֎Raymond Leo Cardinal BURKE (elevated 2010)

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LINKS

Vatican bio of Cardinal Raymond Leo BURKE

https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/documentation/cardinali_biografie/cardinali_bio_burke_rl.html       

Raymond Leo BURKE on FIU's Cardinals Database (by Salvador Miranda):

https://cardinals.fiu.edu/bios2010.htm#Burke                            

Cardinal Raymond Leo BURKE on Gcatholic.org:

https://gcatholic.org/p/2334                                               

Cardinal Raymond Leo BURKE on Catholic-Hierarchy.org:

https://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bburke.html                           

Apostolic Signatura on Gcatholic.org:

https://gcatholic.org/dioceses/romancuria/d13.htm  

Apostolic Signatura on Catholic-Hierarchy.org:

https://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/diocese/dbgch.html

2003 Catholic News Agency bio of Archbishop Burke:

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/286/pope-appoints-bishop-raymond-burke-as-new-archbishop-of-st-louis 

Merriam-Webster, “Defender of the Bond”:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/defender%20of%20the%20bond#:~:text=The%20meaning%20of%20DEFENDER%20OF%20THE%20BOND,the%20marriage%20bond%20in%20suits%20for%20annulment

Dead Theologians Society:

https://deadtheologianssociety.com/about/ 

Catholic Herald analysis of Cardinal Burke's 2014 reassignment:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160701214308/http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/11/10/thousands-sign-petition-thanking-cardinal-burke/ 

2013 National Catholic Reporter commentary- “I want a mess” -Pope Francis:

https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/pope-i-want-mess 

2014 CruxNow “Soap Opera” Synod on the Family coverage:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141017055135/http://www.cruxnow.com/church/2014/10/16/synod-is-more-and-more-like-a-soap-opera/

Amoris Laetitia:

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20160319_amoris-laetitia.html 

2017 Knights of Malta reshuffle:

https://catholicherald.co.uk/pope-names-archbishop-becciu-as-personal-delegate-to-order-of-malta/ 

2018 National Catholic Register editorial Reflection on Amoris Laetitia controversy

https://www.ncregister.com/news/francis-fifth-a-pontificate-of-footnotes 

2016 National Catholic Register coverage of the Dubia:

https://www.ncregister.com/news/four-cardinals-formally-ask-pope-for-clarity-on-amoris-laetitia

Traditionis custodes: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/motu_proprio/documents/20210716-motu-proprio-traditionis-custodes.html 

Cardinal Burke's Statement on Traditionis Custodes:

https://www.cardinalburke.com/presentations/traditionis-custodes

The 2023 Dubia (w/Pope Francis’ responses):

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2023-10/pope-francis-responds-to-dubia-of-five-cardinals.html 

National Catholic Reporter coverage of removal of Cardinal Burke's Vatican apartment and salary:

https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/vatican-news/pope-francis-remove-cardinal-burkes-vatican-apartment-and-salary-sources-say

Anonymous “Cardinal Burke is my enemy” report:

https://catholicherald.co.uk/pope-calls-cardinal-burke-his-enemy-and-threatens-to-strip-him-of-privileges-reports-claim/ 

Where Peter Is coverage of Cardinal Burke's 2024 private meeting with Pope Francis

https://wherepeteris.com/cardinal-burkes-meeting-withĥhh-pope-francis/ 

 

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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Popeular History, a library of Catholic knowledge and insights.

 

Check out the show notes for sources, further reading, and a transcript.

 

Today we're discussing another current Cardinal of the Catholic Church, one of the 120 or so people who will choose the next Pope when the time comes.

The youngest of six, Raymond Leo Burke was born on June 30, 1948, in Richland Center, a small town in sparsely populated Richland County, Wisconsin.

 

Not too much later, the family moved north to tiny Stratford, Wisconsin, where he grew up.

 

We've had a *lot*, of midwestern Cardinals, in fact all but one of our 8 American Cardinals so far has been born in the midwest, a percentage I would probably consider shocking if I didn't identify as a midwesterner myself, though technically I'm about as much of a northern southerner as you can get, considering my parents basically moved to Virginia to have their kids and immediately moved back to Ohio once that was accomplished. But enough about me, this is about Raymond Leo Burke, who signed up for Holy Cross Seminary in La Crosse in 1962. Later he went to The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where he wound up with a masters in philosophy in 1971. After that he was sent to Rome for his theology studies, getting a second masters, this time from the Gregorian. He was ordained by Pope Paul VI–yes, *before* JPII, crazy I know, in 1975 on June 29th, which longtime listeners will probably clock as the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul and more importantly the Popeular History podcasts’ official anniversary date.

