His demotion of Cardinal Burke, a loyal but eloquent critic, could turn out to be his greatest mistake.
Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke.
Vatican politics is notoriously fickle, and media reports about who is in and who is out usually depend on the particular bias of the reporter. However, for months, reports from both the ecclesiastical left and the right were in agreement about the imminent demotion of the leading American cardinal in the Vatican: the Church’s chief justice, or, to give him his proper the title, the prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest judicial authority in the Church, after the pope — Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke. For once, it seems, the tittle-tattle over the evening limoncello was correct. Burke has been “promoted” downward to a position that is normally a sinecure for an elderly cardinal past his sell-by date. As the new cardinal protector of the Sovereign Order of Malta, Burke, a youthful 66, will now oversee the Knights of Malta, one of the oldest existing military orders in the Catholic Church. They are known today mainly for their works of charity.
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