In his latest move to punish a leading American, conservative critic of his papacy, Pope Francis has removed retirement housing and salary privileges from Cardinal Raymond Burke.
At a meeting of the heads of Vatican offices on November 20, Pope Francis said he was acting against the cardinal because he was a source of “disunity” and was using his retirement privileges against the church, two people briefed on the move told the Associated Press.
The Italian Catholic news blog La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana first reported the pope’s planned actions against the conservative cardinal on November 27. According to the blog’s undisclosed Vatican source, Pope Francis said at the November 20 meeting, “Cardinal Burke is my enemy, so I take away his apartment and his salary.”
The AP reported that Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, “referred questions to Burke” when asked about the affair. “I don’t have anything particular to say about that,” Bruni told reporters.
Over the past decade, Cardinal Burke, 75, has been vocal in his disapproval of the Pope’s agenda.
Cardinal Burke, a favorite of Pope Benedict XVI, was one of the five conservative cardinals who sent Pope Francis a letter this past summer, outlining five doubts (dubia) about the Pope’s teaching. The most controversial dubia challenged the Pope’s rhetoric surrounding same-sex unions and the ordination of women, while other dubia challenged Pope Francis’s embrace of the modernization of the Church and its teachings more broadly.
Cardinal Burke, who has often sported satin trains, velvet gloves, and ornate brooches, has served as the symbolic figurehead of traditionalist Catholics, who prefer the ornate liturgical practices which were once dominant in the church before the Second Vatican Council and share a deep skepticism of the modern age.
Burke was ordained a priest in 1975. He served as bishop of La Crosse, Wisconsin, from 1995 to 2004 and archbishop of St. Louis from 2004 to 2008.
Pope Francis has taken action against Cardinal Burke in the past. In November 2014, Francis removed Cardinal Burke from his position as the head of the Vatican’s highest court, where Pope Benedict XVI had appointed him to serve as Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. The current pontiff relegated the cardinal to a largely ceremonial post instead, the Cardinalis Patronus of the Sovereign Order of Malta — a chivalric religious order that emerged in the 11th century.
Cardinal Burke has loudly decried Pope Francis’s efforts to relax Church restrictions around gender and sexuality, along with the Pope’s messaging on immigration and climate change. Burke gained notoriety for questioning COVID-19 shutdown regulations and vaccination requirements — shortly before he had to be placed on a ventilator after contracting the virus.
Pope Francis himself has been sick recently with flulike symptoms and inflammation of the lungs. Under doctor’s orders, the pontiff cancelled his trip to COP28.