Cardinal Burke: Bishop's Conferences Stifle the Message of the Gospel

The bishops of the world must, as individuals, take the lead in combating the Culture of Death, and not wait for the national conferences, Cardinal Raymond Burke has said, reports Life Site News.

 “It should be emphasized that the individual bishop has a responsibility in this matter. Sometimes what happens is the individual bishops are unwilling to do anything because they wait for the national bishops’ conference to take the lead.”

Warning against some of the bureaucratic trends of “truth by committee” in the Church’s organization, Cardinal Burke said, “Simply by the way these conferences work, it can be years before some kind of effective direction is given, and then oftentimes because this direction is discussed and debated, it can get very watered down.”

He emphasized that the involvement of the bishops should be constant, and not merely a matter of issuing a statement once. “We’re not writing term papers here where you make reference to an earlier document and that’s sufficient.” In public life, he said, the message has to be stated and re-stated and kept up to date. And statements, he said, are only one part of it.

“It’s another thing to encourage people to actively manifest their desire that the moral law be respected,” he said. Even in a “pluralistic” society the moral law is universal and can and must be expressed in law, he explained. The head of the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican’s supreme court, spoke in the lead-up to the Marcia per la Vita (March for Life) Nazionale in Rome, set for May 12th in Rome.

The Cardinal is known around the world as one of the strongest voices in the Vatican’s Curia for the Church’s teaching on the sacredness of human life at all its stages. He said that the growth of the marches for life, starting in the US, is indicating a shift in opinion on abortion in many countries of the western world, particularly among younger people. Cardinal Burke said that abortion is the premier social justice issue, even if some in the hierarchy, even in the Vatican, do not seem to act that way.

The lack of enthusiasm for combating abortion as a priority among some of the upper echelons of the Church administration, he said, “is something that needs to be addressed”. Citing the encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI Caritas in Veritate , he said that abortion, as well as the widespread use of artificial contraception, must be made priorities: “It seems to me it’s the first issue of social justice, the right to life. The life of a human being is priceless and we will be in the streets to join our voices in defense of innocent human life that is suppressed every day, every minute in the world!”'

May God bless this faithful Cardinal!