Bernie And Pope Francis

I inadvertently stumbled onto Fox & Friends when I woke up at 4 am Sunday. The producers seemed to have invited some random right-wing priest on to paint a weird picture of Bernie's quick visit to the Vatican. Fox has been asserting all week, Bernie had invited himself to the Vatican-- even as they reported on how a "left-wing bishop," Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, who happens to be a close aide to Pope Francis and the Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, had invited him. According to this random dude with a clerical collar, Bernie was staying-- was staying with an implication he chose where to stay-- in the same guest house where the Pope lives. If Bernie and Jane were placed in a room near the Pope, that was something carefully thought out by the Vatican, not by Bernie or his campaign. Dude with collar then claimed Bernie was waiting for the Pope-- waiting as in waylaid-- in the hallway when the Pope was leaving for Lesbos. The absurdity of what Fox was trying to get across, that somehow Bernie ambushed the Pope was as silly as Fox's overall world view. If Bernie and Jane were in the hall when the Pope was passing by, it's because the Vatican summoned him, not because Jeff Weaver, Tad Devine and Michael Briggs plotted out a strategy to bring the two men into physical proximity. In fact, on Friday night while Bernie was having dinner, he was told that the Pope would like to talk with him personally the following morning.

Despite the picture Fox was trying to portray, Pope Francis had a 5-10 minute meeting in the foyer of the Domus of Santa Marta that included Bernie and Jane along with Bernie advisor Jeffrey Sachs and his wife and, translating, Bishop Sánchez Sorondo.

[F]inal word, it seemed, came Friday afternoon in the form of a handwritten letter from the pope apologizing to conference attendees for his absence.

“I will keep them all in my prayers and good wishes, and send them my heartfelt thanks for their participation,” he wrote. “May the Lord bless you. Fraternally, Franciscus.”

Around 5:30 p.m. Friday, the conference’s business ended and Mr. Sanders made an appointment for dinner at the Casa Santa Marta with his foreign policy adviser, Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and a fellow conference participant.

Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane, sat with Mr. Sachs and his wife, Sonia, for a soup and buffet dinner, where they were joined by Bishop Sánchez Sorondo and Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, the pope’s right-hand man and one of the Vatican’s top power players.

“It was a wide-ranging conversation,” Mr. Sachs said. “It was about issues of the church and its history, about Honduras and foreign policy.”

But the most important words occurred in the middle of dinner, when a personal secretary for Francis arrived with the news Mr. Sanders had been hoping for, Mr. Sachs said.

If Mr. Sanders were in the foyer of the Casa Santa Marta at 6 a.m. the next day, he would be able to speak briefly with Francis as the pope headed to the airport for his Saturday trip to Greece, where the pope would be addressing the migrant crisis.

So early Saturday morning, Mr. Sanders stood in the marble foyer, which looks out onto a large cobblestone drive just inside the Vatican walls. Joining him were his wife, Mr. Sachs and his wife and Bishop Sánchez Sorondo, the senator’s de facto Vatican fixer.

The pope, speaking to reporters on his plane later in the day, described the meeting. “This morning when I was leaving, Senator Sanders was there,” he said, adding, “He knew I was leaving at that time, and he had the courtesy to greet me.”

No photos of the encounter were permitted, but Mr. Sachs said the senator was delighted all the same. He was beaming as he left the guesthouse, and celebrated the informal audience with a victory lap of sorts in St. Peter’s Basilica along with Mr. Sachs and the bishop, passing Bernini’s Baldacchino, a monumental bronze canopy over the papal altar, and Michelangelo’s Pietà.

Aware that his every statement is parsed for deeper meaning, Francis said he was simply being polite, not political.

“I shook his hand and nothing more,” he said. “If someone thinks that greeting someone means getting involved in politics,” he added, laughing, “I recommend that he find a psychiatrist!”

But the candidate was excited to talk about his coveted souvenir.

“I conveyed to him my great admiration for the extraordinary work that he is doing all over the world in demanding that morality be part of our economy,” Mr. Sanders told reporters aboard the plane as it rushed him back to the campaign in New York.

