ACI Prensa Staff, Dec 14, 2023 / 14:50 pm (CNA).
Cardinal Raymond Burke, who in recent weeks has figured prominently in the news following a report that Pope Francis had taken away his salary and Vatican apartment, offered an extensive reflection on the state of the world and the Church during the Mass he offered to coincide with the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Dec. 12.
“At the time of the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the missionary Church in what is today Mexico was suffering seemingly impossible challenges: the violent conflict between the Native Americans and the Spanish explorers and settlers, and the diabolical practice of massive human sacrifice on the part of the pagans,” recalled the 75-year-old cardinal in his homily given at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
The cardinal, prefect emeritus of the Apostolic Signatura — the highest court in the Vatican — noted that in 1531, “Our Lord sent Our Lady to show the way to order and peace in our personal lives and in society, namely, Christ.”
“Through her apparitions and her abiding presence on the miraculous tilma of St. Juan Diego, Our Lady of Guadalupe showed the bishop and the whole Church that the way to overcome evil and to spread goodness is teaching the truth, praying at all times and offering all our love to God in sacred worship, and practicing the truth in love,” he continued.
On the mission of the Church today
The prelate went on to note that “the Church in our time faces similar seemingly impossible challenges. Human life itself, marriage and the family, and the practice of the faith are all under constant attack from a culture which refuses to recognize God and to submit in obedience to his commandments.”
“Many today violently rebel against God, who reveals himself to us through reason and, most fully and perfectly, through the Catholic faith. The rebellion has beguiled even members of Christ’s mystical body, leading them to abandon Christ and his way, leading them to apostasy. What are we to do? What is the Church to do?” he asked.
The veteran cardinal observed that “some, even among bishops, would tell us that the Church has to change her doctrine, her sacred worship, and her discipline in order to accommodate the culture.”
“They talk about a necessary paradigm shift or an ill-defined Synodal Way, which declares that all are welcome in the Church without making clear the conversion to Christ which is necessary to be a member of his mystical body,” he lamented.
Burke then pointed out that these members of the Church “forget that the king in the parable of the wedding feast, who had welcomed all, ‘the good and the bad,’ to the marriage feast for his son, when he saw ‘a man who had no wedding garment,’ had the man cast out from the banquet. Our Lord concludes the parable of the wedding feast with the admonition: ‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’”
“Yes,” he stressed, “Our Lord wants all of us to share in the banquet of divine grace, but we cannot do so unless our hearts, one with the immaculate heart of Mary, rest in his most Sacred Heart, unless we allow ourselves to be clothed with him in our daily life.”
Holiness in everyday life
The prefect emeritus highlighted that “the way of the Church in today’s crisis is the same as it has always been: The teaching of the deposit of faith and of all the riches of the Catholic faith, daily prayer, and worship of God ‘in spirit and in truth,’ and a good and holy daily life.”
After recalling that St. John Paul II explained that the world will not be saved by discovering “some magic formula” or “inventing a new program,” the cardinal emphasized that the path of salvation is “Jesus Christ alive for us in the Church.”
“The program leading to freedom and happiness is, for each of us, holiness of life in accord with our state in life and the particular gifts with which God has endowed us,” the cardinal stressed.
“It is to holiness of life in Christ that Our Lady of Guadalupe draws us. Leaving the ordinariness of our daily living to come on pilgrimage to her holy place, she manifests to us the extraordinariness of our daily living in Christ,” Burke explained.
Our Lady of Guadalupe leads us to Christ
The prelate noted that “the cause of our joy today, the cause of our abiding joy, the cause of our eternal joy, is Christ, God the Son incarnate, whom his Virgin Mother brought into the world and to whom she is ever drawing us, showing us that he, seated at the right hand of God the Father in glory, is also with us in his holy Church which, together with the Virgin Mary, we rightly call Mother.”
“Christ is the fulfillment of man’s deepest desire: to know God and to love and serve him,” he continued.
“The mother of Christ, whom he gave to us as our mother when he was dying on the cross, is, in her maternal love, ever taking us to him with the words which she spoke to the wine stewards at the wedding feast of Cana: ‘Do whatever he tells you,’” Burke said.
In closing, Burke encouraged the faithful: “Let us now, under the maternal care of Our Lady of Guadalupe, give our hearts completely to Our Lord in his Eucharistic sacrifice.”
“May the holiness of our union of heart with his most Sacred Heart through the most Blessed Sacrament of the altar shine forth in our every thought and word and action,” he concluded.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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I love Cardinal Burke!
We read: “They talk about a necessary paradigm shift or an ill-defined Synodal Way, which declares that all are welcome in the Church without making clear the conversion to Christ which is necessary to be a member of his mystical body.”
And, yet, there are also those who view today’s same “impossible challenges” as does Cardinal Burke; but conclude, instead, that the solution is not “conversion” but “convergence”…If only we build a tent big enough for a whole bunch of “concrete” stuff, then later we can maybe evangelize the mega-congregation a little bit (certainly not proselytize!).
