Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke: Message for the Holiest Week of the Year

Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke
5 April 2020
Palm Sunday

Dear Friends,

From the beginning of my service as Bishop of a diocese, it seemed that every year as the celebrations of Christmas and Easter approached, there would be a profoundly sad event in the diocese or difficult crisis to face for the good of the diocese. Just as I was anticipating with joy the celebrations of the great mysteries of our salvation, something would happen, which, from a human point of view, put a dark cloud over the celebrations and called into question the joy they inspired. Once, when I commented to a brother Bishop about this distressingly too regular experience, he simply responded: “It is Satan, trying to steal your joy.”

It makes sense that Satan whom Our Lord describes as “a murderer from the beginning, … a liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8, 44) wants to hide from our eyes the great realities of the Incarnation and Redemption, wants to distract us from the liturgical rites through which we not only celebrate those truths but receive the immeasurable and unceasing graces they have won for us. Satan wants to convince us that loss and death, and the sadness and fear which naturally accompany them show Christ to be false, falsify His Redemptive Incarnation, and show our faith and the joy it naturally inspires to be a lie.  ….

Read more here:  https://www.cardinalburke.com/presentations/holiest-week