Bernie and Pope Francis share a progressive vision around the dignity of mankind that includes peace and economic opportunity that is not shared by anyone else running for president. Bernie has been singing Pope Francis' praises since he became Pope in March of 2013 and chose to be named for St Francis of Assisi, best known as an advocate for the poor and down-trodden. Before he declared Pope he had said of St. Francis that "He brought to Christianity an idea of poverty against the luxury, pride, vanity of the civil and ecclesiastical powers of the time," a message that would be taken as a full on attack against the Republicans and the Clintons, all of whom are living on that low evolutionary plane of luxury, pride and vanity and none of whom are remotely fit for leadership roles.

The paragraphs below are from the speech Bernie delivered at the Vatican, the transcript of which he released even though Clinton is still doggedly refusing to release the transcripts of the speeches she gave to the worshippers of the golden calf, 12 of which netted her a cool $2.9 million. Ask yourself why Bernie was happy to release the transcript of his speech, while Clinton is still tightly guarding the contents of hers. What is she hiding? New Yorkers can force her to release her speeches by refusing to vote for her Tuesday. Bernie:

The Church’s social teachings, stretching back to the first modern encyclical about the industrial economy, Rerum Novarum in 1891, to Centesimus Annus, to Pope Francis’s inspiring encyclical Laudato Si’ this past year, have grappled with the challenges of the market economy. There are few places in modern thought that rival the depth and insight of the Church’s moral teachings on the market economy.

Over a century ago, Pope Leo XIII highlighted economic issues and challenges in Rerum Novarum that continue to haunt us today, such as what he called “the enormous wealth of a few as opposed to the poverty of the many.”

And let us be clear. That situation is worse today. In the year 2016, the top one percent of the people on this planet own more wealth than the bottom 99 percent, while the wealthiest 60 people-- 60 people-- own more than the bottom half-- 3 1/2 billion people. At a time when so few have so much, and so many have so little, we must reject the foundations of this contemporary economy as immoral and unsustainable.

...We are now twenty-five years after the fall of Communist rule in Eastern Europe. Yet we have to acknowledge that Pope John Paul’s warnings about the excesses of untrammeled finance were deeply prescient. Twenty-five years after Centesimus Annus, speculation, illicit financial flows, environmental destruction, and the weakening of the rights of workers is far more severe than it was a quarter century ago. Financial excesses, indeed widespread financial criminality on Wall Street, played a direct role in causing the world’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

We need a political analysis as well as a moral and anthropological analysis to understand what has happened since 1991. We can say that with unregulated globalization, a world market economy built on speculative finance burst through the legal, political, and moral constraints that had once served to protect the common good. In my country, home of the world’s largest financial markets, globalization was used as a pretext to deregulate the banks, ending decades of legal protections for working people and small businesses. Politicians joined hands with the leading bankers to allow the banks to become “too big to fail.” The result: eight years ago the American economy and much of the world was plunged into the worst economic decline since the 1930s. Working people lost their jobs, their homes and their savings, while the government bailed out the banks.

Inexplicably, the United States political system doubled down on this reckless financial deregulation, when the U.S. Supreme Court in a series of deeply misguided decisions, unleashed an unprecedented flow of money into American politics. These decisions culminated in the infamous Citizen United case, which opened the financial spigots for huge campaign donations by billionaires and large corporations to turn the U.S. political system to their narrow and greedy advantage. It has established a system in which billionaires can buy elections. Rather than an economy aimed at the common good, we have been left with an economy operated for the top 1 percent, who get richer and richer as the working class, the young and the poor fall further and further behind. And the billionaires and banks have reaped the returns of their campaign investments, in the form of special tax privileges, imbalanced trade agreements that favor investors over workers, and that even give multinational companies extra-judicial power over governments that are trying to regulate them.

But as both Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis have warned us and the world, the consequences have been even direr than the disastrous effects of financial bubbles and falling living standards of working-class families. Our very soul as a nation has suffered as the public lost faith in political and social institutions. As Pope Francis has stated: “Man is not in charge today, money is in charge, money rules.” And the Pope has also stated: “We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.”

And further: “While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling. This imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good.”

Pope Francis has called on the world to say: “No to a financial system that rules rather than serves” in Evangeli Gaudium. And he called upon financial executives and political leaders to pursue financial reform that is informed by ethical considerations. He stated plainly and powerfully that the role of wealth and resources in a moral economy must be that of servant, not master.

