“Cardinal Burke is my enemy, so I take away his apartment and his salary,” the pope had said at the Nov. 20 meeting, according to Bussola’s undisclosed Vatican source.
CNA was unable to immediately reach Burke to confirm the measures against him. The Vatican’s communications office did not respond to EWTN’s request for comment by time of publication.
The AP reported that the Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, “referred questions to Burke.”
“I don’t have anything particular to say about that,” Bruni told reporters.
Burke was ordained a priest by Pope Paul VI in Rome in 1975 and was bishop of La Crosse, Wisconsin, from 1995 to 2004 and archbishop of St. Louis from 2004 to 2008. Widely regarded as an expert in canon law, Burke was appointed in 2008 as prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura (the highest judicial authority in the Church) by Pope Benedict XVI. Two years later, Benedict made him a cardinal.
Pope Francis removed him from the post of prefect in 2014 and instead appointed him cardinal patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a mostly ceremonial role dedicated to the spiritual welfare of the members of the order. He remained patron until this year but had held only the title, having been reportedly restricted from active involvement since 2016 and thus sidelined during the extensive institutional reforms of the order over the last years. In June, Pope Francis named Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda, SJ, as Burke’s official replacement. At the time of the announcement, Burke was only a few days away from the customary retirement age for bishops of 75.
Credit: Source link
