Parish priest Gabriel Burke denied Holy Communion to pro-abortion politician Colm Burke at the funeral of a long-time party friend in Whitechurch, County Cork, Ireland, on Friday.
Colm Burke is a minister of state and a member of Ireland's Fine Gael party.
Rev. Burke told the politician that he was automatically excommunicated. The politician had voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment, which had banned the introduction of abortion in Ireland, ahead of a referendum in 2018.
Politician Burke has contacted the Diocese of Cloyne. He wants to clarify his status in relation to attending Eucharists.
A spokesman for the diocese of Cloyne said that Bishop William Crean of Cloyne would be contacting the politician.
'I gave him to the count of three to move on' - Cork TD refused communion at funeral mass over abortion legislation
The priest said Mr. Burke approached him intentionally to provoke a reaction - the TD has denied these claims
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BY EOIN SHORTISS
UPDATED
Fr Gabriel Burke was last year invested as a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre - one of the world's oldest Chivalric orders. It was founded during the First Crusade to defend the Holy Sepulchre in 1096 AD (Image: Cloyne Diocese)
Fr. Gabriel Burke refused to give Fine Gael Minister Colm Burke the sacrament at a requiem mass at the St. Patrick's Chuch in Whitechurch on Friday morning, July 12. The priest said he believed that any politician who voted for abortion in Dáil Éireann was "participating in evil" and should not be allowed to receive the rite.
Speaking to CorkBeo, Fr. Burke said the move had 'nothing to do' with the referendum, but was instead due to the TD's work with abortion legislation in Ireland. He also claimed Mr. Burke had been refused communion twice in church before, and believes that he approached him intentionally during the mass to prompt a reaction.
Minister Colm Burke was refused communion (Image: Gareth Chaney/Collins)
He said: "He put out his hand and I gave him a blessing, and I told him that nobody was entitled to receive communion. I then gave him to the count of three to move on before I went to the next person.
"He as a senator voted the abortion legislation in - he didn't have to, he chose to vote for abortion. He didn't do it in any way to lessen the demand for abortion in Ireland. He could have done differently as a Catholic. This is his third time coming up to receive communion, and his third time being refused."
The priest added that he made his decision based on statements from Pope Francis, and believed that Mr. Burke was "playing to the gallery" as there was a camera recording in the church.
"Job on the Ash Heap," by José de Ribera, c.1630. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The simplicity of the righteous is made a subject of derision. The wisdom of this world hideth our true feelings by artifice, and useth language to conceal our thoughts; this is the wisdom which demonstrated the truth of falsehood, and showeth the falsehood of the truth.
This kind of shrewdness the young acquire by practice, and children pay for the learning it. Those who are good at this look down upon their neighbours; those who are bad at it are humble and timid, and wonder at it in others. They regard this astuteness too, wrong though it be, with wistful admiration, under softened epithets.
Unstraightforwardness is called good breeding. The principles of the world teach those who entertain them, to try and rise to distinction, and when they have attained the bubble of glory which is so soon to pass away, to feel it sweet to have at their feet them on whom they may wreak rich revenge.
These principles teach a man, as long as he is strong enough, to give way to nobody else, and, if he hath no chance by force, to try and attain his object by diplomacy.
The wisdom of the righteous is the contrary of all this. They seek to avoid deception, to give their thoughts a clear expression in their words, to love the truth because it is the truth, to avoid falsehood, and rather to suffer than to inflict evil.
Such are they who seek not to avenge themselves for wrong, and deem it gain to be despised for the truth's sake. This their simplicity is made a subject of derision, for such as are wise in this world believe the purity of their virtue to be simple foolery. Whatsoever is done innocently, they consider without doubt stupid. Such works as the truth approveth are idiotic, when tried by carnal standards of wisdom. After all, what stupider thing is there in this world than to express our real thoughts in our words, to keep nothing quiet by skilful tact, to repay no injuries, to pray for them which curse us, to seek poverty, to give up property, to strive not with such as take from us, to turn the other cheek to the smiter?
From the Book of Moral Reflections upon Job, written by Pope St. Gregory the Great.
(N.B. Cover-up. Big time... the FBI was controlling the site of the shooting afterward when Hawley went to inspect and they told him "Get out of here", attempted to bar him from access. Incredible.)
