Burke draws red lines over reforms

Should the Synod on the Family in October decide to reform church teaching on marriage and the family, he would ignore the changes, Cardinal Raymond Burke told an audience of 2,000 priests and lay Catholics on 20 March in Herzogenrath, 50 miles west of Cologne, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt.

Addressing the “Cologne Liturgical Meeting” of the pro-old rite lay organisation Una Voce, Cardinal Burke said: “We must return to what the Church has always taught. As a bishop I have the duty of proclaiming the truth and I will continue to do so. The Church must be seen as the mystical body of Christ in which there is no room for revolution.”

Same-sex partnerships were signs of moral decline in Western secularised societies, Cardinal Burke said, defending Catholic sacramental marriage which was indissoluble and obliged partners to remain faithful to one another for life. He was also against making annulments easier, he said.

Meanwhile a senior German cardinal has accused his nation’s bishops of being “completely unfit to work against growing secularism” after the bishops’ conference president said they could not wait for approval from Rome before allowing civilly remarried Catholics to receive Communion.

Cardinal Paul Cordes, the retired president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, attacked Cardinal Reinhard Marx after Marx told journalists at a February press conference following the bishops’ plenary meeting that the German bishops’ conference would pursue its own programme of pastoral care regardless of the outcome of the October Synod.

“We are not a branch of Rome,” Marx said. “We cannot wait for a Synod to tell us how we have to shape pastoral care for marriage and family here.”

Cardinal Cordes, 80, issued a stout rebuttal, the US-based Catholic News Agency reported this week, in a 7 March letter to the German Catholic national paper Die Tagespost. Marx’s statements had caused confusion and betrayed a “theological blurriness that makes you wonder”, he wrote. Marx’s language was more suitable to a bar than to a theological discussion, and was certainly not “imbued with the spirit of communio”, he said.