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Final Transcript Customer: Carmel Communications/Ignatius Press Call Title: Cardinal Burke/Hope for the World Tele-press conference Confirmation Number: 43256707 Host: Lisa Wheeler Date: August 29, 2016 Time/Time Zone: 9:00 am Central Time SPEAKERS Father Joseph Fessio Cardinal Raymond Burke PRESENTATION Operator: Welcome to the Cardinal Burke Hope for the World Tele-Press Conference. My name is Karen, and I will be your operator for today’s call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Lisa Wheeler. Lisa, you may begin. Lisa: Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. I want to thank everyone for their patience in allowing us to get started a little late. I want to take a moment to thank all of you. This is a rare
Transcript
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Final Transcript

Customer: Carmel Communications/Ignatius Press Call Title: Cardinal Burke/Hope for the World Tele-press conference Confirmation Number: 43256707 Host: Lisa Wheeler Date: August 29, 2016 Time/Time Zone: 9:00 am Central Time

SPEAKERS Father Joseph Fessio Cardinal Raymond Burke PRESENTATION Operator: Welcome to the Cardinal Burke Hope for the World Tele-Press Conference. My name is

Karen, and I will be your operator for today’s call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode.

Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. Please note that this conference is being

recorded.

I will now turn the call over to Lisa Wheeler. Lisa, you may begin.

Lisa: Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. I want to thank everyone for their patience in

allowing us to get started a little late. I want to take a moment to thank all of you. This is a rare

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opportunity we have this morning to come together in this virtual environment to ask questions of one of

the Catholic Church’s leading shepherds on pastoral and cultural challenges facing our world.

I also want to thank His Eminence for making himself available to answer your questions about his newly

released book, which is published by Ignatius Press. Knowing that all of you gathered on this call have

read this book thoroughly or you would not be joining us, I merely want to establish before we begin today

the spirit of this conversation that we are about to undertake with Cardinal Burke. He is with us to provide

thoughtful and perhaps thought-provoking answers to questions that you may have relevant to his

comments in Hope for the World. And we’re going to make every effort to get to everyone’s questions, so

we ask that you limit them to those which are specifically related to his book, if possible, and for the

benefit of all those joining the call it would be helpful if you referenced the topic or the portion of the book

relevant to your question.

Also joining our call today is Father Joseph Fessio, who is the founder and editor of Ignatius Press; and

Mark Brumley, the President and CEO of Ignatius Press. Should you have any questions for them they

can be directed towards them directly during that time, you’re welcome to address them.

I also want to mention that there will be a transcript and audio file available of this call immediately

following it, and you can request that directly from off of Carmel Communications. Just go through my

colleague, Kevin Wandra, to get access to that.

So, at this time I would like to turn the floor over to Father Fessio of Ignatius Press for a few brief

comments, and then we will introduce the Cardinal and get started. Thank you.

Father Fessio: Thank you, Lisa. You asked for some reasons why we’d publish a book like this at this

time, and I don’t want to say too many things in praise of Cardinal Burke while he’s on the line because

we want to preserve his humility, but we are living in turbulent times, both in the world and in the church,

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and generally speaking men who make it to the level of cardinalate, who become cardinals, are chosen

because of a certain amount of experience, and intelligence, and wisdom. And so on these issues it’s

important to listen not only to the pope, that’s important of course, but also these leading members of the

church who, from different countries and different areas of experience, can share with us their thoughts

on things.

And so we began in ’86 with the famous Ratzinger Report, and we’ve done others in the past, we just did

one on Cardinal Sarah called God or Nothing, which is a marvelous book. We’ll be coming out with one

by Cardinal Muller, who’s now the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, and it seemed

appropriate, especially for us in the United States, to hear from a cardinal who represents us in a certain

way because he’s from the United States. So, that’s basically the reason we did it.

Lisa: Excellent. So, I know that Cardinal Burke doesn’t need any introduction, but I want to go ahead and

do that in his honor. Cardinal Burke was made a Bishop by Pope John Paul II in 1994, and a Cardinal in

2010 by Pope Benedict XVI, and as many of you know, he was called to Rome in the same year to

become the Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, and then most recently, in 2014

Pope Francis has named him Chaplain to the Order of Malta. And we’re honored to be able to have him

here today to speak about the things that he reflected on in his book Hope for the World.

And, Cardinal, we’ll turn this over to you for some opening statements and we’ll get started with questions

right after that. Karen, I don’t know if you want to, after the Cardinal finishes, to also give some direction

to the members of the media that are on the call as well.

