According to reports, Pope Francis is evicting the American cardinal from his home in the Vatican
Almost as soon as Pope Francis became head of the Roman Catholic Church in 2013, Raymond Burke, an American cardinal, emerged as his chief critic within the church, becoming a de facto counterpope to frustrated traditionalists who believed that Francis’s teachings watered down.
Francis has regularly demoted and stripped the American cleric of his influence, but this month the pope apparently finally had enough, according to a senior Vatican official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Francis told a meeting of senior Vatican officials that he planned to throw the cardinal out of his Vatican-subsidized apartment and strip him of his salary as a retired cardinal.
News of the possible deportation was first reported by the conservative Italian newspaper La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, which is close to Cardinal Burke and recently sponsored a conference in which the prelate criticized a major meeting of bishops called by Francis. The newspaper’s report comes just weeks after Francis removed another outspoken conservative critic, Joseph Strickland, the bishop of Tyler, Texas, following a Vatican investigation into the governance of his diocese.
“If this is true, it is an atrocity that must be opposed,” Bishop Strickland said in a tweet on Tuesday. “If it is false information, it must be corrected immediately.”
The Vatican has not corrected this. When asked about the report on Tuesday, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni refused to confirm or deny it, telling reporters: “I have nothing specific to say about that.”
He said questions about the report should be directed to Cardinal Burke. An email to Cardinal Burke’s secretary was not returned.
Francis told the heads of Vatican offices last week about his decision to punish Cardinal Burke for being a source of “divisiveness” in the church, according to The Associated Press, which based its report on an unnamed official who called the meeting attended. Another official told the AP that Francis later explained that he had revoked Cardinal Burke’s privileges because he was using them in his campaign against the church.
Corriere della Sera, Italy’s largest daily newspaper, also confirmed the report of the possible expulsion with an anonymous prelate, who told the newspaper that the pope planned to take “measures of an economic nature and canonical punishments” against Cardinal Burke.
Some conservatives have attributed Francis’ disciplinary activities to the new head of the church’s Office of Ecclesiastical Doctrine, Argentine Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández. But Francis’ supporters argue that he has shown wonderful patience with criticism over the past decade, in the interest of sparking healthy debates. in a direction that traditionalists did not support.
Cardinal Burke has seen himself as a loyal defender of the church’s doctrinal laws and papal traditions against what he has called the “confusion, error and division” caused by Francis.
In the days leading up to a major gathering of the world’s bishops and laity gathered to discuss some of the church’s most sensitive topics, Cardinal Burke and other traditionalist prelates made public an exchange of letters with Francis. In the letters, they expressed serious doubts about the legitimacy of the meeting and urged Francis to slam the door on proposals they believe would erode church teaching, including the blessing of homosexual relationships.
Then Cardinal Burke recently sat on stage at a theater in Rome and protested at a forum sponsored by La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana against a meeting that has the “harmful purpose” of reforming the Church’s hierarchy with radical, secular and modern ideas that include inclusivity. of LGBTQ people.
“It is unfortunately very clear that the invocation of the Holy Spirit by some aims to advance an agenda that is more political and human than ecclesiastical and divine,” he said at the time.
Cardinal Burke, a favorite of Benedict Unlike Francis, who preferred more modest priests, Cardinal Burke occasionally wore a long train of watered-down silk, velvet gloves and extravagant brocades, which once led to Vatican officials asking him to “slow it down a bit.” .
On issues the two are far apart. Cardinal Burke opposed immigration as a threat to the West’s Christian values, strongly opposed Francis’ softening on gay issues and church law, and played a role in populist politics in Italy and beyond. He became a hero to the ‘Rad Trads’, or radical traditionalists.
For a vocal faction of conservative Catholics in the United States, the efforts to rein in Cardinal Burke are a signal that Francis is disproportionately cracking down on dissidents on his right.
“For him to be evicted from his apartment is a cruel act,” said Michael Hichborn, president of the Lepanto Institute, a conservative Catholic organization based in Virginia.
Other American observers described Cardinal Burke as a cleric who has consistently used his large platform, especially in the United States, to undermine Francis’ goals for the church. This year, in the foreword to a book criticizing the pope’s major global meeting on the future of the church, he wrote that the event could lead to schism.
“This is like accusing the president of sedition,” said David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University and a commentator on Catholic issues. “They are the most serious charges you can make against the Pope or any Catholic.”
Over the past decade, Cardinal Burke, 75, has cast doubt on the pope’s grip on church doctrine and accused him of alienating the church’s law-abiding conservatives with his inclusive stance.
A populist fan of European nationalists and former President Donald J. Trump, he rarely missed an opportunity to excoriate the pope’s policies, especially his welcoming of LGBTQ people and immigration.
Cardinal Burke had twice joined other conservative cardinals in sending a “dubia” letter to Francis, essentially a list of formal questions questioning his views. In 2016, after Francis indicated a pastoral path for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion, Cardinal Burke and other conservative cardinals sent him a letter demanding clarification. Francis did not respond.
Francis hasn’t exactly given Cardinal Burke a pass in the past.
The pope removed Cardinal Burke from his position in the church’s powerful office that helps appoint bishops, a position that gave him great influence in the United States. In November 2014, Francis dismissed Cardinal Burke from his position as head of the Vatican’s highest court and instead appointed him to a largely ceremonial post for the medieval Roman Catholic chivalric religious order, the Knights of Malta.
During the pandemic, Francis appeared to take aim at Cardinal Burke during a 2021 press conference aboard the papal plane as he deplored vaccine “negationists” among the cardinals. That came after Cardinal Burke repeated a conspiracy theory that Covid vaccines were being used to implant microchips “under the skin of every human being so that he or she can be monitored at any time for health and other matters, which only we can do ‘. imagine being a possible object of state control.”
Shortly before Francis’ remarks, Cardinal Burke contracted the virus and was placed on a ventilator in a U.S. hospital.
When news of the Pope’s apparent comments reached the Vatican, conservatives expressed shock and dismay, while liberals suggested it would take a long time. What was clear was that whether Cardinal Burke stayed in his apartment and received his salary or not, he was unlikely to lower his volume.
“That won’t stop him from talking,” said Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana.