Cardinal Burke Culpably Seeks a Stance of Powerlessness

In a recent interview with Ed Pentin published at the National Catholic Register, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke went into greater detail than before, regarding the mysterious disappearance of the promised “formal correction” upon which so many had pinned their hopes. 

Why has no group of Cardinals challenged the openly heretical, openly abusive, and questionably legitimate Bergoglio? Pentin and a growing number of faithful demand to know.  The stance adopted by His Eminence, if reported accurately by the utterly reliable Pentin is to be believed, is positively mind-boggling for an attitude which can only be characterized as elective futility.

“Is there such a group?” Cardinal Burke is said to have responded, as though this rhetorical question of his might substitute for vindication of Christ’s truth against the assaults of Amoris and the Amazonian Synod.  A shrug at the crack of a gun; a sigh at the sight of a rape.  It is being reported elsewhere that--to his credit, as far as it goes--His Eminence did attempt to assemble such a group, to no avail.  In which case, why not act alone?

Two reasons, apparently: one, that throughout the history of the Church, only groups and not individuals like himself have approached an errant Pope in this way, and secondly, that he himself, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, is not “the savior of the Church.”

Here His Eminence echoes a mentality if not peculiar to modern man, then certainly showcased by him.  Showcased, in particular, by a man noted in history as “Henry Q.,” who offered as justification of his conduct and that of his confreres, to researcher Robert Jay Lifton, that:

we suffered and acted within the limits of the possible.1

They did what they could, in other words, and what they could not do they did not attempt.  They had not the position nor the numbers to make any real difference--or so they judged, regarding as meaningless or (far worse) as misguided any gesture through which the less prudent might be tempted to catch sight of a glimmer of the one real fault a person can commit in their sight; namely, heroism itself.  Theirs is a colorless cosmos in the last analysis, these calculating moderns.  It isn’t as though Henry Q. wasn’t a good man, in his heart.  It’s just that the term “good German” has come to mean something very evil indeed.  The ones who “suffered and acted within the limits of the possible” were, of course, those who collaborated in the National Socialist program of the destruction of life devoid of value—in the euthanasia program which led up to the Holocaust, in other words, and generally speaking in the Holocaust itself.

Anyone who has read through the transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials is very familiar with the particular excuse which Cardinal Burke has so staggeringly, so stereotypically proffered.  War criminal after war criminal advert to it repeatedly throughout the transcripts—how they were only “doing their duty,” how nothing else was to be attempted against a system so omnipotent and perverse.  The same mentality crops up in our own culture when someone proclaims, always hollowly, “It’s above my pay grade!”  Another form of the stance of assumed powerlessness is the “Catholic” politician who rather conveniently claims to be “personally opposed to abortion, but . . . “

Neither Cardinal Burke nor any one of us has any right to be “personally opposed to Bergoglio, but . . .”  It is profoundly anti-Christian to “suffer and act within the limits of the possible,” when the Sacred Scriptures assure us that through Our Blessed Mother, “nothing shall be impossible with God” (Lk. 1:37).  Do you think it is humble of Cardinal Burke, to assert that he himself is “not the savior of the Church”?  What if God Almighty both wants and intends him to be (in an instrumental but providential sense), as was Saint Athanasius during the Arian Crisis, as were Saints John Fisher and Thomas More in the days of Henry VIII?  It is as though the child from whom Our Lord once asked for some loaves and fishes (Jn. 6:9) should have refused Him instead, declaring, “I’ll keep what I have, which is little enough, thank-you-very-much.  Can’t you count?  Who do you think I am, anyway--the savior of this hungry crowd?”

 1.        In Lifton, Robert Jay.  The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic, 1986), p. 238.

Note: This article is by a Catholic Monitor contributor.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as for the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.