Cardinal Burke: This is Cardinal Burke. I was requested to give the interview by a French author and

also Director of the Office of Family Life and Pro-Life Office in the Diocese of Bayonne, and it turned out

to be a reflection on my own coming to know the faith in my family and to know my vocation as a priest,

and eventually as a bishop, and cardinal, and then reflect on certain critical issues of the day, especially

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as they are seen in France, but as one would not be surprised many of these issues are also pertinent to

places far beyond France, including my homeland, the United States. And so after the book was

published in French there was a certain interest in an English translation, and that’s what Ignatius Press

has so graciously provided and published.

Beyond that, I think the book doesn’t need any other introduction. It’s a testimonial of faith on my part,

what it is meant to be to receive and to live the Catholic faith, and at the same time a reflection as a

pastor in the church, as a bishop, on certain critical issues of the time. And I trust that in the end the book

will have the effect which the title announces, namely that it will give hope. One of the experiences that I

have frequently today with the turmoil in the world and in the church, to which Father Fessio referred, is

that many people are tempted to lose hope. And so it’s been my desire with the book to give

encouragement to everyone, not only to people of faith but to other people of goodwill who reading the

book will find cause for new hope and new energy in their daily lives.

Lisa: Thank you, Cardinal Burke. Karen?

Operator: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. [Operator instructions]. And

our first question comes from Peter Baklinski from Lifesitenews.com. Peter, your line is open.

Peter: Thank you very much. Thank you, Your Eminence, it’s very nice to be with you here this morning.

In your book you speak about defending family and defending life as fundamental, and I was wondering

what would be your response to what appears to be a shifting of priorities among the US bishops, namely

from focusing on protecting and defending life and the family, especially regarding abortion and

euthanasia, to now including among those issues the issues of poverty, immigration, and the

environment, and even calling them top tier concerns, which appears to be a shifting of priorities. What

would be your response to that?

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Cardinal Burke: Well, all of these questions have moral importance, but there can be no question also in

the long tradition of not only the church’s thinking but also of philosophical reason, that the fundamental

question has to be the question of human life itself, the respect for the inviolable dignity of human life and

of its cradle, or of its source in the union of a man and a woman in marriage, which according to God’s

plan is the place where new human life is welcomed and nurtured. So, I’d be very concerned that in any

way the questions about the protection of human life, either at its beginning, here questions regarding

abortion and other questions regarding the artificial creation of human life, etc., or at its conclusion,

questions regarding euthanasia, be it in some way seen to be at the same level as questions regarding

immigration and poverty. We have to give the first priority to the respect for human life and for the family

in order to have the right orientation in addressing all of the other questions which are involved with

poverty, immigration, the many challenges that any human being faces in life.

But it doesn’t make any sense at all to be concerned about immigration or poverty if human life itself is

not protected in society, it’s an absolute contradiction. And the first justice accorded to any human being

is to respect the gift of life itself which is received from God, and so that the unborn should be protected

and at the same time those whose lives are burdened, either by advanced years, or special needs, or

some grave illness, their lives also are to be equally protected.

Peter: If I may just go a little bit further, you mentioned that if we don’t get the fundamentals right of life

and family you said we won’t have the right orientation on these other issues. What would be your

concerns regarding these other issues, poverty, immigration, and so on, not having the right orientation

without getting the fundamentals right, what would you see as how we could go wrong on those?

Cardinal Burke: Well, for instance, it’s not uncommon that some people’s idea of how to address the

question of poverty is to eliminate a certain part of the population so that there’s less draw on the natural

goods available, or to propagate a contraceptive mentality. In the same way too in questions of

immigration one has to respect the family, both the family of the country which is receiving the immigrants

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but also the families from which these immigrants are coming. And if we don’t have this fundamental

direction in our lives it all can become social engineering and so forth, which can be in the end very

harmful to society and therefore to the individuals.

Peter: Thank you very much.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Christopher Wells from Vatican Radio.

Christopher, your line is open.

Christopher: Hello, Your Eminence. Thank you for taking time to be with us this afternoon. I had a

question, Part 3 of your book begins with a question about remedies for the crisis that the church and the

world finds itself in today. A lot of people are going to look towards people like yourself, church leaders,

cardinals, and bishops for leadership in these very difficult times, so I’d like to ask two questions. First of

all, what do you see as the role of yourself and other church leaders in leading people during this crisis?

And the flip side of that is certainly lay Catholics have a role to play in responding to the crisis, what is

their role to that end?

Cardinal Burke: Fundamentally, we know that the only answer to the very serious challenges we face

today is Jesus Christ and his gospel, his teaching, his life given to us in the church. And so those of us

who are church leaders have a very serious responsibility to address the truth as taught to us by Christ in

the church to the situations of today, that is done not in a proud way but with a great sense of love, the

same love that inspired our Lord and Savior, that marked his public ministry, but a love which knows that

what will best serve society is the truth, the truth respected which respects the plan of God for us in the

moment of creation and that plan has been restored by our Lord Jesus Christ.