 

Returning to Wisconsin as a priest for the Diocese of La Crosse, Father Burke served as an associate rector for the cathedral, then as a religion teacher at Aquinas High School in town.

 

Making his way back to Rome, Father Burke returned to the Gregorian to study Canon Law, by 1984 he had a doctorate in the topic with a specialization in jurisprudence.

 

He came back stateside long enough to pick up a couple diocesan roles back in La Crosse, but soon enough he went back to the Gregorian for a third time, this time not as a student but as a teacher, namely as a Visiting professor of Canonical Jurisprudence, a post which he held for nearly a decade from ‘85 to ‘94.

 

He wound up becoming the first American to hold the position of Defender of the Bond of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signature, as a reminder that’s basically the Vatican's Supreme Court.

 

As for what being a Defender of the Bond entails, it's basically the guy in charge of proving the validity of a disputed marriage, typically–I’d imagine--oversomeone's objections, or else, you know, the case wouldn't have wound up in court.

 

In 1994, his white phone rang, and it was Pope John Paul II, calling to make him bishop of his home Diocese of La Crosse. Father Burke was personally consecrated by His Holiness in the Vatican.

 

In ‘97, Bishop Burke became a member of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre, ranking as a Knight Commander with Star automatically by virtue of his being a bishop. The Order traces its origins to the First Crusade, making it one of the oldest chivalric Orders in the world–and it’s not the only such order Bishop Burke will get involved in.

 

In 2000, bishop Burke became National Director of the Marian Catechist Apostolate, something which certainly seems near to his heart considering he's still in the role. Well, international director now, as things have grown.

 

In 2002, Bishop Burke invited a fairly new apostolate named the Dead Theologians Society to the diocese, which isn't something I'd normally include, but I wanted to make sure it got a shoutout because it started at my parish. Oriented towards high school and college students, they study the lives of the saints, and Cardinal Burke is a fan, saying: “I am happy to commend the Dead Theologians Society to individual families and to parishes, as a most effective form of Catholic youth ministry.”

 

In 2003, Bishop Burke became Archbishop Burke when he was transferred to the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Saint Louis, where he served until 2008, when he was called up to Rome, to serve as prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signature, there's that Vatican Supreme Court again, and this time he's running it. And if you're making assumptions based on that appointment, yes, he's absolutely considered one of the foremost experts on canon law worldwide, having published numerous books and articles.

 

In 2010, Pope Benedict raised Archbishop Burke to the rank of Cardinal Deacon and assigned him the deaconry of S. Agata de 'Goti. Naturally he participated in the 2013 conclave that elected Pope Francis, where I am prepared to guess he was in the minority given subsequent events.

 

The next year, so 2014, Cardinal Burke was transferred from his top judicial spot to serve as the patron of the Sovereign Order of Malta, aka the Knights of Malta, a reassignment that was generally interpreted as a demotion, given he was going from his dream job for canon law geek that made him the highest ranking American in the Vatican at the time to a largely ceremonial post that was, well, not that.

 

[All that is nothing against the Knights of Malta, which these days are a solid humanitarian resource and quasi-state trivia machine I'll give their own episode at some point.]

 

The tension between Cardinal Burke and Pope Francis has been fairly clear from the start. They have fundamentally different approaches and styles, and frankly different goals. Cardinal Burke is dedicated to maintaining tradition as the safest route, while Pope Francis has famously called for shaking things up, for example saying:

 

“What is it that I expect as a consequence of World Youth Day? I want a mess. We knew that in Rio there would be great disorder, but I want trouble in the dioceses!”

 

That's Pope Francis, of course. Just before his transfer out of his top spot at the Vatican's court, Cardinal Burke noted that many Catholics, quote:

 

“feel a bit of seasickness, because it seems to them that the ship of the Church has lost its compass.”

 

End quote.

 

To his credit, Cardinal Burke took the move in stride, which matches up well with his general view that authority should be respected and that, as a canonist, the Pope is the ultimate authority.

 

Deference to such authority in the context of the Catholic Church is known as Clericalism, and being pro or anti Clericalism is another point of disagreement between Cardinal Burke and Pope Francis, who said “I want to get rid of clericalism” in the same early interview I mentioned before.

 

Part of what Cardinal Burke was responding to with his “lost compass” quote was the first stages of the Synod on the Family, which veteran Vatican reporter John Allen Jr described as like a “soap opera”, with working notes that were released to the public speaking positively about things like same-sex unions and other relationships the Vatican tends to describe as “irregular”. After the Synod on the Family wrapped up, in 2016 Pope Francis produced a post-synodal apostolic exhortation called Amoris Laetitia, or “The Joy of Love”, which I saw one of my sources described the longest document in the history of the Papacy, a hell of a claim I am not immediately able to refute because it sure *is* a long one, which is primarily known for the controversy of just one of its footnotes, footnote 351.

