‘Cardinal Burke’ by Joe McVeigh

There is Cardinal in the United States called Cardinal Raymond L. Burke and every chance he gets he attacks Pope Francis because of what he perceives to be the Pope’s progressive and liberal attitude. This cardinal seems to be above censure. If I said what he has said about the Pope I think I would have been reined in long ago! He says that Pope Francis does not stick to Catholic teaching and that his views are merely his own personal opinions and should not be regarded as ‘Catholic church teaching’. It need hardly be said that Burke belongs to the extreme right wing of the Catholic Church. He is not the only Cardinal or bishop belonging to that wing.

His latest attack is over the Pope’s recent Statement on the Family in a document called The Joy of Love (Amoris Laetitia). ‘It’s not traditional enough’, says Cardinal Burke and it is too vague about allowing divorced and remarried to receive Communion. At present they are barred from Communion though Pope Francis wants them readmitted in certain circumstances.

The Vatican offers the Pope’s statement not as infallible but as the ‘ordinary magisterium’ which Catholics are obliged to give “religious submission of will and intellect.” Cardinal Burke disagrees. He says that the document is ‘a mixture of opinion and doctrine.’

According to a leading theologian in the Vatican, Pie-Ninot, there are three levels of church teaching with the corresponding levels of assent they require.

The top levels are: “Infallible pronouncements,” which require an assent of faith as being divinely revealed; and teaching proposed “in a definitive way,” which is “strictly and intimately connected with revelation” and “must be firmly accepted and held.”

A teaching is an example of “ordinary magisterium,” according to the instruction, “when the magisterium, not intending to act ‘definitively,’ teaches a doctrine to aid a better understanding of revelation and make explicit its contents, or to recall how some teaching is in conformity with the truths of faith, or finally to guard against ideas that are incompatible with these truths, the response called for is that of the religious submission of will and intellect.”

“Amoris Laetitia” falls into the third category, Pie-Ninot said, adding the 1990 instruction’s statement that examples of ordinary magisterium can occur when the pope intervenes “in questions under discussion which involve, in addition to solid principles, certain contingent and conjectural elements.”

The instruction notes that “it often only becomes possible, with the passage of time, to distinguish between what is necessary and what is contingent,” although, as the Spanish priest said, the instruction insists that even then one must assume that “divine assistance” was given to the Pope.

Accepting “Amoris Laetitia” as authoritative church teaching, Pie-Ninot said, applies also to the document’s “most significant words” about the possibility of people divorced and remarried without an annulment receiving Communion in limited circumstances.

It is clear that Pope Francis has his work cut out when he wants to introduce some much needed reforms in the Catholic Church. If he should ever think about introducing married priests or women priests he will certainly meet with strong opposition from the right -wing traditionalists in the Catholic church. I am sure he would want to avoid a schism. However, sometimes that is inevitable given the intransigence of some of these diehards who lack compassion and charity.