So, that’s what is needed so much in the church today, and I find in various places that I visit that this is

what people want to hear from priests, and bishops, and cardinals, they want to hear the truth of the faith.

They aren’t interested in my personal opinions about things, which won’t save their souls, and I’m as

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aware of that as they are, but they look to me to have reflected very deeply on the truth of the faith and on

their application in society today and to speak to that truth with love and care for the society.

And in regard to the second part of your question this is the fundamental mission of Catholics in the

world, Christ came to save the world, and those of us who are Catholics who are united to Christ and his

mission are to be dedicated to serving our world by giving a witness to the truth about human life, to the

truth about the integrity of the family, to the truth about the freedom of conscience, and so forth, the truth

about the dignity to be accorded to immigrants, and to refugees, and so forth. And so the Catholic

Church, again, individual Catholics are called to give that witness, which is very much needed in our time,

which is highly influenced by a secular way of thinking which oftentimes does not respect the individual or

the common good.

Christopher: And just following up a little bit on that, you alluded to a [indiscernible], it’s alluded to in the

book, sometimes those questions may be mixed signals with different Catholics and also the leadership

sometimes seem to send different messages to people. How would you speak to that?

Cardinal Burke: Well, it’s very clear to me that the church is not made up of political parties or various

movements which can be in contradiction to one another. The church is guided by one faith, by one

sacramental life and prayer life, and by one governance. And so if it is the case that different shepherds

of the flock are giving different messages then there’s something seriously wrong in the church herself,

and this is something that St. John Paul II emphasized very much in his Post-Synodal Apostolic

Exhortation on the Laity, that the re-making of the Christian fiber of society, of the Christian fabric of

society requires first that that fabric be repaired and be restored within the church. If the church is going

to serve the good of the world then she herself must be, there must be unity in the church, the unity which

comes from Christ alone, and so this is one of my main concerns is that this question of the unity of the

church’s teaching and practice be restored.

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Christopher: Thank you very much, Your Eminence.

Cardinal Burke: You’re welcome.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator instructions]. And our next question comes from Thomas Szyszkiewicz

from Relevant Radio. Thomas, your line is open.

Thomas: Your Eminence, good morning. The question that I have often wondered about, and in your

interview the interviewer somewhat touched on this, but you talk about your growing up and how that

greatly influenced your choice to go to seminary and the years that you spent in seminary, in the cross.

What I’ve always wondered is, how was it that you were not affected by so much of the craziness that

entered the church formation, in your own formation you stayed faithful and true to the perennial teaching

of the Church and didn’t get caught up in the nutsy stuff that took place during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s?

Can you just explain, I don’t know if there’s an explanation, but how was it that you maintained that?

Cardinal Burke: Well, I think the explanation is simply the way in which I was raised and experienced in

the first years of the minor seminary. I was affected by the craziness in a sense. For instance, I was sent

in the fall of 1968 to the Catholic University of America to study philosophy as part of my seminary

formation, and as everyone would know, those were some of the most tumultuous years in recent history,

both in the church and in the world, and especially in the nation’s capital. And I had been in a minor

seminary, which the discipline was, prayer life and so forth, was stable and good, and I arrived there and

suddenly everything was up for grabs, as they say, everything was called into question, and many things

happened that I must say were most dissatisfying and which led to the abandonment of the seminary by

many seminarians, and also at the same time priests, even seminary professors were abandoning their

priestly ministry.

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I simply couldn’t be convinced that this so-called new way, this new church in which those things that I

had been taught and had learned to practice from my childhood and in the minor seminary were now all

suddenly wrong and needed to be abandoned. And so it was that formation at home, and the faith, and

the prayer life, and in the certain discipline, which had been very much strengthened by my years in the

minor seminary from the time I was 14 until I went to the Catholic University of America which

strengthened me, and I was able to, obviously also with the help of God’s grace, to weather those times.

But I often think of some of the good people I knew during those years who went another way, and I

realize that it could also have been me, and for that reason I had great sympathy, because it was a very

tumultuous time and we were young, when I went there I was just 20 years old. But I have to thank my

good parents, and also the wonderful priests we had, and a certain number of lay faithful who taught us in

the seminary who prepared me in a certain way, even though I don’t think they knew that they were doing

that, to weather those times.

Thomas: Thank you.

Cardinal Burke: You’re welcome.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from John Allen from Crux. John, your line is open.

