Cardinal Burke, living symbol of tradition, returns to the centre

Cardinal Burke made irrelevant by the Pope can rise again today. 

In the history of the Church, the plans of men often end up being mocked by the whims of fate. A few days after the death of Francis, the name that is once again making its way through the shadowy corridors of the Sacred College is the one that many believed to have been archived forever: Raymond Leo Burke. The man that the Pope had wanted to confine to irrelevance now re-emerges, evoked in the whispers of the cardinals, certainly among the kingmakers of the next conclave, but for some even as a possible Pope. Seventy-five years old, imposing physique, sculpted jaws, ironic and cutting smile, Burke is a son of the American heartland, with Irish blood in his veins and the battle for tradition in his heart.

Founder of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, in the United States, he has always been the bulwark of a Church anchored to the ancient liturgy, to the defense of life from conception to natural death, to the family as a sacred mystery between man and woman. A convinced anti-vax, with Covid that was taking him to the other world, a profound expert in canon law, he had sensed before many the earthquake that was brewing under the pontificate of Francis. And when Benedict XVI, in the years of his mild and dramatic reign, wanted him as head of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura and the Vatican Court of Cassation, Burke became one of the guardians of the ancient order.

It was precisely his legal training that made him one of the harshest critics of the motu proprio with which Francis reformed the judicial system of the Holy See, abolishing ancient privileges and subjecting cardinals and bishops to first-instance judgment. For Burke, it was a wound to tradition, a step towards politicized justice as can be seen from the sensational developments of the Becciu trial.

He lives in Rome, Cardinal Presbyter of Sant’Agata de’ Goti, a small church founded by Flavio Ricimero in the beating heart of the eternal city, between the Bank of Italy and the Viminale. No official office, no visible position of power. Yet his apartment has remained a silent crossroads: cardinals, bishops, monsignors cross the threshold with a discreet step. They seek advice, comfort, perhaps a word that restores meaning to uncertain times.

There, between bare walls and worn books on Our Lady of Fatima — to whom Burke is a devotee to the point of emotion — people pray, listen, and remain silent. It is in that silence that the cardinal forged his slow rebirth. The turning point came in 2016, when, together with Carlo Caffarra, Walter Brandmüller, and Joachim Meisner, he signed the Dubia, formal questions addressed to Pope Francis after the apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia. The first question, the most burning, asked whether divorced and remarried people could receive the Eucharist without converting their lives. The answer never came. Not even to the request for an audience, respectfully advanced in April 2017. No controversy, no public rupture: only silence, welcomed as an invitation to meditate on the mysterious action of Providence.

In the hushed halls of the Congregations, his words still echo today: the denunciation of the "anti-family, anti-life, anti-religion culture", the condemnation of globalist dreams that aim to "eliminate nations to subject the world to a single totalitarian authority, forgetting that it is God who governs". He has never hesitated on immigration either: "Those who are welcomed must respect with gratitude the spiritual and material heritage of the host country, obey its laws, assume civil duties". In the ancient game of the cardinal lodges, his is a revenge that needs no proclamations. The American sidelined yesterday, today gathers the consensus of those who, tired of unfulfilled revolutions, dream of a more solid, more secure, more Roman Church. And as often happens in the Vatican labyrinths, true power grows in the shadows. Burke does not propose, does not ask, does not maneuver. His name is circulating not as that of a designated winner, but as the needle capable of orienting the scales, of upsetting plans, of indicating the way. It is he, they whisper, who leads the silent front of the Americans, Africans, Northern Europeans who see in Francis more rubble than conquests. The irony of fate hangs heavy over all this: the very man whom Francis had wanted to silence now risks becoming one of the architects of the future. "This is how the Vatican works," someone whispers in the sacred palaces. 'No one is ever really finished until they are buried. And often not even then'.

Burke, meanwhile, remains unflappable. He attends few, he speaks even fewer. Perhaps it was in his own exile that Raymond Burke found his greatest strength: free of prebends, free of power games, he became what Francis feared he would become. A living symbol of Tradition.

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