 

I’m still making *some* effort to make these first round episodes be brief, but it's important to keep things in context, so let's go ahead and look at the sentence the footnote is attached to, which is in paragraph 305, and Then the footnote itself. If you want even more context, the entirety of Amoris Laetitia is, of course, linked in the show notes.

 

Here we go:

 

“Because of forms of conditioning and mitigating factors, it is possible that in an objective situation of sin – which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such – a person can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end.”

 

And yes, that is one sentence. Popes are almost as bad about sentence length as I am.

 

Without the footnote, this probably would have gone relatively unnoticed, the Church accompanying sinners is not a fundamentally revolutionary idea. But the footnote in question gets specific and brings in the Sacraments, which is where things get touchy:

 

“In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments. Hence, “I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy” I would also point out that the Eucharist “is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak”.

 

For one thing, just to get this out of the way, some of that is in quotation marks with citations. In a document like this that's pretty normal, showing how your argument is based on precedent and authority. Except in this case the precedent and the authority being cited is literally Pope Francis himself. To be clear, this is a normal Pope thing, I found multiple examples of JPII and Pope Benedict doing the same thing, it just amuses me.

 

Anyways, the idea of people in objectively sinful states receiving communion is hyper-controversial. After all, even as far back as Saint Paul, receiving Communion “unworthily” is an awful thing. Of course, questions have long followed about how anyone can be truly worthy of the Eucharist, with the basic answer there being “with God's help”, but yeah, it's tricky.

 

We can have an educated guess how Cardinal Burke felt about all this, because he and three other Cardinals--it'll be a while before we get to any of the others–anyways Cardinal Burke and three other Cardinals asked Pope Francis some fairly pointed questions about this in a format called a dubia, traditionally a yes/no format where the Holy Father affirms or denies potential implications drawn from one of their teachings to clarify areas of doubt. In this case, there were five questions submitted, with the first and I daresay the most sincerely debated being the question of whether footnote 351 means divorced and subsequently remarried Catholics can receive communion. There's lots of subtext here, but as a reminder this is actually the *short* version of this episode, so pardon the abbreviation. The next four questions are, to put it snarkily, variations on the obviously very sincere question of “does the truth matter anymore?”

 

Pope Francis decided not to answer these dubia, which the Cardinals took as an invitation to make them–and his lack of a response–public. Not as a way of outing him after his refusal to answer gotcha questions with a yes/no, not by any means, but because clearly that's what not getting an answer meant Pope Francis wanted them to do.

 

Now, there's something of an issue here, because we're nearing record word count for Cardinal Numbers, and that’s without any real long diversions about the history of Catholicism in Cardinal Burke's area or his interactions with the local secular ruler. It's all been Church stuff. And we’re nowhere near the end.

 

The reality is that I'm painfully aware my own discipline is the only thing that keeps me from going longer on these episodes when appropriate, and the major driving force for keeping them short was to keep things manageable. But now that I'm no longer committed to a daily format, “manageable” has very different implications. And even my secondary driver, a general sense of fairness, not making one Cardinal's episode too much longer than the others, well, the other Cardinals in this batch have had longer episodes too, so it's not as much of a lopsided battle for the First Judgment, and it's not like longer automatically means more interesting.

 

In the end, with those inhibitions gone, and a sense that this stuff is important and it would be a shame to skip big chunks of it if Cardinal Burke *doesn't* make it to the next round, I'm going to go ahead and keep walking through this so it gets said, and let it take what time it takes. My best guess is we're about halfway through. That way there's no special pressure to make Cardinal Burke advance just to cover anything I felt was too rushed. Don't worry, there's still plenty being left out. Fair?

 

Fair or not, Let's resume.

 

In 2015, so after his relegation to the Knights of Malta but before Amoris Laetitia and the Dubia, Cardinal Burke was added to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which is still one of his roles though like other Vatican offices it has since been rebranded as a Dicastery.

 

In 2017, Burke's posting as Patron of the Knights of Malta, the one I described as largely ceremonial, threatened to become interesting when Pope Francis forced the head of the order to resign over, well, condoms, basically. But as soon as things started looking interesting Pope Francis helicoptered in an archbishop to serve as his “special delegate” and more importantly his “exclusive spokesman” to the Order, which effectively sidelined Burke from a gig he had been sidelined *to* a few years earlier.

 

Nevertheless, 2017 also actually saw Burke start to bounce back some. I want to re emphasize this is notably *after* the Dubia, when later in the year Pope Francis picked Cardinal Burke as the judge in the case of an Archbishop who had been accused of sexully abusing his altar servers. The Archbishop was found guilty and deposed, and by the end of the year, having gotten his feet wet again, Cardinal Burke was back on as a member of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signature, though, notably, not as its head anymore.