John: Thank you. And thank you, Your Eminence. I and my colleague, Ines San Martin, are here in

Rome getting ready to cover the canonization of Mother Teresa next Sunday. It seems to me that if any

figure in recent Catholic life successfully combined an obvious concern for the poor and an obvious

concern for the unborn it was Mother Teresa. Can you talk a little bit about how you would see the

significance of her canonization and what her legacy means for the church in our time?

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Cardinal Burke: First of all, I couldn’t be happier that we’ve come to this point, where Mother Teresa will

be canonized a saint, because she’s been an inspiration to me from my years in the seminary, when I first

came to know her, and when I began teaching high school as a young priest I used as a standard book

for the students to read, I was teaching in fact Catholic moral teaching, a book which she wrote in

conjunction with Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God.

But to get to your point, one thing that always struck me about Mother Teresa was people would say to

her, because she was confronting these enormous situations of poverty, for instance, in Calcutta,

numerous people left to die in the streets, the abandonment of babies, all of these horrendous difficulties.

And people would say to her, you know, these are huge problems that need to be dealt with in some kind

of global way, and here you are with this little band of sisters trying to deal with it. And her response

always was, “We can only love one person at a time,” and so she went out with her sisters and picked up

one dying person at a time and took them to the home for the dying that she was able to find, or she

helped one mother at a time to bring her child to term or to feed the children she already had, or people

who were living on the street, to help them.

And I think is the genius of Mother Teresa is that Christ was so much alive in her that in facing the most

overwhelming situations of poverty and need, she had the grace to know that what I can do is to address

this with the gifts that I have and respecting each individual person, and in fact her order has grown

immensely and is carrying out this work all over. And I remember one story told in the book, Something

Beautiful for God, the interviewer talked to this man who was in the home for the dying, and he was dying,

and he said simply, he said he was so full of joy, he said, “I was on the street dying like an animal,” and

he said, “now I’m here and I’m treated like I’m an angel.” He had recovered a whole sense of his dignity

and of how much he’s loved by God.

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So, this is, I believe, what Mother Teresa can teach us best, that no matter what we’re doing for those

who are in the greatest need, the most important thing that we bring to them is love, is a genuine selfless,

pure love, and then everything else we do beyond that has its ultimate good effect.

John: Your Eminence, can I follow up on that?

Cardinal Burke: Sure.

John: Can I just pressure you, that was a beautiful answer, but I was hoping what you would also say is

something about how for Mother Teresa and for Catholics who think with the mind of the church that

concern for the poor and concern for the unborn are two sides of the same coin.

Cardinal Burke: Oh, of course. Thank you for making that point. Yes, this was so fundamental to her.

As I mentioned in response to one of the earlier questions, when someone asked well, why is this

teaching about abortion or about euthanasia, what importance does it have for addressing poverty and so

forth, she said frequently that the greatest poverty in the world is the fear of life, are those nations which

seemingly are very rich which practice freely, for instance, the killing of unborn children in the womb and

so forth as a response to social needs.

And so she is a brilliant teacher to us in addressing, whether it be questions of a difficult pregnancy, or

questions of a difficult illness, whatever it may be, she teaches us that the way to address these issues is

with respect for the individual human life and in that way no matter what the suffering is of the person, or

no matter what great sacrifices have to be made, the person will find that happiness and fulfillment for

which he or she is seeking.

John: Thank—

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Cardinal Burke: So, the matters are absolutely related one to the other.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator instructions]. And our next question comes from Joseph Pronechen

from the National Catholic Register. Joseph, your line is open.

Joseph: Thank you. Thank you, Your Eminence, for spending this time with us. It’s a great honor to

have you do so. You mentioned in your book that when you were a young priest two things, you noticed

confession was falling off and families were not attending Sunday Mass also, neither one were they going

to regularly, confession or Sunday Mass, and then the children became religiously illiterate in many

cases. I find the same things going on in my own parish, much to the concern of our pastor, who has

tried for years to do something about it, it’s a very large parish, and I can say this firsthand simply

because of being a teacher in the CCD classes there.

Cardinal Burke: Yes.

Joseph: What would you say as a way that people can find hope and a turnaround here, or how can they

make a turnaround in situations like this?

Cardinal Burke: I think that the way to turn things around is to have confidence in what the Sacred

Liturgy has always taught and practiced. One of the things that I found in the time since actually I was in

the seminary but especially as a young priest there was always this idea that we had to find some new

program, some new foolproof formula which would set people on fire with the faith, which would respond

to the question of the tremendous secularization of society. And what I’ve found the answer to be is to

teach people the truth of the faith and their integrity and with some depth. For instance, in the programs

of the catechesis, which I knew in my early years as a priest, the children at the end of it would have been

left with nothing if the teachers, or priests included, hadn’t gone way beyond what was presented in the

books.

