KANSAS
National Catholic Reporter
Dennis Coday | Feb. 17, 2017
ANALYSIS
LENEXA, KAN. It was a stump speech. A speech filled with familiar themes for those who’ve been on the beat for a while.
But for a crowd in a packed Catholic high school gymnasium in Lenexa, Kan., on a Friday evening, it was a speech filled with red meat, a reassuring message that the crowd applauded and which explained why they call Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, “Leo the Lion,” courageous and outspoken.
Burke’s Feb. 9-11 tour of the Kansas City metro area included two public Masses — one each in the extraordinary and the ordinary forms — a public address and a luncheon with the local chapter of the Catholic Medical Association, and was a calm harbor from the storms of controversy that have swirled around the cardinal as of late.
Already buffeted by his calls for Pope Francis to clarify parts of his teaching, Burke found himself in more stormy seas in mid-January over troubles in the Knights of Malta, an ancient chivalrous order that traces its roots to the crusades and today maintains a worldwide prestigious membership and thousands of charitable causes. Burke is the order’s spiritual patron. In January, Francis appointed a papal delegate to oversee the order.
Three days before he arrived in the heartland, a front-page New York Times story linked the American cardinal to the Trump administration through White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon. According to the Times article, the pair met in April 2014 when Bannon was in Rome to cover the canonization of Pope John Paul II and to recruit a Vatican correspondent for his Breitbart News.
Bannon found his correspondent — Thomas Williams, a former priest of the Legionaries of Christ, the international order known for its conservativism and for its founder, the late Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, a pedophile who fathered children with two women. Williams, an American, had built a career as a Rome-based academic whose suave, camera-friendly demeanor made him a minor media celebrity.
Williams resigned from the priesthood in May 2013; a year earlier, it became public that he had fathered a child several years before that. In December 2013, he married the child’s mother, Elizabeth Lev, daughter of a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Mary Ann Glendon.
During that 2014 visit, Bannon also met Burke. Bannon would go on to make Breitbart News a platform for alt-right politics and two years later guide Donald Trump to the presidency. Burke, meanwhile, would emerge as a spokesman for the opposition to Francis.
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