort them, those who toiled and suffered, it was not to preach to them the jealousy of a chimerical equality. Whilst He lifted up the lowly, it was not to instill in them the sentiment of a dignity independent from, and rebellious against, the duty of obedience. Whilst His heart overflowed with gentleness for the souls of good-will, He could also arm Himself with holy indignation against the profaners of the House of God, against the wretched men who scandalized the little ones, against the authorities who crush the people with the weight of heavy burdens without putting out a hand to lift them. He was as strong as he was gentle. He reproved, threatened, chastised, knowing, and teaching us that fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body.
Finally, He did not announce for future society the reign of an ideal happiness from which suffering would be banished; but, by His lessons and by His example, He traced the path of the happiness which is possible on earth and of the perfect happiness in heaven: the royal way of the Cross. These are teachings that it would be wrong to apply only to one’s personal life in order to win eternal salvation; these are eminently social teachings, and they show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism.
(Pope St. Pius X, Apostolic Letter Notre Charge Apostolique; underlining added.)
He who subordinates the love of neighbor to the love of God understands what Christ meant when He instructed His disciples: “He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me” (Mt 10:37).
Responding to Meurer’s Remarks
So ‘Father’ Meurer does not believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ because he believes it is “Quatsch” (“nonsense”). That is merely a testimony to his unbelief, and thus he incriminates himself, certainly not God or the Church. There is no reason why He who created the world out of nothing, divided the Red Sea, rained Manna from heaven, transfigured Himself on Mount Tabor, and passed through His own closed tomb and locked doors with His glorified Body, should not be able to be born of a perpetual Virgin.
For a thorough explanation and defense of the dogma that the Mother of God, Mary Most Holy, remained a Virgin even in the physical-biological sense before, during, and after the birth of her Divine Son, please see the following post:
In 649, a synod held at the Lateran Palace in Rome declared the following with the approval of Pope St. Martin I, then reigning:
If anyone does not properly and truly confess in accord with the holy Fathers, that the holy Mother of God and ever Virgin and immaculate Mary in the earliest of the ages conceived of the Holy Spirit without seed, namely, God the Word Himself specifically and truly, who was born of God the Father before all ages, and that she incorruptibly bore [Him], her virginity remaining indestructible even after His birth, let him be condemned.
(Lateran Synod, Canon 3; Denz. 256)
Of course Meurer doesn’t care about this — it is “nonsense” to him. It would be useless to cite further magisterial evidence against him, since he refuses to believe. But, as Holy Writ warns us: “Whosoever revolteth, and continueth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that continueth in the doctrine, the same hath both the Father and the Son” (2 Jn 9); “He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be condemned” (Mk 16:16).
By reinterpreting the dogma of the Virgin Birth/Perpetual Virginity as a nice mythological story with no claim to being true, Meurer reveals he is a classical Modernist. In fact, the Jesuit theologian Fr. José de Aldama (1903-1980) noted that the dogma of the Virginal Maternity of Our Lady is denied, among other heretics, precisely by…
…Rationalists and Modernists who, having an abhorrence for anything supernatural, say that the Catholic doctrine about the virginal maternity was introduced in the 2nd century because of the influence of the teachings of the docetists…, or is some kind of myth or legend to which [Modernist Hugo] Koch assigned various [made-up] stages.
(Rev. Joseph A. de Aldama, Sacrae Theologiae Summa IIIA: On the Blessed Virgin Mary [#CommissionLink], n. 105; italics given.)
The Modernist, however, does not ‘merely’ deny this particular dogma, or even a certain set of dogmas. Rather, Modernists subvert and destroy the very concept of dogma — they pervert what dogma even is.
Thus we find the following error condemned by St. Pius X in his Syllabus of Modernist Errors: “The dogmas which the Church professes as revealed are not truths fallen from heaven, but they are a kind of interpretation of religious facts, which the human mind by a laborious effort prepared for itself” (Error No. 22; Denz. 2022).
It would seem that by denying the Virgin Birth, Meurer believes that Jesus Christ is not truly God but rather the biological son of St. Joseph. That is heresy and blasphemy, from which countless other heresies and blasphemies flow.
But then, Meurer made clear what he thinks of religion in general: “…if you want a good man to do something evil, lead him to religion. Religion is the most dangerous thing there is in the world. All you have to do is watch the news….” As if Marxist atheists had never started wars or bloody revolutions!
Apparently for Meurer, man without religion is (or can be) good, but then religion comes along and corrupts him, at least potentially. Such diabolical inversion of the truth illustrates what spirit informs Meurer’s conscience, and it’s not the Holy Spirit.
It is precisely because humanity found itself enslaved to sin, to the devil, with a strong inclination to do what is wrong, that our Lord Jesus Christ came to redeem it!
For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting. For God sent not his Son into the world, to judge the world, but that the world may be saved by him. He that believeth in him is not judged. But he that doth not believe, is already judged: because he believeth not in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the judgment: because the light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the light: for their works were evil.
(John 3:16-19)
Our Lord reminded the Pharisees that “[f]rom within out of the heart of men proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and defile a man” (Mk 7:21-23). It is no wonder, therefore, that “Jesus did not trust himself unto them, for that he knew all men, and because he needed not that any should give testimony of man: for he knew what was in man” (Jn 2:24-25).
