Cadinal Burke transferred

Pope Francis’ transfer of Cardinal Raymond Burke from being the Vatican’s “chief justice” to a mere cardinal-protector of the Knights of Malta, has intensified yet more irresponsible talk of schism within the Catholic Church.

Nov 20, 2014

By Robert Mickens
Pope Francis’ transfer of Cardinal Raymond Burke from being the Vatican’s “chief justice” to a mere cardinal-protector of the Knights of Malta, has intensified yet more irresponsible talk of schism within the Catholic Church.And top prize for the person most responsible for being irresponsible goes to none other than the man wearing the long red train. Yes, to Burke himself.

In an interview with the news site Breitbart. com just days before he was officially removed as prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the 66-year-old American cardinal again stoked the fires. He said that if bishops, in the months leading to next year’s second gathering of the Synod of Bishops on the family, were seen to move “contrary to the constant teaching and practice of the Church, there is a risk [of schism] because these are unchanging and unchangeable truths.”

In the same interview, he urged Catholics to “speak up and act.”

If you look a bit more closely at the cardinal’s surprisingly fast advancement up the hierarchical ladder, as well as the groups with which he’s been most associated, you’ll understand which Catholics he’s talking about.

Raymond Burke studied theology in Rome, where Pope Paul VI ordained him to the priesthood in 1975. He returned to his home diocese of La Crosse, Wis., and did a couple of years of chancery work and assisting at the cathedral before returning to Rome to get a doctorate in canon law. He then did another few years of chancery work and teaching in the diocese before being called to the Vatican in 1989 to work in the Apostolic Signatura. Five years later, at only 46 years old, Pope John Paul II appointed him bishop of La Crosse.

In the nine years as head of his home diocese, his credentials as a doctrinal conservative and his strange penchant for the pre-Second Vatican Council Mass became more and more pronounced. He reopened the diocese’s long-shuttered high school seminary, set about building a retrograde shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and helped establish a weird neo-Tridentine religious community that had a special indult to use the Old Rite. This was a full decade before Pope Benedict XVI would eventually grant unfettered use of the Tridentine Mass throughout the Church.

But already, Burke had established a strong connection with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, father of these so-called Ecclesia Dei Afflicta communities. They take their unofficial name from Pope John Paul II's 1988 motu proprio, which excommunicated Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the four bishops he illicitly ordained for his Society of St. Pius X. That document also appealed to Lefebvre’s adherents to return to Rome, and Ratzinger, from the start, was a major force in facilitating the establishment of what are now dozens of small communities that were given special permission to use the Old Mass and live practically as if Vatican II never happened.

It was the mantle that Burke would eventually assume when Ratzinger became pope, and Burke arrived for his new job in Rome in 2008, after serving just less than five disastrous and divisive years as the archbishop of St. Louis.

John Paul II, already old and feeble, had appointed him to St. Louis in 2003. And with Benedict XVI on St Peter’s cathedra two years later, Archbishop Burke became even more brazen and canonically rigid. Eventually, the German pope called him to Rome in a move many Vatican watchers wrongly described as a “promotion in order to remove” him (promoveatur ut amoveatur), a move that would decrease his power and prevent him from doing any further damage. Instead, he gained more authority and influence in Rome. Not only was he now effectively the church’s “chief justice” as head of its most important tribunal, but he was also made a cardinal in 2010. Benedict XVI named him a member of the Congregation for Bishops and the Congregation for Divine Worship, giving him a prominent say in who would be appointed to head dioceses around the world, and in all matters concerning the liturgy. Pope Francis removed him from the Congregation for Bishops, but he remains a member of the Congregation for Divine Worship.

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