Story by Audrey Conklin
Whistleblowers have told Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley that a law enforcement officer who was assigned to monitor the roof of a building that would-be former President Trump assassin Thomas Crooks fired from on July 13 left their post because it was "too hot."
Crooks, 20, fired multiple rounds from the roof of American Glass Research (AGR) Building 6, which was outside the rally perimeter but had a direct line of sight to where the former president was standing on stage at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
"This comes from a whistleblower with direct knowledge of the Secret Service plan and setup that day," Hawley said. "And what this whistleblower tells my office is that there was at least one law enforcement person assigned to the roof itself. In other words, the plan called for a law enforcement individual to be on the roof at all times during the rally. And that did not happen. And what the whistleblower tells me is the law enforcement individual who was assigned to that roof abandoned it."
Butler's temperature reached a high of 92 degrees on July 13, and prior to the assassination attempt, emergency personnel at the rally were mostly focused on attending to people suffering from heat-related illnesses.
Knights of Columbus Supreme Knight Patrick Kelly speaks with EWTN News President and COO Montse Alvarado on Thursday, July 11, 2024, regarding the organization's decision to cover mosaics by the accused abuser Father Marko Rupnik in chapels in Washington, D.C., and Connecticut. | Credit: EWTN News
The Knights of Columbus announced Thursday it will cover mosaics by the accused abuser Father Marko Rupnik in Washington, D.C., and Connecticut, a dramatic move that represents the strongest public stand yet by a major Catholic organization regarding the former Jesuit’s embattled art.
The 2.1-million-member lay Catholic fraternal order said July 11 it would use fabric to cover the floor-to-ceiling mosaics in the two chapels of the St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington and in the chapel at the Knights’ headquarters in New Haven, Connecticut — at least until the completion of a formal Vatican investigation into the Slovenian priest’s alleged abuse.
Patrick Kelly, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, told EWTN News Thursday the opaque material would be installed “very soon” but gave no firm timetable. The Knights said in a statement released Thursday afternoon that the artwork may later be more permanently hidden with a plaster covering after the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issues its ruling on Rupnik.
The decision by the Knights to cover the sprawling works, which envelop both spaces, was made at the end of a comprehensive, confidential review process that included consultations with sexual abuse victims and those who minister to them, art historians, pilgrims to the shrine, bishops, and moral theologians.
The Knights of Columbus have decided to cover these mosaics because our first concern must be for victims of sexual abuse, who have already suffered immensely in the Church, and who may be further injured by the ongoing display of the mosaics at the shrine,” Kelly said in the statement.
“While opinions varied among those consulted,” he said, “there was a strong consensus to prioritize the needs of victims, especially because the allegations are current, unresolved, and horrific.”
“Newly Ordained, and Leaning Right in Theology and Politics”
Priests: Young, Confident and Conservative In an era of deep divisions in the church, newly ordained priests overwhelmingly lean right in their theology, practices and politics.
July 10, 2024
On a sunny afternoon in May, Zachary Galante was sitting in a conference room in St. Francis de Sales Seminary with several other young men, talking about what it meant for them to choose the Catholic priesthood in the year 2024. The next morning, they would make lifelong promises of celibacy and obedience, and they were palpably elated by the prospect.
“It’s a beautiful life,” Deacon Galante, soon to become Father Galante, said.
There was a time where the church “maybe apologized for being Catholic,” he said later in the conversation. He and the other new priests agreed they were called to something different: advancing the Catholic faith, even the parts that could seem out of place in an increasingly hostile world. “The church is Catholic, and so we should announce that joyfully,”he said.
In an era of deep divisions in the American Catholic Church, and ongoing pain over the continuing revelations of sexual abuse by priests over decades, there is increasing unity among the men joining the priesthood: They are overwhelmingly conservative in their theology, their liturgical tastes and their politics. Priests ordained since 2010 “are clearly the most conservative cohort of priests we’ve seen in a long time,” said Brad Vermurlen, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, who has studied the rightward shift of the American priesthood. Surveys tracking the opinions of priests have found that, starting in the 1980s, each new wave of priests in the United States is noticeably more conservative than the one before it, Dr. Vermurlen said.
His and his colleagues’ analysis found newer priests were significantly more conservative than their elders on questions including whether homosexual behavior is always a sin, and whether women should be able to serve as deacons and priests, for example.
