Savaging Cardinal Burke – OpEd
Raymond Cardinal Burke is a brilliant defender of orthodoxy, one who has bumped heads with the pope. Which man is right is not for the Catholic League to say. But when either man is being unfairly maligned, it beckons a response.
Emma-Kate Symons is not content to side with the pope—she is bent on savaging Cardinal Burke. Not able to sustain a rational argument, she descends to vitriol.
She calls Burke a “renegade cleric” and a “rebel prince of the church” who seeks to “legitimize extremist forces that want to bring down Western liberal democracy.” He also works with a “conservative wing that wants to reassert white Christian dominance.” She did not say if he belongs to the Klan.
Burke is also charged with presiding over a “secretive society headquartered in Rome.” It’s called the Knights of Malta! He is also accused of presiding over “a far-right, neo-fascist-normalizing cheer squad out of the Holy See.” She did not say if they wear Brown Shirts.
Symons, acting like a good liberal, wants Burke silenced. She wants him kicked out of the Knights of Malta—it does not matter to her that it is a sovereign entity—and punished for enabling “extremism and neo-fascism” in the Catholic Church.
This kind of insane discourse is usually found on some alt-left blog site, the creation of an unemployed blogger writing on his laptop at Starbucks. That the Washington Post would provide a home for this trash tells us how low its standards have fallen.
I do not think this author can simply leave on one side the dispute between the Knights of Malta and the Pope as well as the very public serving on the pope of “Dubia” penned by a group of rather dubious prelates. Normally these disputes are kept between the Holy Father and the Cardinals rather than by nailing thesis to the door of the Vatican. The Pope introduced the process of consulting all the people of God as to the churches teaching and discipline on marriage and the family. Many would add that the bishops of the church in the USA have behaved abominably over modern politics.