Cardinal Burke speaking at the Rome Life Forum in Rome, May 2018.don Elvir Tabaković / Propstei_Paring
By Dorothy Cummings McLean and Natalia Dueholm, LifeSiteNews, June 13, 2018
WARSAW, June 13, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Ireland’s recent caving into the globalist agenda of abortion and same-sex “marriage” is partly due to silence coming from Rome, American Cardinal Raymond Burke said in an interview last week with Polish weekly “Sieci” magazine.
“In Ireland, during the campaign before the referendum on protection of the life of the unborn, just like before the previous referendum on so-called same-sex ‘marriage,’ people fighting in these battles did not receive support from Rome,” said the cardinal, “and [its own] bishops themselves defended moral principles too weakly.”
Burke called what happened in Ireland evidence of an “alarming” situation in the Church. One problem, he said, is that leaders within the Catholic Church herself are casting doubt upon Church teachings.
“There is no doubt about that,” the cardinal said. “The situation in the Church is alarming. This is above all because fundamental truths of faith are being undermined and questioned.”
“Moral teaching tells us that certain behaviors are evil, always and everywhere, and that they cannot be called good under any circumstance,” Burke continued. “This applies to sexual activity with a person of the same sex, and also to extramarital sexual relations. Now consent to this kind of practice is appearing also in the Church.”
“I repeat: it is very alarming. Currently there is also an absence of a strong leadership from Rome, which could make these matters clear and remove uncertainty.”
Cardinal Burke warned against allowing one’s Catholic faith to be removed from the public sphere, kept privately in homes and in church buildings.
“…People should understand that their life in Christ also means that they act in Christ also in the public sphere, and thus in politics, in education, in health care, and in business,” he said. “When our religiosity is only private, when it is connected only to what we do at home and in the church, it has no future. Such religiosity will not survive in the modern world.”
The cardinal pointed to Ireland as an example of what can happen to a Catholic country if faith is banished from public life.
“As far as I know, your government [in Poland] has a clever approach to tradition and faith, but the general direction of civilization is very dangerous,” he told the interviewer. “States are entering more and more into further aspects of life, into different areas of reality. They interfere with human life and they secularize it. And it ends with what happened in Ireland…”
This secularization leads to an abandonment of moral foundations that are not just Catholic but also, more fundamentally, natural law.
The spiritual state of Western Europe, the cardinal said, is in a parlous condition.
“The situation of Western Europe is hard, very serious,” he said. “It suffices to look at what is currently happening in the Church in Germany.”
There he finds the most serious cause for alarm because in Germany the Church itself, Burke asserted, has stopped defending the truths about marriage and Holy Communion.
“The Church herself is beginning to secularize,” he mourned. “The Church is entering into the outside world, to culture, without bringing a strong Christian message with her.”
He observed that although Poland still has a strong Catholic Christian culture, Poles need to protect it or else their nation will go the way of Ireland.
“Ireland was one of the most Catholic countries in the world,” he said, “and today it is one of the most secularized.”
Editor’s note: The Cardinal’s quotes were translated from Polish by LifeSiteNews’ Dorothy Cummings McLean