 

The next major flashpoint came In 2021, when Pope Francis published Traditionis Custodes, a document that severely restricted the celebration of the old Latin Mass. 

 

Long story short, what's colloquially called Latin Mass is the version of Mass that was the main liturgy for Latin rite Catholics for hundreds of years until the Second Vatican Council kicked off serious updates in the 1960s, the most obvious of which is the general shift from Latin to the use of local aka vernacular languages, and the second most obvious is the direction the priest is facing for the majority of the liturgy. There's obviously more detail available on everything I just said, and people have *opinions*, I'll tell you that for sure.

 

Cardinal Burke's fundamental opinion was and is that the Latin Mass is great and should be maintained and that, in short, Pope Francis may even be overstepping his bounds in restricting it as much as he is with Traditionis Custodes, which is a strong claim given the whole, you know, general idea of the Papacy.

 

A few weeks after the Traditionis Custodes stuff went down, Cardinal Burke was on a ventilator fighting for his life. We're only doing living Cardinals at this time, so no suspense there for us, but his bout with COVID was touch-and-go for a while there.

 

In June 2023, notably a few weeks before his 75th birthday and that customary retirement age, Pope Francis replaced Cardinal Burke as the Patron of the Knights of Malta with an 80 year old Jesuit Cardinal. If you're noticing that Burke was relaced by someone who was themselves a fair bit older and also well past retirement age, yeah, you're not alone in noticing that, and you wouldn't be alone in thinking that some kind of point was being made here.

 

Just a few weeks after that retirement, Cardinal Burke attached his name to another dubia document, this one covering a larger variety of topics and appearing and in the context of the ongoing Synod on Synodality.

 

Cardinal Burke was again joined by one of his fellow signers of the first dubia, the other two having passed away in 2017, may they rest in peace. They were also joined by three Cardinals who had not cosigned the previous Dubia, though all of those are over 80 and so we won't be covering them for a while.

 

In any event, this second set of dubia covered a wider range of topics in its five questions, including two particularly hot-button issues, namely the question of blessings for same sex unions, which is something I will refer you to my Fiducia Supplicans anniversary coverage (oops, didn't get that out yet) on for fuller detail, and notion of women serving as deacons, which is still an open question at the time of this writing: as we've discussed previously, ordination has been pretty firmly ruled out, but there may be room for an unordained diaconate. After all, Saint Paul entrusted the letter to the Romans to a woman he described as a deacon.

 

Pope Francis actually responded to this second dubia the day after the dubious Cardinals submitted it, giving lengthy and detailed answers to all of their questions. Naturally this seems to have annoyed Cardinal Burke and his compatriots, because remember, traditionally answers to Dubia have been yes or no, and so they reframed their questions and asked Pope Francis to respond just with “yes” or “no”. When it was evident His Holiness was not going to reply further, the Cardinals once again took the lack of an answer- or rather the lack of yes/no format answers- as encouragement to publish everything, which was an interesting move since that seems to have essentially set Fiducia Supplicans in motion, as Pope Francis indicated an openness to informal blessings for homosexuals in one of his dubia responses. All of that is in the show notes.

 

Later in 2023, Pope Francis stripped Cardinal Burke of his Vatican apartment and retirement salary, which I have been tempted to call a pension but everyone I've seen calls it a retirement salary so it's probably safest to follow suit. Officially no reason was given, but I mean, you've listened to this episode, take your pick of tension points and believe it or not I've skipped several chapters of drama real or alleged. Speaking of alleged, this is the Vatican, so anonymous sources are happy to weigh in, including alleging that Pope Francis straight up said “Cardinal Burke is my enemy”. I don't think I buy that he was so plain about it, but I also don't expect Cardinal Burke is Pope Francis’ favorite guy.

 

On December 29, 2023, Cardinal Burke had a private audience with Pope Francis for the first time in over seven years. Cardinal Burke's last private audience with Pope Francis had been back in 2016, four days before the first dubia was made public.

 

The idea of the two having a little chat grabbed media attention more than any other meeting between a Cardinal and a Pope that I can recall. As is typical for such one-on-ones, no official reason or agenda was given, and it's not likely we'll ever know what exactly was said, but I've got to hand it to Cardinal Burke for his response when Reuters asked him about it:

 

‘Well, I’m still alive.'”

 

Raymond Leo Cardinal BURKE is eligible to participate in future conclaves until he turns 80 in 2028.

“AM I THE DRAMA”?

Today's episode is part of Cardinal Numbers, 

and there will be more Cardinal Numbers next week. Thank you for listening; God bless you all!