As regards Meurer’s excited quoting of ‘Pope’ Benedict XVI, who allegedly said that there are as many ways to God as there are people, we don’t doubt he really did say it. The Lord Jesus, however, taught a different Gospel: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me” (Jn 14:6). And that is precisely what the Apostles preached: “This is the stone which was rejected by you the builders, which is become the head of the corner. Neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:11-12).
The apostate presbyter from Cologne may think God laughs about it all, but the true religion was no laughing matter for the martyrs who willingly and lovingly endured even the most cruel deaths rather than give up one iota of the divinely revealed truth — including martyrs that were killed by Lutherans and Anglicans and other Protestants, we might add. St. Thomas More, St. John Fisher, St. Fidelis of Sigmaringen, and Bl. Edmund Campion come to mind immediately.
Meurer’s happy agreement with the Koran’s apparent teaching that God allows many different religions so they would compete about who could do the most good, again shows that the man is a Modernist, an Indifferentist, a Naturalist. For him, religion is not about anything supernatural, it’s about making the world a better place. That is entirely compatible with Bergoglio’s ‘Gospel of Man’, according to which the “pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings” (Document on Human Fraternity, Feb. 4, 2019).
It seems, however, that Meurer has entangled himself in a contradiction. At first he says religion is the most dangerous thing in the world, as it has the capability of making a good man bad, and then he ends by saying that he agrees with the testimony of the Muslim ‘holy’ book, the Koran, that God allowed many different religions so that they would compete with each other for doing the most good.
A Formal — Not Material — Heretic
Meurer’s remarks reveal that he is a heretic in the proper sense (actually, an apostate, but apostasy differs from heresy only in degree, not in kind). He has no Faith and does not really believe in the supernatural. He is a Modernist, an Indifferentist, and a Naturalist.
Let us be clear, then, that we are not talking about material heresy here but formal heresy. The man is not innocently mistaken about a point of dogma; he is consciously and willingly rejecting what he knows the Church to be teaching. He is a formal heretic, therefore, and no official declaration or Church judgment is needed to know that. Why? Because his pertinacity — the deliberate will to contradict a defined dogma of the Church — is manifestly present. The man shouts his pertinacity from the rooftops, so to speak. Just as no official certificate of death from the coroner’s office is needed to know that a man whose body has been visibly decaying for days is dead, neither is an official ecclesiastical declaration needed to know that Meurer is not a Catholic.
His assertion that no one believes everything [the Church teaches], and his explicit exhortation to pick and choose (in German, “eine Auswahl treffen”, “to make a selection”), could not reveal his heretical depravity any more clearly. The word heresy comes from the Greek haíresis, defined as an “act of taking, choice, course of action or thought, system of principles, sect, faction,” from haireîn “to take, grasp, (middle voice) obtain, choose, prefer” (see Merriam-Webster dictionary here).
A heretic, then, is someone who picks and chooses what dogmas he will believe. As such, he does not possess the virtue of Faith and therefore does not believe (in the proper sense of the word) anything at all. The reason is that the virtue of divine Faith is the ready assent to what God has revealed for the reason that the all-knowing and all-truthful God has revealed it. Such true Faith is supernatural and requires God’s assistance (actual grace). Genuine Faith, therefore, is a true gift from our Lord.
Faith by its very nature is all-or-nothing because if the motive of our assent is the fact that it is God who has revealed a certain truth to us, who can neither deceive nor be deceived, then it is impossible that we could withhold our assent from some of it, without contradicting this motive. And so, because Faith is all or nothing, heresy — the picking and choosing of what one will assent to — is inherently incompatible with it.
He who, like ‘Fr.’ Meurer, knowingly and stubbornly denies even just a single dogma thereby manifests that he does not have divine Faith at all, because he makes clear that he assents to dogma not because God has revealed it, but for some other, insufficient motive — usually because he finds it to be reasonable, convenient, or in conformity with his socio-political outlook, etc.
With this in mind, we can now better understand what Pope Leo XIII taught regarding Faith and heresy:
The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine: they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. “There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition” (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).
The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. “No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic” (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88).
(Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Satis Cognitum, n. 9)
Pope Benedict XV gave a pithy summary of the matter in his inaugural encyclical letter, as follows:
Such is the nature of Catholicism that it does not admit of more or less, but must be held as a whole or as a whole rejected: “This is the Catholic faith, which unless a man believe faithfully and firmly; he cannot be saved” (Athanas. Creed). There is no need of adding any qualifying terms to the profession of Catholicism: it is quite enough for each one to proclaim “Christian is my name and Catholic my surname,” only let him endeavour to be in reality what he calls himself.
(Pope Benedict XV, Encyclical Ad Beatissimi, n. 24)
Despite his manifest heresy, Meurer seems to have an affable personality, and his pleasant regional accent surely helps him in that regard. Such qualities make him all the more dangerous, however, precisely because he comes across as a nice fellow — much like poison is more likely to be swallowed if mixed in with honey than with vinegar.
St. Paul’s warning applies eminently to this apostate devil from Cologne:
For such false apostles are deceitful workmen, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no wonder: for Satan himself transformeth himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers be transformed as the ministers of justice, whose end shall be according to their works.
(2 Corinthians 11:13-15)
Let no one say we weren’t put on notice!
Image source: kivvon.com (screenshot)
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