{T} here are the reports that one hopes are not true but that one knows probably are. Such is the rumor out of Rome that Cardinal Raymond Burke is to be stripped of his apartment and salary. The news, based on anonymous sourcing, is already being reported by the Associated Press. If it bears out, Catholics will be surprised and saddened.
It will be especially disappointing for Catholics who have been looking to Rome these past weeks as the Vatican held the first of its two-part Synod on Synodality, whose professed aim is to bring about greater unity within a church plagued by division and rancor. No matter where Catholics fall on the fault lines, we are all weary of the controversy and division that seem to characterize every piece of news we read about the church. This news of Cardinal Burke will be just more of the same.
To be sure, controversy has stalked Cardinal Burke his entire career. Not because he went looking for it but because, in our clickbait culture, it goes looking for the types that don’t toe the popular line. His unwavering commitment to church truths and to preserving the transcendent beauty of her liturgy is the stuff of good bogeyman pieces.
It’s also the stuff of revitalizing the church with young converts, of whom I am one. “Everywhere I go, I find a significant number of young couples with children, of young single people, young priests who treasure their tradition,” Burke said in an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in 2019. “They’re on fire. And I don’t find young people who buy this agenda of accommodation to the world. The younger people, they’ve experienced the bankruptcy of the culture. . . . And they want a church that teaches them clearly the way to eternal salvation, the way to lead a good and decent life on earth.”
Those who know the cardinal, or who take the time to understand the priest that he is, discover a kind and holy man who has suffered for his steadfast service to the church and for his commitment to professing her truths in plain terms.
His steadiness, shaped by life on a farm in the American Midwest, in a loving and devotedly Catholic home that knew hard work, disability, and tragedy, pulled him unbroken through the crumbling American seminaries of the ’60s. He loyally answered the call to canon law. In that capacity, he experienced firsthand what he called the increasing “loss of respect for church law,” pointing out in particular an increasing failure to celebrate Mass in a way that is “properly transcendent.”
Speaking out against these trends, he admitted to Douthat, “marked me.”
But his mark on the church has been one of example — of simple, humble courage in defense of the truth. It’s a mark that has attracted scorn, both inside the church and out, a cross he has borne with grace. Rather than stand on a bully pulpit of earned media and tangle with his critics, he has spent his time quietly working to build up the church. Most recently those efforts have brought him back to his roots, as he helped to establish the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wis., a “place of ceaseless prayer for the corporal and spiritual welfare of God’s children, especially those in most need.”
You’ll be forgiven if that’s not the story about Cardinal Burke that you’ve read. More likely you’ve read something from the clickbait category that involves some kind of controversy. That’s undoubtedly because when Burke is not busy building shrines to Mary, he is busy speaking the truth to a world — and, at times, to a church — that doesn’t want to hear it. He does so unbeholden to the political calculations that keep one out of the press. Politics is not part of his calculus when it comes to speaking the truth.
“I haven’t changed,” he said to Douthat. “I’m still teaching the same things I always taught. And they’re not my ideas. For my own part, I simply wanted to be able to say, with St. Paul, that I fought the good fight, I stayed the course, I kept the faith.” And for that, he will keep paying the price.