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And I remember one time interviewing a young Catholic man for a position when I was Bishop of La

Crosse, and he told me about his own catechesis, and he was a bright young man and ended up going to

Yale University, and he said, “I arrived there in which many of the professors were constantly attacking

the Catholic Church as backward and so forth,” and he said, “And I was armed with crayons and

construction paper.” Well, that’s maybe an exaggeration, but a lot of it was just that, the young people

weren’t taught anything of substance and so they believed that maybe all there was about their Catholic

faith was just that well, we’re all good, we’re all wonderful, but nothing more than that, no deep

understanding of why it is that we’re good. Who is God? He made us in his own image and likeness, and

so forth.

So, I remember too when I was a young priest my first year the pastor said, now, you will interview each

first communicant to make sure that the child is prepared for Communion. And I remember every child,

obviously a fundamental question, what’s the difference between the host that you receive in Holy

Communion and the bread you eat at home? And not one told me, well, the host is the body of Christ.

So, I started to teach this, and the teacher in the classroom said, “These children, they don’t understand

these things.” I said, “Well, of course they don’t understand it fully. It takes us a lifetime to ponder these

mysteries, but we teach them concepts like transubstantiation so that they realize there is a mystery to be

plumbed, to be always understood more.” And I said to her, I said, “These children are telling me that

they’re studying photosynthesis, that they’re working on computers, doing all kinds of elaborate

operations, and yet,” I said, “when it comes to our Catholic faith we don’t think that they can learn

anything difficult, or that they can’t be challenged in any way.” And I said “That doesn’t make sense to

me, and it certainly wasn’t my experience as a child.”

And so I think that’s where we have to have confidence that the truth of our faith actually respond to the

needs of our time and that the courage, and this is what I find many young people are craving so much,

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they don’t want facile answers, some new flashy program or whatever, they simply want to learn the truth

which Christ teaches us in the church.

Joseph: Thank you. Thank you very much, Your Eminence.

Cardinal Burke: You’re welcome.

Operator: Thank you.

Lisa: This is Lisa. I just want to remind, we have many members of the media that are on the line right

now, and as Karen has pointed out, with this opportunity here with Cardinal Burke here, please queue

into the line so that you can take advantage of the opportunity to ask the cardinal questions about the

themes in his book.

Cardinal Burke, I thought that maybe it might be interesting for those that are on the call for you to

address I think what appears to be one of the overriding concerns among Catholics that we are hearing

about as people of communication that work in communication, as the Catholics try to determine how to

guide their consciences right now over the coming election. I think a lot of Catholics feel like the choices

that are being given to us on both sides from a political perspective are not good ones and there’s a real

struggle for many faithful Catholics in trying to determine what they should do when it comes to the time

to vote in our election.

Given that the theme of your book is hope for the world and you address some of this in the chapter, Part

4, on proclaiming the gospel of life, what sort of encouragement or hope can you give to Catholics that

are currently in that struggle, that battle within their hearts of what they should do with their consciences

when it comes to being a good citizen and fulfilling their political responsibility?

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Cardinal Burke: Well, in the United States we live in a democratic republic, and of course the individual

citizens choose the leadership, and so the moral weight to voting is indeed very heavy, in other words,

every vote counts. And many people say in a situation like we face today in the United States that they

choose not to vote at all because they find neither candidate acceptable, or they choose to write in the

name of someone who would be good. And I understand these sentiments very well, but one also has to

be very prudent and know that by not voting at all you’re probably favoring one candidate or another, and

the situation in the United States, at least as far as I understand it, also by writing in candidates it simply,

although certainly it registers a displeasure with the candidates that there are, it probably won’t ultimately

affect the election of the write-in candidate.

I say all this simply to say that I think that what we have to do in this time is to look at both candidates and

to see if one of them will not at least in some way advance the common good, both with respect to the

good of human life, the good of the family, the freedom of conscience, the care of the poor, and to look at

that very carefully. More than likely the judgment will be that neither candidate ideally answers these

questions all in the way that we want, but given the nature of our government can we in conscience

support one of the candidates at least who, while maybe doesn’t support everything that we believe and

know as important will at least support it to a certain extent with the hope that that candidate can be

convinced to embrace ever more fully the common good.

Those are difficult considerations, and I don’t say any of this in an easy way, but I do think that the

Catholics especially need to be very cautious about simply opting out, or good pro-life people, or good

pro-family people, simply just throwing up their hands. But I would just urge them to study the positions of

both candidates to the fullest possible degree to see whether or not one of them will not advance, at least

to some degree, restoration of the civilization of life and love in our country.