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“The church is Catholic, and so we should announce that joyfully,” said Father Zachary Galante.
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The class of Milwaukee seminarians from St. Francis de Sales lying prostrate during their ordination, symbolizing their dependence on God.
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Every priest at the ordination mass placed their hands upon the men joining their ranks that day.
More than 80 percent of priests ordained since 2020 describe themselves as theologically “conservative/orthodox” or “very conservative/orthodox,” according to a nationally representative survey of 3,500 priests published by the Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America. Foreign-born priests in the United States, a significant presence as ordination rates remain below replacement levels, are less conservative theologically than their American-born peers. But still, not a single surveyed priest who was ordained after 2020 described himself as “very progressive.”
Politically, the trend is similar, with almost all priests ordained in 2020 or later describing themselves as moderate or conservative.
That represents a sharp contrast with priests ordained in the 1960s, about half of whom describe themselves as politically liberal, and an even greater share as theologically progressive.
In the near future, in other words, the liberal Catholic priest could essentially be extinct in the United States. The shift toward more uniform conservatism puts the rising generations of priests increasingly at odds with secular culture, which has broadly moved to the left on questions of gender, sexuality, reproductive issues and roles for women.
The Catholic population itself in the United States has historically been politically diverse, and people in the pews do not always endorse church teachings on issues like abortion, birth control and the meaning of the eucharist. Changing attitudes will reshape parish life, where priests choose topics for homilies and have discretion over matters like whether girls can volunteer as altar servers and lay people can assist in the distribution of Communion. It will also influence the leadership ranks of the American church, which already has a global reputation for conservatism, and antagonism to Pope Francis’s more pastoral tone in leadership. That gap is poised to harden as current bishops retire and die.
The tilt partly reflects broader cultural changes, including the fact that liberals are becoming increasingly secular and having fewer children, said Michael Sean Winters, a columnist for National Catholic Reporter, a left-leaning newspaper. Today, “there are fewer liberals in the pews with large families,” he said, adding that parents with more children have typically been more willing to offer one of them to the church.
Mr. Winters, who attended seminary himself for a few years in the 1980s before deciding not to pursue ordination, said he was concerned that some conservative priests take an overly nostalgic view of history, imagining a golden era in which church teaching was widely respected and obeyed. But he takes comfort in the fact that a majority of a parish priest’s duties are not defined by ideology. “The day-in, day-out practice of burying the dead, baptizing the young and preparing couples for marriage — there’s not really a left or right cast to that,” he said.
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Almost all priests ordained in 2020 or later described themselves as politically moderate or conservative, according to one survey.
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Priests have discretion over matters like whether or not girls can volunteer as altar servers.
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The Catholic population in the United States has historically been politically diverse.
Today’s young priests don’t see themselves as a conservative insurgency, but as part of a new generation who embrace difficult church teachings rather than soft-pedaling them in what they see as the misguided pursuit of big-tent evangelism.
In an attempt to make the church seem more welcoming and difficult teachings easier to accept, Father Galante said, generations of clergy softened expectations around everything from regular prayer to cohabitation before marriage to dressing nicely for Sunday Mass.
Many priests in the 1970s and ’80s, he said, “were looking at the world and saying, ‘The world is changing, we need to change, too.’” That approach didn’t work, as he sees it. Among Father Galante’s peers in Catholic grade school, only a handful out of more than 30 still practice the faith, he said. Mass attendance has been broadly declining for decades.
Many young priests see morals and political sensibilities having swung dramatically, even in their living memory.
Father David Sweeney, 31, who was ordained with Father Galante, recalled that it was only during his freshman year in college that President Obama first endorsed same-sex marriage. Today, the idea of the country’s top Democrat not sharing that view is almost unimaginable.
“That’s a core tenet of our faith that our culture has shifted drastically on in the last 12 years,” Father Sweeney said. “If we’re saying that we’re holding to eternal truth, something that is changeless, and the world changes, well, now I guess I’ve changed in my relation to the world.”
Father Galante added, “Maybe we’re more conservative now because the culture moved, not because we moved.” Father Galante and Father Sweeney were two of nine priests to be ordained in the archdiocese of Milwaukee, the largest group in the ecclesiastical region in more than 30 years.
“Young guys today desire sacrifice, they desire to do something great with their life,” said Father Luke Strand, a former director of vocations for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. Father Strand, 43, serves as rector at St. Francis de Sales Seminary, which has sent 35 men on to be ordained in the last three years, 20 for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. Two of his own brothers are also priests.