The widening gaps between the rich and poor, the desperation of the marginalized, the power of corporations over politics, is not a phenomenon of the United States alone. The excesses of the unregulated global economy have caused even more damage in the developing countries. They suffer not only from the boom-bust cycles on Wall Street, but from a world economy that puts profits over pollution, oil companies over climate safety, and arms trade over peace. And as an increasing share of new wealth and income goes to a small fraction of those at the top, fixing this gross inequality has become a central challenge. The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great economic issue of our time, the great political issue of our time, and the great moral issue of our time. It is an issue that we must confront in my nation and across the world.

Pope Francis has given the most powerful name to the predicament of modern society: the Globalization of Indifference. “Almost without being aware of it,” he noted, “we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.” We have seen on Wall Street that financial fraud became not only the norm but in many ways the new business model. Top bankers have shown no shame for their bad behavior and have made no apologies to the public. The billions and billions of dollars of fines they have paid for financial fraud are just another cost of doing business, another short cut to unjust profits.

Some might feel that it is hopeless to fight the economic juggernaut, that once the market economy escaped the boundaries of morality it would be impossible to bring the economy back under the dictates of morality and the common good. I am told time and time again by the rich and powerful, and the mainstream media that represent them, that we should be “practical,” that we should accept the status quo; that a truly moral economy is beyond our reach. Yet Pope Francis himself is surely the world’s greatest demonstration against such a surrender to despair and cynicism. He has opened the eyes of the world once again to the claims of mercy, justice and the possibilities of a better world. He is inspiring the world to find a new global consensus for our common home.

I see that hope and sense of possibility every day among America’s young people. Our youth are no longer satisfied with corrupt and broken politics and an economy of stark inequality and injustice. They are not satisfied with the destruction of our environment by a fossil fuel industry whose greed has put short term profits ahead of climate change and the future of our planet. They want to live in harmony with nature, not destroy it. They are calling out for a return to fairness; for an economy that defends the common good by ensuring that every person, rich or poor, has access to quality health care, nutrition and education.

As Pope Francis made powerfully clear last year in Laudato Si’, we have the technology and know-how to solve our problems-- from poverty to climate change to health care to protection of biodiversity. We also have the vast wealth to do so, especially if the rich pay their way in fair taxes rather than hiding their funds in the world’s tax and secrecy havens-- as the Panama Papers have shown.

The challenges facing our planet are not mainly technological or even financial, because as a world we are rich enough to increase our investments in skills, infrastructure, and technological know-how to meet our needs and to protect the planet. Our challenge is mostly a moral one, to redirect our efforts and vision to the common good. Centesimus Annus, which we celebrate and reflect on today, and Laudato Si’, are powerful, eloquent and hopeful messages of this possibility. It is up to us to learn from them, and to move boldly toward the common good in our time.

Margaret Archer-- Nasty, Nasty

I woke up yesterday at around 4am and fumbled around for the TV remote to get some light on in the room. And who should come up on my TV but BERNIE! What a happy surprise! He was chatting with the Morning Joe crew, most of whom were making an attempt to act like humans for a change. All nice! And then they started talking about how Bernie had been invited to speak at the Vatican on the morality of economics or something like that and I was thinking, "Oh, this is going to be a good day!"

That didn't last long. Once I got downstairs to my computer, there was already a budding scandal, set off by an academic, Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Does she ever sound like the worst sadistic nun I ever heard of from my Catholic friends when I was a kid, the one who took great joy in inflicting pain and drawing blood.

It has also inserted Sanders into a dispute among Vatican officials. The president of the academy said Friday that Sanders didn’t follow proper protocol by failing to contact her office, and that his presence threatens to make the event political. The academy’s chancellor said he arranged the invitation and defended the Vermont senator.

“Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons,” Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which is hosting the conference, said in a telephone interview. “I think in a sense he may be going for the Catholic vote but this is not the Catholic vote and he should remember that and act accordingly-- not that he will.”

"Not that he will?" Is she a soothsayer as well as a professor who can't express an idea in a way that anyone can understand? "'The president of the academy organizing this event has not been contacted with monumental discourtesy,' she said, referring to herself" and continuing her incredible nastiness. Sounds like David Brock gave her 30 silver coins.

