Catholic cardinal Gerhard Müller has cited homosexuality as the source of the church’s child sexual abuse scandal. Müller, who was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, voiced his homophobic rhetoric in an interview with a far-right Catholic website LifeSite.

Müller’s comments were in reference to the resignation of another cardinal – Theodore McCarrick – who was accused of sexually abusing boys earlier this summer:

“That McCarrick, together with his clan and a homosexual network, was able to wreak havoc in a mafia-like manner in the Church is connected with the underestimation of the moral depravity of homosexual acts among adults.”

Müller went on to make a series of statements in which he linked same-sex attraction with mental illness:

“In my view, there do not exist [sic] homosexual men or even priests. God has created the human being as man and woman.”

The Catholic cardinal continued:

“But there can be men and women with disordered passions. Sexual communion has its place exclusively in the marriage between a man and a woman.”

Finally, the cardinal added that homosexuality itself counts as a form of abuse:

“Outside, there is only fornication and abuse of sexuality, both either with persons of the opposite sex or in the unnatural intensification of sin with persons of the same sex.”

Müller’s recent comments emerge as a larger part of a rhetoric in the Catholic Church in which homosexuality is demonised as the root cause of the church’s history of child sexual abuse. Raymond Burke, a US cardinal who served as the head of the Apostolic Signatura conflated homosexuality with paedophilia in 2014:

“It was clear after the studies following the 2002 sexual abuse crisis that most of the acts of abuse were, in fact, homosexual acts committed with adolescent young men.”

In September, Bishop Marian Eleganti said on Facebook that the sexual abuse of underage boys by 300 priests in Pennsylvania was “related to homosexuality”.