Conscience, The Infallible Guide To Holiness Of Life
The Wanderer (By RAYMOND LEO CARDINAL BURKE)
(Editor’s Note: Following is an excerpt from March 7, 2015 address that Cardinal Burke gave at the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children Youth Conference, Southport, England. Some citations in the original quoted the German spoken by Pope Benedict XVI in his September 2011 address to the German Parliament. These have been omitted here for reasons of space.)
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If we are to seek holiness of life, to live more totally and faithfully for Christ, namely, to give our lives to Christ, without any reserve, our hearts must seek their wisdom and strength in the glorious pierced Heart of Jesus; our conscience must be trained to listen to God’s voice alone and to reject what would weaken or compromise, in any way, our witness to the truth in which He alone instructs us through the Church. Through our daily prayer and devotion, and through our study of official Church teaching, our conscience is formed according to the will of God, according to His law which is life for us.
January 25, 2016
Top cardinal promotes rosary campaign to counter ‘work of the devil’
ANN ARBOR, Michigan, January 22, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) –
His Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke, former prefect of the Vatican's highest court, took to the airwaves to urge faithful Catholics to join with him in "storming heaven" seeking the Blessed Virgin Mary's intercessions for guidance for Catholic leaders. In the same radio interview, he was strongly critical of radical Church leaders who during the recent Synod on the Family attacked him and fellow defenders of traditional Church teachings on marriage. Such "calumnies" were "the work of the devil," he said, comparing them to the attacks on Christian Europe by the Muslim Ottoman Empire in the 16th century.
January 25, 2016
Interview With Cardinal Burke… Insights On The State Of The Church In The Aftermath Of The Ordinary Synod On The Family Part Three
By DON FIER (The Wanderer)
Part 3
(Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, recently traveled from Rome to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wis., a magnificent place of worship which he founded and dedicated.
(His Eminence graciously granted an extensive interview to The Wanderer during which he shared his insights on a variety of topics, including the recently concluded Ordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family and his recommendations for how we should contend with the uncertainty and confusion that is currently prevalent among the clerical and lay faithful.
(This is the last installment of our three-part interview with Cardinal Burke.)
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Q. Do you have any words for faithful priests who find themselves discouraged by the current ecclesiastical atmosphere of doctrinal confusion and subversion?
Also, what about lay people? If faithful members of the laity find themselves in parishes (or dioceses) where aberrant practices contrary to authentic Church teaching are taking place, what is the proper response?
To whom does the laity turn if those in leadership positions in the magisterial office of the Church espouse pastoral practices that are in opposition to her unchangeable doctrine?
A. I hear this from many good priests; even bishops talk to me about the difficulty of dealing with confusion when they present the Church’s teaching. They are told they are not in step with the current practice of the Church or even that they are against the Pope.
One archbishop said to me, “How is it that those of us who teach what the Church has always taught are now called enemies of the Pope by the media and others?”
My response is this: “We know what the Church teaches. It is memorialized in the Catechism of the Catholic Church; it is in the magisterial statements with regard to marriage and family. Go to Familiaris Consortio, go to Casti Connubii, go to Humanae Vitae! We know what the Church teaches and we hold firm to that.”
January 20, 2016
Judge: California Hospital Doesn't Have To Do Tubal Ligation
(Associated Press)
A California Catholic hospital is not engaging in sex discrimination by denying a woman's request for the sterilization procedure known as tubal ligation, a San Francisco judge said in a tentative ruling.
Superior Court Judge Ernest Goldsmith said in his decision Wednesday that Rebecca Chamorro could get the procedure at another hospital, and that Mercy Medical Center's policy against sterilization on religious ground also applies to men.
January 15, 2016
Cardinal Burke urges Catholics to ‘storm heaven’ with monthly Rosary to lift Church from confusion
SAN DIEGO, California, January 11, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Cardinal Raymond Burke is calling on faithful Catholics to “storm heaven” by joining with him once a month in the Mass and the Rosary to pray for hope and guidance out of the Church’s current “confusion.”
The grassroots lay organization Catholic Action for Faith and Family has put up a page on its website for “Rosary Warriors” to sign on to the joint effort, which Cardinal Burke launched with a Mass on December 8.
“As Catholics we find ourselves in a general crisis of culture,” the organization’s spokesman Thomas McKenna told LifeSiteNews. “We seem to be losing the battle against same-sex marriage, we see Planned Parenthood killing babies and selling their body parts and nothing is done to stop them, and euthanasia is being brought in through the backdoor.” Then there is the state of “confusion” in the Church itself flowing from public statements by high officials.
January 11, 2016
Interview With Cardinal Burke . . . Insights On The State Of The Church In The Aftermath Of The Ordinary Synod On The Family
By DON FIER (The Wanderer)
Part 1
(Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, recently traveled from Rome to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wis., a magnificent place of worship which he founded and dedicated. His Eminence graciously granted an extensive interview to The Wanderer during which he shared his insights on a variety of topics, including the recently concluded Ordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family and his recommendations for how we should contend with the uncertainty and confusion that is currently prevalent among the clerical and lay faithful.)
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Q. Several weeks have passed since the Synod on the Family, and I presume you have now had time to study carefully the final report. In your view, what are the main fruits of the Synod, and how best can the Church take advantage of them?
A. The final report is a complex document and is written in a way in which it is not always easy to understand the exact import of what is being affirmed. For example, three paragraphs (nn. 84-86) suggest that the last session of the Synod found a way whereby people who are in irregular matrimonial unions can still receive the sacraments. To address the lack of clarity in the document, I have written a brief commentary on those paragraphs to clarify what the Church actually teaches.
January 06, 2016
The Truth About the 14th Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops?
by CARDINAL RAYMOND BURKE (National Catholic Register)
In the Nov. 28 issue of La Civiltà Cattolica, Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, director of the journal and a synod father, presents a summary of the work of the 14th Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, dedicated to the vocation and mission of the family (pp. 372-391).
Although the author makes various affirmations about the nature and work of the Synod of Bishops, which demand critical comment in a longer study, one affirmation which necessitates immediate comment is summarized thus by the author:
The synod has also desired to touch wounded persons and couples to accompany them and heal them in a process of integration and reconciliation without barriers. Concerning access to the sacraments for those divorced and remarried civilly, the synod has formulated the way of discernment and of the “internal forum,” laying the foundations and opening a door which, on the contrary, had remained closed in the preceding synod.
December 02, 2015
Pope Francis to doctors: never commit abortions or euthanasia, even if that means civil disobedience
by (Life Site News)
“To play with life is a sin against the Creator,” and doctors must make the “brave choice,” even up to the point of civil disobedience, never to commit abortion or euthanasia, Pope Francis said in an address on Saturday. “There is no human life more sacred than another: all human life is sacred!” the pope said.
November 17, 2015
Did Thomas More and John Fisher die for nothing?
by Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila
The idea that Catholics should be allowed to remarry and receive communion did not begin with the letter signed by Cardinal Kasper and other members of the German episcopate in 1993. Another country’s episcopate – England’s – pioneered this experiment in Christian doctrine nearly 500 years ago. At stake then was not just whether any Catholic could remarry, but whether the king could, since his wife had not borne him a son...
November 09, 2015