Unscramble the eggs, or dregs, or whatever! The “mess of things” is not in wanting to harmonize apparent opposites into some kind of mosaic (there are precedents), but also in imposing genuine contradictions (!) as if they also can be smoothed over, or camouflaged, or ignored and set aside. It’s almost as if the “diversity” thingy is bubble wrap for some kind of agenda…
Word salad from the five Marx brothers, now including 19th-century Karl and 21st-century Reinhard! Kumbaya!
The big-tent Big Lie from the “beginning.”
Not sure I understand your usual insightfulness. I certainly share disgust with the pervasive spirit of a non-religious “evil as a social-management problem” secular sort of thinking that has become pervasive in the Church. After a couple of hundred years of Western thought, dominated by grand scale solutions to human problems, to be reengineered by elites, weak-minded prelates tend to be seduced into these sort of default assumptions of social organization as an objective good, as a primary goal.
Many are even too dimwitted to perceive the inevitable frustrations from humanity failing to be its own savior, which cannot avoid producing such things as war and other forms of mass murder (abortion, population control, state-planned poverty) but as long as elitists, including the churched, can comfort themselves with endless pontificating, while demoting God to an administrative assistant, making heroic virtue little more than an affectation, we will pursue the same “progress” Adam and Eve pursued in the Garden.
Beautiful. Thanks to Cardinal Burke and CWR.
When someone of the character and credentials of Cardinal Raymond Burke alludes to apostasy within the Church, the Church and world must listen.
Words to live by:
“May the holiness of our union of heart with his most Sacred Heart through the most Blessed Sacrament of the altar shine forth in our every thought and word and action.”
Thank you, Cardinal Burke.
Cardinal Burke is a good shepherd, and therefore,the Pontiff Francis, and his “Paradigm-Shift-Parolin-Pontificate, wages war against him. They wage war against the disciples of Jesus.
When Cardinal Burke speaks, there is a thoughtful depth. There is meat on the bone. A profound contrast to the word salads with too much dressing that come from Rome.
Now we know one reason why Cardinal Burke survived his fight with COVID-19! He is a shining light in a dark world.
Can you imagine a Catholic Church where Cardinal Burke were the Pope? Just think about what would be different.
And, now, back to reality.
Thank you cardinal burke….the faithful know the way the truth and the life and will discern rightly the sheperds we will follow…we know their voices….the good cardinal is one of them and there are plenty others…they are laying low and keeping cover….but soon their voices and leadership will be revealed….keep the faith….at the appointed time the church triumphant will arise and reflect its glorious Savior our Lord Jesus Christ !!!
My personal gratitude extends to God for Card. Burke saying: “Many today violently rebel against God, who reveals himself to us through reason and, most fully and perfectly, through the Catholic faith. The rebellion has beguiled even members of Christ’s mystical body, leading them to abandon Christ and his way, leading them to apostasy.”
God reveals himself to us through reason. Our reason! THINK ON THAT! Aristotle and Aquinas argue that intemperance (the vice of unchastity) clouds, darkens, distorts, contorts, and interferes with the very structure of our ability to reason.
Last night, I argued that innocence is a relative concept. Only Jesus and Mary are innocent of original sin; the unborn infant and the child under the age of reason are innocent of personal sin. The rest of us are not.
The killing of the innocent is absolutely prohibited. Jesus and His mother are solely and uniquely absolutely innocent. The First Commandment calls us to order our priorities. Yet the world and many apostate Catholic Church bishops continue to wound, ridicule, reject, deny, forsake, scourge, and betray their very own salvific God. Then they pretend they have faith and expect those of us with a little reason to believe them!
Catholics MUST make reparation. Do we owe God and His Lady anything less? Yet we continue to first accommodate and then render obeisance to our own temptation, to sin, to growth in vice. Then we wonder why our world and our church has gone crazy, flat, fat, gray, and far astray. Our ability to reason has gone awry.
Pray for us, O Lord.
The Church can’t reinvent Christ. If it continues to promote policies that reflect a paradigm shift, including an ongoing question discussion forum on permanent doctrine, the Synod on Synodality, in effect casting doubt on its permanence, the living image of Christ will fade. Apostasy will replace faith.
But as Card Burke attests this is what’s happening. More of our bishops are morally indebted to join him.
I’d like to correct something, based on what is written in the article and the tone it is presented here. While native Americans were not Christians, they were massacred by the colorists, not helped. It was not a fair war. And like anyone, they defended, their land. There is a Dominican frier who wrote extensively on this, his name is Bartolome de las Casas.
I recognize Cardinal Burke’s words as God’s truth!
As for Rome, remember we will all be judged by Jesus, the Christ.
Cardinal Burke is spot on with
His prophetic words.
All should remember that they will be judged by their actions.