Pope Francis moved on Monday against a conservative American cardinal who has been an outspoken critic of abortion and same-sex marriage, by replacing him on a powerful Vatican committee with another American who is less identified with the culture wars within the Roman Catholic Church.<\/span>
<\/span>The pope\u2019s decision to remove Cardinal Raymond L. Burke from the Congregation for Bishops was taken by church experts to be a signal that Francis is willing to disrupt the Vatican establishment in order to be more inclusive.<\/span>
<\/span>Even so, many saw the move less as an effort to change doctrine on specific social issues than an attempt to bring a stylistic and pastoral consistency to the church\u2019s leadership.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cHe is saying that you don\u2019t need to be a conservative to become a bishop,\u201d said Alberto Melloni, the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, Italy, a liberal Catholic research institute. \u201cHe wants good bishops, regardless of how conservative or liberal they are.\u201d <\/span>
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>Cardinal Burke still serves as the prefect of the Vatican\u2019s highest canonical court, but analysts say his removal from the Congregation for Bishops will sharply reduce his influence, especially over personnel changes in American churches.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cThe Congregation for Bishops is the most important congregation in the Vatican,\u201d said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest and the author of \u201cInside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.\u201d<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cIt decides who are going to be the bishops all over the world,\u201d he added. \u201cThis is what has the most direct impact on the life of the local church.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nNote that when Archbishop of S. Louis, Burke publicly announced that he was refusing communion to John Kerry.<\/p>\n
This is a substantive change, assuming that he lives long enough,*<\/sup> for them to take.<\/p>\n*<\/sup>I am not suggesting a Da Vinci Code<\/i> type conspiracy, I am merely observing that he is 75 years old.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For all that Pope Francis has said about changing the focus of the church from right wing agitprop to helping the poor and doing good, it is in the bureaucracy, particularly the personnel structures where change has to be made. Well the rubber has officially met the road, as he canned a notoriously right wing …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1010,975,978,1021],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-employment","category-politics","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186568"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}