By Francis X. Rocca
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis removed U.S. Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, 66, as head of the Vatican’s highest court and named him to a largely ceremonial post for a chivalric religious order.
Cardinal Burke, formerly prefect of the Apostolic Signature, will now serve as cardinal patron of the Knights and Dames of Malta, the Vatican announced Nov. 8.
It is highly unusual for a pope to remove an official of Cardinal Burke’s stature and age without assigning him comparable responsibilities elsewhere. By church law, cardinals in the Vatican must offer to resign at 75, but often continue in office for several more years. As usual when announcing personnel changes other than retirements for reasons of age, the Vatican did not give a reason for the cardinal’s reassignment.
A prominent devotee of the traditional liturgy and outspoken defender of traditional doctrine on controversial moral issues, Cardinal Burke had appeared increasingly out of step with the current pontificate.
In December 2013, Pope Francis did not reappoint him to his position on the Congregation for Bishops, which advises the pope on episcopal appointments.
Cardinal Burke expressed frustration, in a February 2014 article in the Vatican newspaper, that many Americans thought Pope Francis intended to change Catholic teaching on certain “critical moral issues of our time,” including abortion and same-sex marriage, because of the pope’s stated belief that “it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”
Insisting that the pope had “clearly affirmed the church’s moral teaching, in accord with her unbroken tradition,” Cardinal Burke blamed perceptions to the contrary on “false praise” of Pope Francis by “persons whose hearts are hardened against the truth.”
After Pope Francis invited German Cardinal Walter Kasper to address a meeting of the world’s cardinals in February, Cardinal Burke emerged as a leading opponent of Cardinal Kasper’s proposal to make it easier for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive Communion.
Cardinal Burke also warned that efforts to streamline the marriage annulment process — the mandate of a commission that the pope established in August — should not undermine the process’ rigor.
During the Oct. 5-19 Synod of Bishops on the family, Cardinal Burke was one of the most vocal critics of a midterm report that used remarkably conciliatory language toward people with ways of life contrary to Catholic teaching, including those in same-sex unions and other non-marital relationships. The day the report was released, the cardinal told an American reporter that a statement from Pope Francis reaffirming traditional doctrine on those matters was “long overdue.”
Cardinal Burke made the news again late in October when he told a Spanish journalist that many Catholics “feel a bit of seasickness, because it seems to them that the ship of the church has lost its compass. The cause of this disorientation must be put aside. We have the constant tradition of the church, the teachings, the liturgy, morals. The catechism does not change.”
A former archbishop of St. Louis, Cardinal Burke was named by Pope Benedict XVI to lead the Apostolic Signature in June 2008. At the time of his dismissal, he was the highest-ranking U.S. bishop at the Vatican. That distinction now belongs to Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, adjunct secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The new head of the Apostolic Signature is French Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, formerly secretary for relations with states, the Vatican’s equivalent of a foreign minister.
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God Bless Cardinal Burke for his courage!! We need more clergy like him!!! Unfortunately he is pushed aside for standing up for the Truth and for Our Lord Jesus Christ
I am 71 and been a Catholic all my life. For the first time, My faith in a pope has been shaken. Pope Francis’ statements and direction are instilling a bad feeling in me because I feel they are adverse to God’s clear intentions in creating a male and female, the special unity in marriage, and consequences resulting when couples do not marry, or they separate and go with another partner.
God also made His feeling clear about deviation from the intended male-female relationships including same-sex relationships. The Sodom and Gomorrah coverage in the Bible further God’s dissatisfaction with such behavior.
Although I would never consider leaving the Catholic Church, I have serious reservations about following the guidance of this pope.
I have full confidence that the Church will maintain its teaching in a coherent way regarding what Rocca calls ‘traditional doctrine on controversial moral matters’. Burke’s teaching is not his personal perspective emphasising his own moral stance but is a coherent extrapolation of what the Church has always held. Quite simply if another wishes to enter the discussion with the same depth of understanding of Church teaching he or she merely has to clearly explain in line with what the Church has always held, which is coherent with Divine Revelation, whether those who are validly married are not in a state of adultery when they take another sexual partner apart from their spouse, whether Jesus is not present sacramental in the Eucharist or whether marriage is not the indissoluble state the Church says it is in which case we can make of it what we like. What Burke’s opponents are trying to tell us that the right to have sexual Union according to the depth of our feeling is the only way for an individual not to feel oppressed by the Church. In a nutshell that is what it comes down too…the freedom of sexual expression…but Christian love is utterly different from that I that sexual love is ordered to spousal love only apart from that there is no other context of sexual act that is valid. Christianity is chastity and that is the embarrassing elephant in the room of western libertinism….
Oh that there were many more faithful and courageous servants of God like Cardinal Burke to helm this increasingly storm-tossed Church of ours (sadly, the “storms” are mostly of our own making) that is drifting dangerously in the direction of religious relativism and (false) ecumenism.