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RELIGION

The Vatican's Francis Revolution gains pace

  • 11 November 2014

An important power shift has just occurred in Rome, and it has a genuine Australian connection. 

The long-rupmoured removal of US Cardinal Raymond Burke as Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the top tribunal in the Vatican’s judicial system, and effectively the appeals court for all other tribunals in the church, occurred at midday on Saturday. 

Burke has been made Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta. His replacement at the Signatura is Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, Secretary for Relations with States, effectively the Vatican’s foreign minister. Mamberti’s replacement is Liverpool-born Archbishop Paul Gallagher, currently papal nuncio to Australia.

The sidelining of the 66 year old Burke signifies an important power shift. A bluntly outspoken conservative critic of Pope Francis’ pastoral approach to difficult moral issues, his rejection of a hierarchy of truths (the notion that some teachings are more important than others) has placed him at the far right of the Catholic spectrum. Burke has said that Catholicism risks schism if bishops at the Family Synod next year ‘go contrary’ to the Church’s established dogmas.

A ‘folk hero’ for some Catholics, Burke was appointed bishop of La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1994, and promoted to Archbishop of St Louis in late 2004. He was appointed Prefect of the Signatura in 2008 and was made a cardinal in November 2010. 

He exercised considerable influence on the appointment of new bishops in the US as a member of the Congregation of Bishops. He was removed from the Congregation by Pope Francis in December 2013. His dismissal from the Signatura was certainly brutal by Vatican standards. The Roman saying is ‘Let him be promoted that he may be removed’, but with Burke they didn’t even pretend he was being ‘promoted’. Perhaps it is because he had ‘leaked’ his own demotion some weeks earlier.

He is known for his devotion to the Tridentine liturgy and practices such as wearing a cappa magna. He has claimed that contemporary ‘moral corruption’ is ‘strictly correlated’ to the liturgical ‘abuses’ that in his view came in the wake of Vatican Council II. Whispers in the Loggia blogger Rocco Palmo has described him as ‘arguably the most polarising figure on the global Catholic stage.’ His removal from the Signatura and Bishops strips him of any real influence on the wider church - at least for this papacy.

Burke’s replacement at the Signatura is Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, a Corsican. This leaves
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