Bernie's spokesperson said Archer had it wrong and that he had been invited. The Chancellor of the Academy, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, a close aide to Pope Francis, didn't specifically call her a lying sack of shit or anything like that but he did mention to the media that he had extended the invitation to Bernie. Now that Hillary characters have started a whispering campaign that Bernie invited himself, the Bishop felt he needed to set the record straight. "I deny that, he said flatly. "It was not that way. He said it was his idea to invite Sanders. "This is not true and she knows it. I invited him with her consensus," said Sorondo, who is senior to Archer.

Sanchez Sorondo: "We are interested in having him because we have two presidents coming from Latin America, I thought it would be good to have an authoritative voice from North America."

A copy of the invitation to Sanders provided by the chancellor’s office is dated March 30 and signed by Sanchez Sorondo. The letter says he’s inviting the senator “on behalf of” Archer and the conference organizers. An announcement about Sanders’s participation, also under Sanchez Sorondo’s name, was released early Friday.

...The conference Sanders will attend marks the 25th anniversary of an encyclical by Pope John Paul II that criticized excesses of unfettered capitalism.

Archer, 73, is now laying low and won't respond to phone calls and e-mail requests from the media for a response to Sanchez Sorondo’s remarks, that seem to indicate she's off her rocker. Or maybe she just hates Jews. Or is violently anti-something Bernie stands for (like Choice or marriage equality)... who knows. But, as far as I know, she still hasn't apologized for her ugly, rude boorish remarks to the press. What a pitiful creature!

Satan's Man In Rome, Ray Burke, Knows Who To Blame For All His Woes: Women!

Right-wing drag queen, Raymond Cardinal Burke

Pope Francis demoted Raymond Cardinal Burke from a powerful Curia job to a ceremonial post once he recognized him as a cancer within the Vatican. But Burke is still a darling of the far right of the church and they still cover his hateful blatherings. Yesterday, the Pope met with Burke for 45 minutes, although the routine meeting had already been scheduled before Burke's latest hate-filled outburst about the feminization of the Church.

The 66-year-old American cardinal emerged as one of the leaders of the conservative camp at last fall’s Synod of Bishops on the family, at one point openly suggesting that Pope Francis owed the world an apology for sowing “confusion” about Catholic teaching on family matters, especially Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.

In an interview published three days ago, Burke returned to some of the same themes, complaining that the Catholic Church has become too “feminized” and suggesting that a drop in vocations to the priesthood may be related to widespread use of altar girls.

A Vatican spokesman told Crux on Thursday, however, that the meeting with Francis was “routine” in light of Burke’s new role.

In early November, Francis removed Burke as head of the Vatican’s highest court and appointed him to a largely ceremonial post as patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which today functions mostly as a philanthropic foundation.

The move was widely seen as a demotion, though in a recent interview with an Argentine journalist, Francis denied that the move was a punishment for the role Burke played in the synod and said he needed a “smart American” in the new role.

Whenever a cardinal receives a new position, the spokesman said, it’s customary to have an appointment with the pope to talk about it.

Moreover, the spokesman said, the meeting could not have been a response to Burke’s most recent interview, because it’s been on the pope’s calendar for at least the past 10 days.

Burke is a primitive woman-hater in the way that old-time, self-loathing homosexuals like Burke have been until recent decades. Best known for his outrageous drag outfits, Burke has been a coddler of predatory priests for his entire miserable career and has always stood in the way of the legitimate aspirations of Catholic women. In his latest screed against the post-Enlightenment Church, Burke, channelling another right-wing woman-hater, Rush Limbaugh, said that "the radical feminist movement strongly influenced the Church, leading the Church to constantly address women’s issues at the expense of addressing critical issues important to men; the importance of the father, whether in the union of marriage or not; the importance of a father to children; the importance of fatherhood for priests; the critical impact of a manly character; the emphasis on the particular gifts that God gives to men for the good of the whole society. The goodness and importance of men became very obscured... [the] "radical feminism which has assaulted the Church and society since the 1960s has left men very marginalized."

But many women will head to Mass this weekend and note that the priest, bishop and pope have something in common: They are all men, and the power they hold in institutional church structures hardly looks like marginalization.

In spite of Burke’s paranoid opinion that “rampant liturgical experimentation” resulted in men who were “really turned off” by the Mass, women will stand and recite a recently revised Nicene Creed that states that Christ died “for us men.” They will pray to a God referred to only by male pronouns even as God’s gender remains stubbornly mysterious. Even the language of the liturgy negates the presence of women.

