That commitment means that Burke will continue to push hard against the heart of Francis’ reformist approach, and that he will continue to be seen as, if not an enemy of the pope, at least his counterweight, and a favorite of those who would love to see the 68-year-old Burke one day succeed Francis, who turns 80 in December. That simply is not the case.”ĭuring the course of a half-hour conversation, Burke did continually return to his commitment “to simply speak up to defend what the church has always taught and practiced.” The cardinal said that his own critics - his outspokenness has left no shortage of those - “would like to construe my relationship with the Holy Father as some kind of ongoing hostility or war between this reform of the church, this revolutionary reform (that Francis is promoting), and these old die-hards who resist it. ![]() “I’ve said to the pope himself, in conversations with him - and these by the way are friendly conversations - I told him, ‘Holy Father, the only way I can serve you is by speaking the truth in the best and clearest way possible.’ His response to me is: ‘That’s what I want.’” “I have never, in anything I’ve said, shown disrespect to the papal office, because the Catholic Church doesn’t exist without the office of Peter,” he said, referring to the apostle who Catholic tradition views as the first bishop of Rome and therefore the first pope in an unbroken succession up to the present day. I have never been and I am not presently the enemy of the pope,” Burke told RNS by telephone recently from his home state of Wisconsin, where he was spending time this summer. People call me ‘the enemy of the pope’ and so forth. He even praises Saint Pius X, the pope who a century ago was famous for his campaign to expunge the heresy of “Modernism” from the church - errors that the cardinal says “are still current.”īut Francis is mentioned only in passing, which seems just fine by Burke. Throughout the extended interview with French journalist Guillaume d’Alancon, which was published under the title, “Hope for the World: To Unite All Things in Christ,” Burke approvingly and frequently cites Saint John Paul II, the pope who named him a bishop back in 1995, and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who brought him to Rome in 2008 and made him a cardinal two years later. Notably absent from the book, however, and from direct criticism, is Francis himself. The cardinal also has a provocative new take on Islam, which he said “wants to govern the world.” The reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s are also a recurrent target, as he again champions a return to the old Latin Mass and voices nostalgia for the Catholicism of his boyhood (Burke says that he first felt a tug to the priesthood at the age of 8). ![]() He did that again most recently in a book-length interview in which he hits many of the themes that have drawn attention in the past: critiquing “radical feminism” and homosexuality (“a wounding of nature,” he calls it) as well as the “secularization” and moral relativism that he says have infected society and the Catholic Church. ![]() ![]() Louis who has a devoted following among conservatives, has continued to use his Roman platform to speak his mind. Ever since Pope Francis was elected in March 2013, he has faced strong opposition from traditionalists unhappy with his push for church reforms - and the face of that opposition has often been Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American prelate who has worked in senior positions in Rome for most of the past decade.įrancis eventually moved Burke out of key Vatican jobs and into a more ceremonial post as patron to the Knights of Malta, an apparent downgrade that both Burke and the pope insist wasn’t tied to the cardinal’s criticisms.īut Burke, a former archbishop of St.
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