ROME
The Daily Beast
An American cardinal who opposes Pope Francis has just been sent to the remote Pacific island of Guam.
Barbie Latza Nadeau
02.16.17
ROME — Catholic conspiracy theorists unite! After weeks of speculation that American Cardinal Raymond Burke had been secretly slapping up anti-Pope posters and stirring up a schism among conservatives who oppose Pope Francis, the American has suddenly been shipped out to sea.
Specifically, Burke has been sent to the island of Guam, an American outpost of about 162,000 people in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. His departure was seemingly spontaneous, with the Catholic News Service only announcing his arrival when he landed on the island late Wednesday.
The Vatican press office offered a quick explanation for Burke’s departure. While it hadn’t been publicized at the time, Burke had been named by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as the presiding judge in a case against Guam Archbishop Anthony Apuron last October. Apuron has refused to resign despite a handful of allegations of sexual misconduct from altar boys who served him in the 1970s.
This is the first such case that Burke has been sent to oversee. He was the head of the Vatican’s tribunal until 2014 when Francis sidelined him shortly after he started his papacy in 2013. …
Despite being well versed in Canon law, Burke’s reputation on clerical sex abuse cases is dismal. He stands accused of not reporting predator priests while he worked in the United States, and he once blamed gay priests as the authors of the assaults, accusing the perpetrators of being “feminized and confused about their own sexual identity.”
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