And in both cases I don’t think that anyone doubts what our position is, in other words, at the same time

that we might vote for a candidate who doesn’t perfectly respond to all the questions, at the same time we

make it known clearly, and the church has I believe in the United States made it known what response it

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considers to be absolutely essential for the good of society. I know that it’s not an easy answer to the

question, but I think it’s something that we really all have to take very much to heart at this time.

Lisa: Thank you, Your Eminence.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Carl Olson from Catholic World Report. Carl, your

line is open.

Carl: Thank you, Your Eminence, for this book, which I found to be very encouraging.

Cardinal Burke: Good.

Carl: Your remarks about Islam in the book made a lot of headlines initially, but you actually identify

something else as the greatest danger of our days, and that is relativism, and in this way your book

reminds me a little bit of what Benedict said in his Regensburg address. And so my question, a two-part

question is, how are Islam and relativism related? Are they the flip side of the same coin? And then on

top of that, how do we go about recovering a sound metaphysic in a culture that’s so deeply relativistic?

Cardinal Burke: I think the response to Islam, at least as I see it on the part of some, is very much

influenced by a relativism of a religious order. I hear people saying to me, well, we’re all worshipping the

same God. We all believe in love. But I say stop a minute and let’s examine carefully what Islam is, and

what our Christian faith teaches us both. And when we come to the question of Christian faith,

immediately there is involved a metaphysics because in the Christian faith God is the creator both of

reason and he’s the giver of revelation, by which that what he teaches us, what the law is written on our

hearts is illuminated and we’re given a divine grace to live according to that law.

This is not true in Islam, and my remarks, I’ve been accused of taking an extreme view about Islam or of

being influenced by people who don’t understand Islam, everything that I’ve said about Islam, including

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especially what’s in the book, is based on my own study of the text of Islam and also of their

commentators, and when I’ve written on Islam I’ve been at pains to cite their own authors. And the point I

wanted to come to is this, I don’t believe it’s true that we’re all worshipping the same God, because the

God of Islam is a governor. In other words, fundamentally Islam is, Sharia is their law, and that law,

which comes from Allah, must dominate every man eventually.

And it’s not a law that’s founded on love. To say that we all believe in love is simply not correct. And

while our experience may be with individual Muslims may be one of people who are gentle and kind and

so forth, we have to understand that in the end what they believe most deeply, that to which they ascribe

in their hearts, demands that they govern the world. Whereas, in the Christian faith we’re taught that by

the development of right reason, by sound metaphysics, and then that which leads to faith and to the light

and strength that’s given by faith, we make our contribution to society also in terms of its governance, but

the church makes no pretense that it’s to govern the world, but rather that it’s to inspire and assist those

who govern the world to act justly and rightly toward the citizens.

I don’t know if that’s addressing your question or not. So, I think this relativism comes in, in this sense

that we don’t respect the truth about what Islam teaches and what, for instance, the Catholic Church

teaches, and we just make these general statements, we’re all believing in the same God and so forth,

and this is not helpful and ultimately it will be the end of Christianity, meaning nothing has changed in the

Islamic agenda from prior times in which our ancestors in the faith have had to fight to save Christianity.

And why? Because they saw that Islam was attacking sacred truths, including the sacred places of our

redemption.

So, that would be my response. I don’t know if that’s adequate to your question or not. But that would be

a first response to it.

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Carl: Yes. And I’m very fond of saying that Americans have a real difficulty with looking at things from a

philosophical or a metaphysical perspective, and it seems to be part of that bigger problem that you just

addressed.

Cardinal Burke: Yes. We have to have a profound respect for right reason, for the natural law which

God has written in every human heart. I think most people don’t realize that there is no natural law

doctrine in Islam and neither is there an ocean of conscience, everything is dictates of the laws that are

given by either in their sacred text or by those who are entrusted with interpreting the law.

Carl: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from Steve Koob from One More Soul. Steve, your

line is open.

Steve: Good morning, Your Eminence. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Cardinal Burke: Thank you.

Steve: I know you spoke about liturgy in your book. Could you tell us about what does the liturgy have to

do with our culture of death? Is there a connection between the changes that were made after Vatican

Council II and the liturgy and the change in the culture that we’ve experienced over the last at least 50

years?

Cardinal Burke: Well, there’s a fundamental connection. The Sacred Liturgy is the highest and most

perfect expression of our Catholic faith, and the Sacred Liturgy, when it’s celebrated correctly and with

great dignity, we see the order of creation and we approach God himself with worship, and we receive

from him not only the truth, which he teaches us through the scriptures and through the homily of the

priest, but also we receive truth itself in the sacraments and in direct encounter with Christ.

