Reports started circulating about this story earlier this week, and now it’s hit The New York Times:
Almost as soon as Pope Francis became the head of the Roman Catholic church in 2013, Raymond Burke, an American cardinal, emerged as his leading critic from within the church, becoming a de facto antipope for frustrated traditionalists who believed Francis was diluting doctrine.
Francis frequently demoted and stripped the American cleric of influence, but this month, the pope apparently finally had enough, according to one high-ranking Vatican official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Francis told a meeting of high-ranking Vatican officials that he intended to throw the cardinal out of his Vatican-subsidized apartment and deprive him of his salary as a retired cardinal.
The news of the possible eviction was first reported by the conservative Italian newspaper La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, which is close to Cardinal Burke and recently sponsored a conference featuring the prelate criticizing a major meeting of bishops convened by Francis. The newspaper’s report comes only weeks after Francis removed another vocal conservative critic, Joseph Strickland, the bishop of Tyler, Texas, after a Vatican investigation into the governance of his diocese.
“If this is accurate, it is an atrocity that must be opposed,” Bishop Strickland said in a post on the social media platform X on Monday. “If it is false information it needs to be corrected immediately.”
The Vatican did not correct it. Asked about the report on Tuesday, the Vatican’s spokesman, Matteo Bruni, declined to confirm or deny it, telling reporters that “I don’t have anything particular to say about that.”
He said questions regarding the report should be put 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 because he was a source of “disunity” in the church, according to The Associated Press, which based its report on an unnamed official who attended the meeting. Another official told The A.P. that Francis later explained that he removed Cardinal Burke’s privileges because he was using them in his campaign against the church.
The Pillar, meanwhile, has this take, from J.D. Flynn:
A lot of Catholics are talking this week about a report that began on an Italian news site just a day or two ago, and has since taken on a life of its own — including a report by the Associated Press this morning, which says it has confirmed the story.
The report is that Pope Francis has “punished” — as the AP put it — Cardinal Raymond Burke, by cutting off his Vatican salary and pulling his subsidized Vatican apartment.
According to the AP, the pope told Vatican officials last week that he was doing that because Burke is a source of “disunity” in the Church.
Moments before I pressed send on this newsletter, The Pillar confirmed several elements of the story.
The Pillar has confirmed that there was a Vatican meeting last week, at which Pope Francis discussed a punitive measure, pertaining to Cardinal Burke’s stipend and apartment, mentioning specifically that Cardinal Burke has been a source of “disunity” in the Church.
It was not clear to our sources-close-to-the-situation whether the measure would include both apartment and stipend — but since the stipend goes to cardinals living in Rome, if Burke loses the apartment and leaves Rome, he also loses the stipend.
The Pillar has also confirmed that Burke has not been informed directly of the decision.
Burke, I suspect, will take it rather quietly.
The cardinal is an outspoken critic of Pope Francis, and has generated a fair amount of controversy for his approach.
But while he speaks out vociferously on ecclesiastical issues as he sees them, Burke does not have the temperament to speak out on a personal slight — in fact, I’ve been in his company several times in recent years, and I’ve not heard him speak ill of the pope personally, or of his decisions to remove Burke from the leadership positions he once held.
Meantime, a quick Google search turned up this 2019 interview with the cardinal, by Ross Douthat in The New York Times:
Douthat: Let’s talk about how your position has changed under this pope.
Burke: It might be good to start with the 2014 Synod of Bishops on Marriage and the Family. I was still prefect of the Apostolic Signatura. And I spoke strongly in favor of the church’s traditional discipline with regard to marriage and divorce.
Douthat: This was a synod called by Pope Francis, where a core controversy was whether divorced and remarried Catholics should be permitted to receive communion without an annulment.
Burke: Yes — we were told repeatedly this is not what the synod is about, but in the end, that is what it was about. And it was about a rethinking of the church’s teaching on human sexuality, with talk about finding the good elements in genital acts between people of the same sex, finding the good elements in sexual intercourse outside of marriage.
During one of the breaks, Cardinal Caffarra [Carlo Caffarra, the late archbishop of Bologna], who was a dear friend of mine, came up to me and he said, what is going on? He said those of us who are defending the church’s teaching and discipline are now called enemies of the pope. And that is symbolic of what happened. Throughout my priesthood, I was always criticized for being too attentive to what the pope was saying. And now I find myself in a situation where I’m called the enemy of the pope, which I am not.
I haven’t changed. I’m still teaching the same things I always taught and they’re not my ideas. But now suddenly this is perceived as being contrary to the Roman pontiff. And I think here what’s entered in is a very political view of the papacy, where the pope is some kind of absolute monarch who can do whatever he wants. That has never been the case in the church. The pope is not a revolutionary, elected to change the church’s teaching. And a lot of the secular view is people looking at the church, but not understanding her profound reality.
Douthat:Going back to the Holy Father himself, you have said that people have accused you of being the enemy of the pope. Do you think Francis regards you as his enemy?
Burke: I don’t think so. He’s never said that to me. I don’t meet him frequently, but in the encounters I’ve had he’s never reprimanded me or accused me of having inimical thoughts or attitudes toward him.
Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Austin Iverleigh published the following piece this morning, clarifying and correcting the “enemy” quote.
Snip:
I met with Pope Francis on the afternoon of November 27th. It was a short meeting because of his lung inflammation, which meant it took him some effort to speak. (The following evening his trip to Dubai was cancelled because it had not improved enough.) In the course of our conversation, Francis told me he had decided to remove Cardinal Burke’s cardinal privileges — his apartment and salary — because he had been using those privileges against the Church. He told me that while the decision wasn’t a secret, he didn’t intend a public announcement but earlier that day (Monday) it had been leaked.
After I came out from the Santa Marta I found it on a traditionalist news website, La Bussola Quotidiana. The meaning of this is obvious to anyone covering the Vatican: the leaker is motivated by animus against the Pope. Their story reported that at a meeting on November 20 with heads of the dicasteries, the Pope had told them: Il cardinale Burke è un mio nemico, perciò gli tolgo l’appartamento e lo stipendio (“Cardinal Burke is my enemy, so I am taking away his apartment and stipend”).
I knew this quote was pure fiction. Pope Francis would never conduct a personal vendetta. It was conveniently in line with the traditionalist narrative of a merciless, vindictive pope who recklessly and unreasonably “punishes” those who disagree with him. Anyone who knows or works with the pope knows how bizarrely untrue this is, yet it is a fiction promoted with great vigor by media and websites supportive of Cardinal Burke. It is a fiction meant to perpetuate their fantasy that they are innocent victims being punished merely for defending the Church’s unchanging tradition against a modernist usurper.
On Tuesday morning, I wrote Pope Francis a note alerting him to this quote and offering to correct it with the truth as he had put it to me. As it happened, others who were at the November 20 meeting had already done so, speaking on condition of anonymity to reputable journalists. One told Massimo Franco of Corriere della Sera that the Pope had informed them of “some measures of an economic nature, together with canonical penalties” he would be taking against the cardinal. According to a source present at the meeting cited by the Associated Press’s Nicole Winfield, this was because Burke was “a source of ‘disunity’ in the church.” A Reuters report by Philip Pullella quoted an official at the same meeting recalling the Pope saying that Burke was “working against the Church and against the papacy” and had sown “disunity” in the Church. The same official specifically denied that Francis had referred to Burke as an “enemy.”
On Tuesday evening I had a note back from the Pope. “I never used the word ‘enemy’ nor the pronoun ‘my.’ I simply announced the fact at the meeting of the dicastery heads, without giving specific explanations.”
He thanked me for making this clear.
