Cardinal Joachim Meisner was a doctrinal conservative, and one of the four cardinals who signed the dubia questioning the orthodoxy of parts of Pope Francis's encyclical Amoris Laetitia. Hours after the conservative Cardinal Gerhard Müller phoned to let the older German cardinal know that Francis had cashiered him at the CDF, the Vatican's doctrinal office, Cardinal Meisner died. As Ross Douthat writes in his column this week, the death of Meisner was one of several events that removed significant opposition to Francis's agenda among conservatives at the senior level of the Catholic Church.
At Cardinal Meisner's funeral in Cologne today, a representative of the retired Pope Benedict XVI read a short message from him. (The original German statement is here.) It included this stunning paragraph:
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