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And so what happened, sadly, after the council, and it certainly was not part of the teaching of the council,

was there was a tremendously man-centered approach to the Sacred Liturgy, to the extent that the idea

that this was worship offered to God according to God’s commandment was completely lost, and the

liturgy became something we created, and I remember people saying well, we have to make the Sacred

Liturgy interesting and it was all of this experimentation. But all of it completely blurred the essential

encounter between heaven and earth, which is the liturgy, the essential encounter between eternity and

time.

And so, first of all, many people when the Sacred Liturgy, especially the Holy Mass was reduced in this

way, stopped attending Holy Mass. They didn’t find anything there that they couldn’t find in other human

activities. And those that were coming were not being nourished with the truth, or were not seeing in the

Sacred Liturgy this wonderful, what we call the mystery of faith, God’s plan for our salvation. And so it

strikes me that there’s an exact correlation between the abuses in the Sacred Liturgy and the breakdown

of the moral life, and especially in these very serious questions regarding the protection and nurture owed

to every human life from the moment of its conception to the moment of natural death.

Steve: Cardinal Sarah gave a talk at the Sacred Liturgy 2016 Conference in London, where he

encouraged some changes in the liturgy, including ad orientem even for the Novus Ordo Mass. Would

you agree with that lecture that he gave and the recommendations that—

Cardinal Burke: I agree with him completely. And I believe that many of the comments which were

made afterwards are not well informed and are not fair. His fundamental point, and the question of the

position of the priest in the assembly, if we want to call it, in the congregation which was coming for

worship is key because the priest is at the head of the congregation, he’s acting in the person of our Lord

Jesus Christ, offering this worship to God, and so all of us are facing the Lord. He’s not turning his back

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on anybody, this is oftentimes what people say, well, now, the priest turned his back on us, not at all, the

priest, as our spiritual father, is leading us in this worship to lift our minds and hearts to God.

There’s nothing in the documents of the Second Vatican Council which would demand or even suggest

that Mass should now suddenly be celebrated with the priest facing the people. This is a discipline which

was introduced afterwards and I think was part of the false liturgical reform. And what happens when the

priest is facing the people, it doesn’t mean that the priest can’t offer the Mass very reverently and with the

true spirit of the liturgy in the sense of offering worship to God facing them, but there’s the great

temptation when the priest is facing the people to see him as some kind of a performer that suddenly now

instead of the priest together with the people relating to God, somehow now it becomes an interaction

between the priest and the people, and that the priest is the protagonist and it’s no longer our Lord Jesus

Christ. And this is a very fundamental gross error that has to be addressed.

And so, Cardinal Sarah, I couldn’t agree more with him, and I trust that with time people will recognize

that the criticism which was lodged against him is completely unjustified. And it’s also not very sincere

because he wrote the same thing on June 12th in 2015 in the Osservatore Romano, he expressed the

same strong convictions, and nobody reacted then and this was the official newspaper of the Holy See,

and now suddenly in this context there’s this reaction. I don’t understand it.

Steve: I guess it’s like, is it better to turn your back on the people or turn your back on God?

Cardinal Burke: Well, I don’t think—

Steve: So, that’s a simple way.

Cardinal Burke: Well, I suppose that would be a simple way of putting it, except I absolutely refuse to

have, when I celebrate Mass ad orientem, as we say, or facing the Lord, I absolutely object to someone

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saying that I’ve turned my back on the people. No, it’s the greatest act of love for the people to be at their

head and to offer for them the Holy Mass, because the Eucharist can only be offered by Christ himself

and it’s the priest who sacramentally is Christ offering the Holy Mass, so let’s all just face the Lord as we

should.

Steve: If I can ask another question. I hope I’m not being selfish here. Contraception has been accepted

by 85% of Catholics supposedly by polls, and it seems to me like it’s a foundation for the culture of death.

I don’t know if you would agree with that and say that, but so many of our immoral activities that we

accept in our country, in vitro fertilization, now physician-assisted suicide, so many of these things are

violations of the moral law, but yet they’re sanctioned by our government and by the medical community.

It seems like the medical community has been industrialized and has been taken over by those who are

doing whatever they do for money and not for principle, and yet I don’t see our church addressing any of

these issues from the pulpit, or from any other direction. Is that your perception, and if it is, how do we

correct it?

Cardinal Burke: Well, it’s clear that the whole reaction against the Enclyclical Humanae Vitae of Pope

Paul VI, in which he set forth what the church has always taught about contraception, had a devastating

effect, and at that time many rebelled against the teaching of the church and the error became

widespread.

