Pope has stripped conservative US Cardinal Raymond Burke of some of his privileges, including a large subsidised flat and salary, a senior Vatican official said yesterday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was attending a regular Vatican meeting when the Pope made the statement to senior aides last week. He quoted the Pope as saying that Burke, one of his fiercest critics, was “working against the Church and against the papacy” and that he was sowing “disunity” in the Church.
Burke has long been out of high office at the Vatican. He is a consultant to a tribunal, like many cardinals who live outside Rome, and spends most of his time in his home state of Wisconsin.
Burke, a 75-year-old canon lawyer whom Francis sacked as the Vatican’s top judge in 2014, has become one of the most outspoken critics of the Pope, his outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics and his reform project to make the church more responsive to the needs of ordinary believers. He is a hero to traditionalists in the Church, especially in the United States, where he is a frequent guest of the conservative Catholic media, which has made criticism of the Pope a major focus.
The move by Francis was the second involving a conservative American prelate this month. On 11 November, the Pope fired another critic of conservatism, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, after Strickland refused to resign following a Vatican investigation.
Conservatives have considerable influence in developed countries such as the US, partly due to their association with conservative politics, although they are a minority in the Church.
Burke has opposed the pope’s reforms almost from the beginning. In 2014, a year after Francis’ election, the pope removed Burke as head of the Vatican tribunal and moved him to a largely ceremonial post, days after Burke said the Church under Francis was “like a ship without a rudder.”
More recently, the two seemingly were at odds over Covid-19 vaccines. Francis had been a proponent of the vaccines and lashed out at vaccine skeptics, who included some conservative Catholics.
