VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis has dismissed the church’s chief of doctrine, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller — one of the most powerful cardinals at the Vatican — and appointed a Spanish archbishop to the role, the Vatican said on Saturday.

German conservative Mueller, 69, who served a five-year posting as head of the powerful department responsible for church doctrine, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), had clashed with the pope over key reform issues.

He was one of several cardinals who questioned Francis’s determination for the Catholic Church to take a softer line on people traditionally seen as “sinners”, including remarried divorced people who want to take communion.

Mueller had also been caught up in the controversy surrounding the church’s response to the clerical sex abuse scandal after his department was accused of obstructing Francis’s efforts to stop internal cover-ups of abuse.

“In space of three days, two leading Vatican cardinals out of their posts,” said Vatican watcher Christopher Lamb, after Vatican finance chief George Pell was charged with historical sexual assault this week.

The Vatican said Mueller’s five-year term would not be renewed and he would be replaced by CDF secretary Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, a 73-year-old Spaniard.

Ladaria was appointed to the CDF by former Pope Benedict in 2008, and was asked last year by Francis to head up a new papal commission studying the possibility of having women deacons in the Church.

Francis may not have liked the Mueller’s “excessive media exposure” and “interventions... that almost always sounded like he was distancing himself from the pope”, Vatican expert Andrea Tornielli wrote in the Vatican Insider.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2017