I think it’s essential for us now, as Pope St. John Paul II helped us to do in a brilliant way through his

pontificate, the first four years of his pontificate he devoted to a very careful catechesis on human life and

its origin and the conjugal union. The fundamental point is that the conjugal act is by its very nature

procreative. It doesn’t mean that every time the conjugal act takes place that there’s a conception of a

child, no, of course, only if it happens to be during the time when the woman is ready to conceive and so

forth. But it does mean that in every conjugal act there is this openness to human life and a desire for it,

and great love for the crown of marriage, which is procreation.

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Now, if you posit otherwise, which the contraceptive mentality does, they say well, the conjugal act can be

an act of love between a man and a woman, while at the same time artificially, through some device or

through some chemical, eliminating this essential aspect of it which is the potential of procreation. Well,

that then, the conjugal act is not integral and it’s not fully an act of love because one or both of the parties

is withholding the total gift of himself or herself, and so the conjugal act becomes manipulated in some

way contrary to its nature.

And then what happens in people’s thinking is they begin to justify all kinds of sexual activity as

supposedly an expression of love even though it can’t be life-giving, for instance, genital activity between

two persons of the same sex, or solitary acts. Now people begin to argue that these are all things that

are good. Well, the sexual act belongs in marriage by its very nature, its whole, all we have to do is study

the act itself to see that it’s meant to make a man and a woman who are joined in marriage one flesh.

And so we certainly do need to teach much more effectively and much more consistently the truth about

the conjugal union, and the truth about contraception, especially in a society which in terms of sexual

morals has gone completely insane.

Now, when you think about this whole gender theory and even the loss of fundamental modesty with

regard to use of restrooms, the encouragement of young people to experiment with all kinds of just sordid

sexual activity, this is ultimately completely destructive. So, we have to help people once again to respect

themselves as a man or as a woman and respect themselves therefore in their sexual identity and where

it finds its fullest expression, that is in the conjugal union, or for those who are called to renounce the

good of marriage and to live a celibate or virginal life, that nevertheless is done with the fullest respect for

the nature of the conjugal union.

Steve: Thank you, Your Eminence.

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Cardinal Burke: You’re welcome.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator instructions]. And our next question comes from Thomas Szyszkiewicz

from Relevant Radio. Thomas, your line is open. Thomas, if you are on mute, can you please unmute

yourself?

Thomas: Thank you. My apologies. Your Eminence, just a follow up to your answer to Carl Olson’s

question about Muslims. We just had a debate a few weeks ago between Monsignor Stuart Swetland

and Robert, I’m blanking on his last name, from, and I don’t even remember the organization right off the

top of my head, but anyway about—

Cardinal Burke: I’m sorry. I’m not aware of that debate. I can’t help you.

Thomas: Sure. Well, let me just get to the point here. The issue was about is Islam a peace-seeking

religion, and part of that question hinged on whether or not we should be taking the definition of Islam

from the documents of Vatican II and from some papal magisterium on the question. And in the conciliar

documents, both Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate, the council is pretty clear that we and Muslims do

worship the same God, or at least the Lumen Gentium talks about worshipping the Creator.

Cardinal Burke: It’s one thing to say that, but to say that we worship the same God as stated in Nostra

Aetate, which is not a dogmatic document, I think is highly questionable.

Thomas: Okay.

Cardinal Burke: How can the God that we know, a God fundamentally of love, St. John says “God is

love,” be the same God that commands and demands of Muslims to slaughter infidels and to establish

their rule by violence.

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Thomas: Right. Okay. Alright, I just wanted to get that clarification from you.

Cardinal Burke: But I think one has to look at those documents in terms of, I believe what’s most

important for us today is to understand Islam from its own documents and not to presume that we know

already what we’re talking about.

Thomas: Okay. Alright. Thank you.

Cardinal Burke: You’re welcome.

Operator: Thank you. And we have no further questions at this time.

Lisa: Karen?

Operator: Yes.

Lisa: This is Lisa. I just want to address everyone that’s on the call before we end up. First, thank you,

Cardinal Burke, for taking the time to be with us today—

Cardinal Burke: You’re welcome.

Lisa: —and to address the members of the press that have been here.

Cardinal Burke: Thank you for your questions.

Lisa: Thank you. And for all of those that attended this conference call and did not ask questions, a

transcript will be made available of the call, both audio and written transcript, so for the purposes of your

stories that you’re preparing you’ll be able to have those transcripts so that you can provide accurate

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quotes for those sources. And if you have any other questions at all, please feel free to contact us at

Carmel Communications and we’ll be happy to direct any further follow up that you have in the

appropriate direction. Thank you all for attending.

Operator: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today’s conference. Thank you for your

participation. You may now disconnect.


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