Yet Burke is bewildered by women’s “self-focused attitudes” and “constant and insistent demanding of rights.” Women, he said, “respond very naturally to the invitation to be active in the Church.” And yet, when the sanctuary becomes “full of women,” and the parish activities and liturgy are influenced by them, these become “so feminine in many places that men do not want to get involved.”

...Burke argues that “feminized” priests have been so influenced by overbearing women that they have lost their sense of manhood. But it was that same generation of “feminized” priests who encouraged women to study theology, write for Catholic magazines, take up leadership roles in parishes and even educate future priests. Those priests see women as collaborators. They do not see women as something to be feared.

The problem with Burke’s idea of manhood is that it is oversimplified and based on antiquated notions of gender. Men, according to Burke, have “particular gifts,” they “make sacrifices” and defend their families with “chivalry.” They are “heroic” and should demonstrate a “manly identity” and “manly virtues.”

Women are “wonderful,” but that’s just about the only compliment Burke manages to pay them before he trashes the presence of altar girls in favor of Knights of the Altar who will “defend Christ” with their “chivalrous service.”

It would be easy here to point out that Burke also demands that “men need to dress and act like men” while having a reputation as a Vatican fashionista who often sports “elaborate silk and lace vestments.” One blog actually pairs photos of Cardinal Burke with ones of Liberace, and the resemblance is uncanny. Burke’s notions of gender may be woefully outdated, but his sense of style is wrought with irony.

Irony is perhaps the bottom-line takeaway from Burke’s ideas about gender. It is ironic that a man who wears silk and lace chooses to lecture men on what it means to be masculine.

It is ironic that the same man blames women for the drop in vocations to the priesthood when many of those women would make excellent priests.

It is ironic that women are considered a threat to a church that refers to itself as the “Bride of Christ.”

It is ironic that women who do the majority of catechesis at parishes, who educate priests, who write landmark works of theology and give birth to cardinals, bishops and popes are still not able to be leaders in the church. Because, according to Cardinal Burke, we’re just girls. And everyone knows girls are icky.

As Raw Story reminded us, "in his own time at the Vatican, Burke was called to account by his superiors for his lavish taste in ceremonial robes, donning a $20,000 jeweled hat for one prayer service and a cape with an elaborate 20-foot train that cost more than $30,000 for another. Burke was Cardinal of St. Louis from 2003 to 2008, a period during which he imported predator priests into his diocese from other areas in order to shield them from investigation. According to the clergy sex-abuse survivor advocacy group SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), Burke was 'reckless, deceptive and callous regarding predator priests, vulnerable kids and wounded victims' during his tenure."

Burke, and conservative men in general, have always, all through history, seen women as a dangerous "other" to be feared and controlled. Burke is a symbol of the sickness that infects the Church hierarchy and Pope's Francis' decision to sideline him was a very good one. Now he should shut him up and get him to stop maligning the faithful.

Miss Thing wants to tell Catholic men how to dress

Satan’s Man In The Vatican— Demoted Again

American fascist Raymond Burke, the satanic cardinal, loses his power over Church law

We’ve been covering slimy little neo-Nazi Raymond Cardinal Burke for years. He’s the far right’s and Satan’s representative in the Vatican and, before Pope Francis came along, seemed destined to turn the hands of time back on the Catholic Church to the 15th Century, which is where his worldview comes from. He’s the Ayn Rand of Catholicism, just more primitive and more partisan. Pope Francis has finally tossed him out on his ass.

Predictably, Burke had gone against the Pope at the Synod, claiming Pope Francis was trying to “weaken the church’s teaching and practice.”

“According to my understanding of the church’s teaching and discipline, no, it wouldn’t be correct,” Burke said, saying the pope had “done a lot of harm” by not stating “openly what his position is.” Burke said the Pope had given the impression that he endorses some of the most controversial parts of the Relatio, especially on questions of divorce, because of a German cardinal who gave an important speech suggesting a path to allowing people who had divorced and remarried to receive communion, Cardinal Walter Kasper, to open the synod’s discussion.

