Cardinal Gerhard Müller kicked off a multiweek North American tour Sept. 12 at Montreal’s McGill University with a lecture that performed an end run round the standard faith versus science debate.

Citing Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins and Yuval Noah Harari, the former Cardinal-Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith (CDF) told the mixed crowd of students, academics and clerics that he proposed “to do almost exactly the opposite of what I have been asked to do: I should like to speak about the purported link between atheism and science.”

“If the narrative that I tell about the origins of modern atheism is true, then it will constitute a powerful challenge to the regrettably widespread prejudice that claims atheism is a natural corollary of the scientific method.”

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The organizer of Müller’s Canadian visit says this muscular approach will set the tone for the tour. Msgr. Hans Feichtinger told The Catholic Register that Müller, in a manner not dissimilar to his friend the late Pope Benedict XVI, advocates an intellectually rigorous faith. 

Müller proposes a “robustly Catholic understanding of what faith, revelation and theology are and of what they communicate, bestow, demand and promise, culminating in nothing less than eternal life,” said Feichtinger.

Now the pastor of two Ottawa parishes and adjunct professor at Saint Paul University, Feichtinger worked for eight years as an official at the Holy Office.

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Though this was Müller’s first visit to Montreal, he has been to Canada before, delivering the keynote for the 2017 Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute conference in Toronto where, in a prescient talk, given in the wake of the Canadian decriminalization of euthanasia in 2015, Müller effectively predicted the subsequent examples of medical aid in dying (MAiD) being offered to socially disadvantaged individuals.

“Legalization creates toxic and deadly social pathologies that disproportionately afflict the weakest members of society,” said Müller.

Since leaving the CDF in 2017, Müller has written and spoken widely on the widespread secularization of the West, the danger of a new totalitarianism emerging from a de-Christianized ruling class and what it means to be a Catholic in the middle of the ruined vestiges of a Christian culture.

In 2023, Müller published True and False Reform: What it Means to be Catholic. In it, Müller warns against what he calls “ideological viruses and ecclesiological pandemics,” suggests moving “beyond traditionalism and progressivism” and advocates that Catholics take their “bearings solely from God’s truth in the Gospel of Christ. This is the word of God in Sacred Scripture and the Apostolic Tradition, especially in the Creed and the Divine Liturgy, and in the binding witness and interpretation of it by the Church’s Magisterium.”

The Archbishop Emeritus of Regensburg will spend five days in Canada. From Montreal, he travels to Ottawa where he will deliver two public talks and celebrate three pontifical Masses. 

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Müller will then go to the United States where he has speaking engagements in New York City, Philadelphia and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. 

In a trip the Cardinal likens to a missionary tour, Feichtinger says that “the key insight he is driving home in multiple ways is that fidelity to the Gospel and to the Catholic tradition is key for evangelization.”