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“Young guys today desire sacrifice, they desire to do something great with their life,” said Father Luke Strand.
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Seminarians playing cornhole at St. Francis De Sales Seminary.
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Catholic priests make lifelong promises of celibacy and obedience.
St. Francis de Sales has become a place where young men experience “a deep sense of fraternity,” Father Strand said. On Saturday nights, the men watch sports together, play basketball in the gym, or bowl in the seminary’s small alley. Promotional videos for the seminary introduce the students like football recruits.
“It becomes really attractive for a young man to then say, ‘Boy, am I called to this?’” he said. “There are a lot of normal guys here.”
The idea of “normalcy” looms large in Catholic seminaries in the long wake of revelations of widespread sexual abuse of children and young adults by clergy over decades. Applicants are now screened for psychosexual maturity, and St. Francis de Sales’s program includes an emphasis on “healthy and balanced celibacy.”
For priests like Father Strand, the community’s palpable confidence is a part of its success. He cited a quotation he attributed to Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, a former archbishop of Milwaukee: No man will give his life for a question mark; he will for an exclamation point. Hours after his ordination ceremony at the cathedral in downtown Milwaukee, Father Galante was presiding over his first Mass at St. Frances Cabrini Parish in West Bend, about 40 miles northwest of the city. It was the parish in which he had been baptized, confirmed and raised. More than 600 people attended the two-hour Saturday afternoon Mass, a crowd so large that ushers ran out of bulletins and had to scramble to line up extra chairs along the back wall of the sanctuary.
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Hours after being ordained, Father Galante distributed communion at his first Mass at his childhood parish, St. Frances Cabrini.
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A photo of Father Galante with Bishop Jeffrey Haines, when he was a priest at Father Galante’s childhood church.
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A reception for Father Galante after he celebrated his first Mass at St. Frances Cabrini.
After the service, attendees walked across the parking lot to the parish’s school, where men and women from the church had set up long tables of ham sandwiches, pasta salads and cookies in the gym, with a beverage station that included coffee and Miller High Life. The mood was cheerful. A few teenage altar servers, who had taken off their robes and were sitting together with plates of sandwiches and brownies, said they were thinking of becoming priests themselves someday. Father Galante was not eating. He was standing at the end of the hallway outside, facing a growing line of parishioners who were waiting to receive one of his first blessings as a priest. One by one, he greeted them, smiled, placed his hands on their heads or their shoulders, murmured a prayer, shook their hands. Outside, the sun was setting over his hometown. His work had just begun.
A version of this article appears in print on July 11, 2024, Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Newly Ordained, and Leaning Right in Theology and Politics. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Francis Appointed Homosex Propagandist for Ex-Synod’s Study Group on 'Controversial Issues'
Francis has named on 9 July homosexual and paganism activists among the seven members of the synod's study group on 'controversial doctrinal, pastoral and ethical issues'. They are:
1. Monsignor Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio, Archbishop of Lima, Peru, an idolater, who presided over a Pachamama procession in his cathedral in September 2019, called Christ a layman, and twice refused to give Communion to a kneeling faithful.
2. Monsignore Filippo Iannone, archbishop and Prefect of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts.
3. Monsignor Piero Coda, Secretary General of the International Theological Commission and the house theologian of the Focolari movement.
4. Rev. Maurizio Chiodi, Professor of Moral Theology at the 'John Paul II Institute' in Rome, and a homosexual activist who has argued that homosexual acts can sometimes be "morally good", and who believes that contraception can be necessary for "responsible" parenthood.
5. Father Carlo Casalone SJ, Professor of Moral Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome.
6. Sister Josée Ngalula, Professor of Dogmatic Theology in Kinshasa, Congo.
7. Stella Morra, Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome.
Card. Burke: "Prophétis meis"
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Non relíquit hóminem nocére eis: et corrípuit pro eis reges.
Nolíte tángere christos meos: et in prophétis meis nolíte malignári.
-- Sanctae Mariae in Sabbat...
Dominica X Post Pentecosten: "Self-righteousness"
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From the Holy Gospel according to Luke
*Luke 18:9-14*
*A*t that time: Jesus spoke this parable unto certain which trusted in
themselves that they were ...