“The pope, more than anyone else as the pastor of the universal church, is bound to serve the truth,” Burke said. “The pope is not free to change the church’s teachings with regard to the immorality of homosexual acts or the insolubility of marriage or any other doctrine of the faith.”

Burke has publicly clashed with the pope since Francis took office in 2013, and he has come to represent the sidelining of culture warriors elevated by Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict and as the top doctrinal official under Pope John Paul II. Burke, who caused controversy while bishop of St. Louis by saying Catholics who voted for politicians supportive of abortion rights should not receive communion, went on Catholic television in 2013 to rebut remarks Pope Francis made to an interviewer that the church had become “obsessed” with abortion and sexuality to the exclusion of other issues, saying, “We can never talk enough about that as long as in our society innocent and defenseless human life is being attacked in the most savage way,” Burke said. While Francis famously responded to a question about homosexuality in 2013 by asking, “Who am I to judge?” Burke described homosexual “acts” as “always and everywhere wrong [and] evil” during an interview last week.

In the interview with BuzzFeed News, Burke confirmed publicly for the first time the rumors that he had been told Francis intended to demote him from the church’s chief guardian of canon law to a minor post as patron to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

“I very much have enjoyed and have been happy to give this service, so it is a disappointment to leave it,” Burke said, explaining that he hadn’t yet received a formal notice of transfer. “On the other hand, in the church as priests, we always have to be ready to accept whatever assignment we’re given. And so I trust, by accepting this assignment, I trust that God will bless me, and that’s what’s in the end most important.”

When the pope first took office, his pivot away from an emphasis on questions of sexuality were more a matter of personal tone rather than changes in church policy or personnel. There were rumors that he was trying to oust the man chosen by Pope Benedict to head the church’s office responsible for doctrine, Gerhard Müller, but last winter he instead elevated him from archbishop to cardinal. When word that Burke was on his way out began circulating last month, it signaled that Francis would take major steps to reshape the church. It coincided with the selection of a new archbishop of Chicago, Blase Cupich, whom Catholic progressives celebrated for positions like breaking with the American church hierarchy when it withheld its support for President Obama’s health reform law over questions of abortion and contraception.

Internal discontent among conservatives inside church leadership began to simmer over in the weeks leading up to the synod. Just before it began, Burke, Müller, and other senior cardinals published a book in several languages attacking the ideas laid out by Cardinal Walter Kasper on allowing those who had divorced and remarried to receive communion in a speech heartily praised by Pope Francis. It broke into open revolt at the midpoint of the synod, following publication of a document presented as a summary of discussions but that conservatives said misrepresented the debate by including passages on “welcoming homosexual persons” and discussing some of Kasper’s proposal on divorce. The backlash appeared to have been especially strong from the English-speaking world, which includes a large number of African and American bishops; in an apparent attempt to mollify anglophone conservatives, the Vatican released a new translation of the report that changed the phrase “welcoming homosexual persons” to “providing for homosexual persons” and made other small changes, while leaving the versions in all other languages unchanged.

The report is now being revised with feedback from small-group discussions held this week, and a final version is scheduled to be voted on on Saturday. Burke said he hoped that the committee writing the new report will produce a “worthy document,” but said his “trust is a little bit shaken” by the language in the interim draft he said lacks “a good foundation either in the sacred scriptures or in the church’s perennial teachings.”

But there seems to be little middle ground between Pope Francis’ worldview and Burke’s. Francis was president of the Argentinian bishops conference when that country passed a marriage equality bill in 2010 and reportedly tried to convince his colleagues to support a civil union proposal instead. He lost the internal battle and gave voice to the hard-line consensus that the law was “sent by the devil.” The fight over the bill left the church appearing out of step with the beliefs of many in Argentina, a country where 76% identify as Catholic but only 38.2% went to church in 2005, per the most recent data available from the Association of Religious Data Archives. While Francis has shown no sign he supports overhauling the church’s teachings that homosexuality is sinful, he seems to have taken from this experience a desire to downplay conflicts over sexuality in order to broaden the church’s message.

Burke isn’t being exiled to Malta and the Pope is keeping him in Rome where he can be watched. His job will be to head an organization charged with assisting the elderly, handicapped, children, homeless, those with terminal illness and leprosy in all parts of the world, as well as refugees and victims of natural disasters, epidemics and armed conflicts without distinction of race or religion.