Archbishop Raymond L. Burke: A Modern-Day Hero

On this past June 27th, Pope Benedict XVI appointed me to the office of prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. With the appointment, which took effect at noon in the Vatican (5 a.m. in St. Louis) on the same day, I ceased to be the Archbishop of St. Louis. In the afternoon of June 27th, the College of Consultors of the archdiocese, in accord with Church law, met and elected Bishop Robert J. Hermann to the office of archdiocesan administrator. As archdiocesan administrator, Bishop Hermann will govern the archdiocese, until the new archbishop is appointed. From my very close work with Bishop Hermann, over the past four years and five months, I can assure you that the governance of the archdiocese is in the best of hands. It is in the hands of a bishop of deepest faith and prayer.

Since I have regularly written a column for you in our archdiocesan newspaper, when I was your archbishop, I wanted to write to you, one last time, now no longer as your archbishop but as your former archbishop who continues to love you very much. I write simply to say "Thank you" and "Farewell."

As I commented during the news conference on the day of the announcement of my new appointment, my years of service in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, even though they have been relatively brief, have been years of intense grace for me. I have encountered in St. Louis a remarkable depth of Catholic faith, strongly connected with the apostolic tradition and lived practically in the homes of the faithful.

The strong Catholic faith of the Archdiocese of St. Louis is manifested in a host of ways. Some examples are Eucharistic adoration in almost all of the parishes and its extension through enthronement of the Sacred Heart in many homes, a strong archdiocesan seminary enrolling an ever growing number of archdiocesan seminarians, a long-standing and vigorous exercise of the apostolate of the respect for human life, a generosity to the Annual Catholic Appeal, which is unparalleled in the Church throughout our nation; multiple agencies of Catholic Charities and a Saint Vincent de Paul Conference in practically every parish; and the deeply-rooted practice of making great sacrifices to provide a Catholic-school education for the children and young people, including the children and young people with special needs. These are just some examples.

The New Evangelization and Controversy

As archbishop, building upon the strength of Catholic life in the Archdiocese, I tried to lead you in the new evangelization which is so needed in the totally secularized society in which we live. Your response has been dedicated and generous. In thanking you for your response to my pastoral leadership in carrying out the new evangelization, I urge you to continue to teach, to celebrate in prayer and the sacred liturgy, and to live in practice our Catholic faith with new enthusiasm and new energy, with the enthusiasm and energy of the first disciples of our Lord and of the first missionaries to our part of the world.

During my service in the Archdiocese and as I am now leaving you, the secular media have focused very much on the controversies which have marked my years in the Archdiocese of St. Louis. While the controversies have been difficult for us all, I did not shrink from them, when I knew the integrity of our Catholic faith, worship, and practice was at stake. Our society, which esteems, above all, political correctness, views negatively anyone who is in the eye of a controversy over questions of faith and morals. Yet, in the Church, we know that we, like our Divine Master, are destined to be a "sign of contradiction" (Luke 2:34). It is not by chance that our most esteemed religious symbol is the crucified Christ.

If a totally secularized society is not uncomfortable with the way we teach and pray and live, then we are not putting the truth of our faith into practice. While we must always speak the truth with love (Ephesians 4:15), we must speak the truth. A society which prefers the comfort of confusion and error will not be pleased. But what alone matters for us is that we be pleasing in the eyes of God. Thank you for holding fast to the truth of our Catholic faith, for praying and worshiping with the great devotion and fervor, and for witnessing to the truth of the faith in your attitudes, words, and actions.