Flashback: The Nuremberg Trial-like Excuse which Cardinal Burke has so Staggeringly, so Stereotypically Proffered on the Promised “Formal Correction”

Does Cardinal Burke think Francis is an antipope?

On at least five occasions, Cardinal Burke has rejected the magisterial nature of official papal teaching (in one case, pre-emptively dismissing a hypothetical official teaching of the Magisterium):

1. Cardinal Burke has rejected the official teaching of Pope Francis in the new Apostolic Constitution Episcopalis Communio concerning the possibility that a pope can raise the final synodal document to the level of ordinary magisterium, if the pope chooses. (We covered the Episcopalis Communio here.)

The whole apostolic constitution on the Synod is problematic. … This idea that either the Pope on his own or the Synod together with the Pope can create some new Magisterium [i.e. a new teaching of the ordinary Magisterium], is simply false.

The Synod is a consultative body, to help the Pope to see how best to present the Church’s teaching in time. It’s not able to create ordinary Magisterium.

As a canon lawyer, Cardinal Burke must certainly be aware that an apostolic constitution is necessarily official magisterial teaching; in fact, it has the highest level of legal authority of any document issued by the Holy See. For Cardinal Burke to dismiss an apostolic constitution’s teaching as “false” is therefore astonishing.

2. In late 2013, Cardinal Burke openly denied the magisterial status of Francis’s first Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. He said in an interview (link to full episode here),

I would have to have the text in front of me, but it seems to me that the Holy Father made a very clear statement at the beginning that these are a number of reflections that he’s making, that he doesn’t intend them to be part of the papal magisterium.

3. Cardinal Burke has rejected the Magisterial nature of Amoris Laetitia in its entirety.

The only key to the correct interpretation of Amoris Laetitia is the constant teaching of the Church and her discipline that safeguards and fosters this teaching. Pope Francis makes clear, from the beginning, that the post-synodal apostolic exhortation is not an act of the magisterium.

He has asserted this more than once.

The Holy Father says himself – in the document – that he’s not presenting the Magisterium – it’s a kind of reflection.

This is contrary to what numerous cardinals have asserted and to what Francis himself has said:

Over the course of the Exhortation, current and concrete problems are dealt with: the family in today’s world, the education of children, marriage preparation, families in difficulty, and so on; these are treated with a hermeneutic that comes from the whole document which is the magisterial hermeneutic of the Church, always in continuity (without ruptures), yet always maturing.

4. Cardinal Burke has rejected the Magisterial nature of the guidelines of the Buenos Aires bishops on Amoris Laetitia, which were explicitly promulgated as authentic Magisterium by Pope Francis. He recently reaffirmed this rejection in his August 2019 interview with Patrick Coffin. In January 2017 (albeit prior to Francis’s magisterial promulgation of the guidelines being made public) he told the Remnant:

What he wrote in that letter simply means that this is his personal understanding of the matter. But that letter hardly could be considered an exercise of the papal magisterium. And so, it’s a painful situation in which to be involved but we simply have to press forward to clarify the matter.

5. Cardinal Burke has rejected Francis’s teaching on the death penalty as “personal opinion.” I have already written a detailed account of this rejection, including audio and transcripts from an event where the cardinal told catechists that Francis’s revision to the Catechism on the death penalty had no authority that they should not teach it.

While each of these contradictions between Cardinal Burke and the Magisterial teachings of the Church is troubling, what separates Cardinal Burke from an ordinary Catholic who dissents from one or more magisterial teachings is Burke’s insistence that he is the one teaching the authentic Catholic teaching. He continually shows no deference to Pope Francis’s teaching authority or the ordinary Magisterium. In fact, he seems to reject the notion that Francis’s official teachings are magisterial at all.

Why does Cardinal Burke seem to reject everything that Francis officially promulgates as magisterial teaching? 

[...]

The clear implication here, as well as the explanation for Cardinal Burke’s rejection of virtually everything that Pope Francis has formally taught, is that he thinks Francis hasn’t taught anything magisterial because he doesn’t believe Francis is pope - Where Peter Is [https://wherepeteris.com/does-cardinal-burke-think-francis-is-an-antipope/]

-  LifeSiteNews, "Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers," December 4, 2017:

The AAS guidelines explicitly allows "sexually active adulterous couples facing 'complex circumstances' to 'access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'"

-  On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:

"The AAS statement... establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense."

- On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

"Francis' heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.

- Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:

"[T]he Pope... WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See."
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306) 

In a 2020 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 reparation for the sins committed because of Francis's Amoris Laetitia.

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

Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost - Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.

Francis Notes:

- Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:

"[T]he Pope... WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See."
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)

Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said "the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church."
[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]

- "If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?": http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html

- "Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?": http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html

 -  LifeSiteNews, "Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers," December 4, 2017:

The AAS guidelines explicitly allows "sexually active adulterous couples facing 'complex circumstances' to 'access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'"

-  On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:

"The AAS statement... establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense."

- On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

"Francis' heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents."

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.

Election Notes:  

- Intel Cryptanalyst-Mathematician on Biden Steal: "212Million Registered Voters & 66.2% Voting,140.344 M Voted...Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden" [http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/intel-cryptanalyst-mathematician-on.html?m=1]

- Will US be Venezuela?: Ex-CIA Official told Epoch Times "Chávez started to Focus on [Smartmatic] Voting Machines to Ensure Victory as early as 2003": http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/will-us-be-venezuela-ex-cia-official.html

- Tucker Carlson's Conservatism Inc. Biden Steal Betrayal is explained by “One of the Greatest Columns ever Written" according to Rush: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/tucker-carlsons-conservatism-inc-biden.html?m=1

 

- A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020:
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1

 

What is needed right now to save America from those who would destroy our God given rights is to pray at home or in church and if called to even go to outdoor prayer rallies in every town and city across the United States for God to pour out His grace on our country to save us from those who would use a Reichstag Fire-like incident to destroy our civil liberties. [Is the DC Capitol Incident Comparable to the Nazi Reichstag Fire Incident where the German People Lost their Civil Liberties?: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/is-dc-capital-incident-comparable-to.html?m=1 and Epoch Times Show Crossroads on Capitol Incident: "Anitfa 'Agent Provocateurs'":
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1] 

Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God's Will and to do it.

 

Pray an Our Father now for America.

 

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