(Editor’s Note: Below is Dexter Duggan’s review of and commentary on Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke’s new book Hope for the World: To Unite All Things in Christ. An Interview with Guillaume d’Alancon. Ignatius Press, San Francisco, ISBN 978-1-62164-116-2, 123 pages paperback, $14.95, 2016. Visit ignatius.com or call 1-800-651-1531.
(We are featuring the review on our editorial page because of the book’s importance.)
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Hope, rightfully one of the seven virtues, ultimately looks toward the reward of everlasting Heaven, for which God created everyone. But some people, whose numbers are unknown to us now, choose to reject this bliss.
Why would anyone refuse to accept unbounded joy when the alternative is the everlasting deep suffering of Hell?
Biblical wisdom informs us that our temporal path is strewn with temptations and deceptions to make us choose wrongly and chain us into the cruel custody of God’s prime enemy, Satan. This supremely evil spirit let his pride lead him to reject his Creator and then resolve to mislead fallible humans into joining him in his awful ocean of unquenchable fire.
Although God welcomes every person’s honest, possibly faltering attempts to find Him and His bountiful goodness while passing through this brief life on a small planet, the pilgrim best turns to the Church on Earth as the proven guide past Satan’s snares and serpents. That’s why the Evil One hates the Church so deeply and intrudes into her gardens when a fissure in the wall opens.
In this extended conversation with French author Guillaume d’Alancon that can be read in a few hours, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke recalls his early life that resembled many others’ in mid-20th century America. A faithful, hard-working Catholic family on a Midwest farm, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, familiar parish life and practices, an understanding they were “part of a Church that spread throughout the whole world.”
It seemed a traditional safe haven. But the Midwest is known to suffer tornados, even an ecclesiastical one that arose elsewhere and spread in the 1960s “throughout the whole world.”
Burke, born in 1948, was strongly attracted to the priesthood and entered his diocese’s minor seminary in Wisconsin in 1962, just as the first session of the Second Vatican Council began.
Another chapter in the reliable Church he knew, the beginnings of the council were “met with great enthusiasm,” an event that the young Burke considered “an extraordinary way of sharing the great richness of the life and practice of the Church.”
There had been no general demand among the laity for such a major Church council, but people mainly deferred to a chief shepherd who deemed the gathering in Rome advisable.
However, the generally unanticipated consequences shook Catholicism to the core as well as the world around it, leaving the Church exposed to hostile influences assaulting it with increasing energy up until today, including the evil tentacles of the Barack Obama government in the U.S., which Burke specifically notes is even trying to forbid the Church from applying her own law in her own institutions.
Be it noted that bullies like Obama don’t attack strong bodies they fear, but cowering ones like bishops’ conferences that seek to please his left-wing politics rather than courageously stand against his aggressive immorality that is fueled by everlasting fires.
The Wisconsin youngster freshly entering the seminary more than 50 years ago, along with his surviving contemporaries of that time and all born since, still are buffeted by wild winds loosed then.
Burke recalls Blessed Paul VI, who succeeded St. John XXIII in presiding over the council and then overseeing its changes, saying in 1972 that the smoke of Satan had entered into the Church.
Young people today may have a hard time understanding the institution and motherhood of the Catholic Church as they were firmly established and relied upon in nearly the first two-thirds of the 20th century.
They were not beyond need of reform, but in many ways religious radicals and their liberal media allies upended renewal into revolution.
Among many examples: loving devotional practices were ridiculed and abandoned, priests and nuns fled their vocations, people stopped attending church regularly, students even in Catholic schools didn’t understand their own religion, an ill-informed conscience was considered an authentic guide to behavior.
This was a sharp contrast with early in the 20th century, when St. Pius X was a great Pope who reformed “in continuity,” Burke says, instead of rupture — thereby leaving a stronger Church and believers back then.
Burke was “very much inspired” in 2005 when Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Curia on correctly interpreting conciliar reforms by applying the understanding of “reform in continuity” rather than “discontinuity and rupture.”
But why did people at the time of Vatican II allow developments to get so out of hand? The cardinal suggests that people “assumed too much that the faith and the practice of it were things acquired once and for all,” while at the same time holding “a very strong but erroneous feeling of human progress.”
In every age the Church finds herself in some way in conflict with the world, Burke says, sometimes more so than others, such as when her Founder Himself was executed. But the cardinal takes hope in the future, with “young people…thirsting to hear the truths of the faith,” and renewed families and liturgy.
“Worship centered on man is a self-contradiction,” Burke says, “and this is what led many people to stop attending Sunday Mass and other sacramental celebrations.”
Among other observations:
— Appointing good bishops “is essential for the proclamation of the Gospel”;
— Christians must be involved in politics rather than leave the field to those who oppose the natural law;
— People should seek out a Catholic church where Mass is celebrated properly rather than simply attend the church closest to them;
— The poor are best aided by the works of the Church, which “are sustained by the love of Christ.” The bureaucratic system of the state does not work, “because it is not animated by charity.”
Burke says his mother suffered a serious illness when she was pregnant with him in 1948, and a doctor suggested she have an abortion so she could better care for her other children, but she refused. “My parents told him that they believed in God, and that Christ would give them the necessary help.”
This is a strong reminder, as pro-lifers say, that every life counts. If the doctor had prevailed, a future cardinal of the Catholic Church would have been dumped anonymously into some pan and never heard from again.
Just, no doubt, as future presidents, bishops, entertainers, inventors, pundits, and even simply boyfriends and girlfriends already have been destroyed in frenzied liberals’ — like Hillary Clinton — permissive-abortion madness.
In his own ministry, Burke adds later, he learned that post-abortive women can have difficulty forgiving themselves and accepting God’s forgiveness.
One unfortunately can see evidence of this in the stridency of pro-abortion militants. Yet, Burke says, Jesus “opens the riches of His heart to those who, despite their sin, dare to turn to Him with trust.”
The cardinal, who has learned much, has much to teach in a time of continued Church uncertainty.
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