Raymond Burke: The hope for a church that rejects wokism and the 2030 Agenda

By Facundo Torres | Pope Francis died yesterday at 88 years old. At this moment, the process of Sede Vacante prevails in the Vatican while the Camerlengo Cardinal, Kevin Farrell, prepares to face the coming days and will be in charge of the Holy See while a new Supreme Pontiff is elected.

To this end, the College of Cardinals convened by its Dean, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, must meet as soon as possible to hold the highly secretive election ceremony of a new Pope: the conclave.

As expected, the world press speculates on the possible successors of Saint Peter and calls "papabili" a myriad of cardinals who for one reason or another might have the possibility of becoming the next Vicar of Christ. So much so, that a figure emerges from the depths of the so-called "conservative wing" of the Catholic Church, the American prelate Raymond Leo Burke.

Born in the State of Wisconsin on June 30, 1948, Burke (76) has become the natural reference for the most traditional positions of the Catholic Church after long public disputes against Pope Francis.

Precisely, Burke questioned the late Pope about the woke political influence in the dogmatic positions of his pontificate to the point of presenting a series of "dubia" (formal and explicit questions) regarding the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, in which Francis proposed a paradigm shift regarding the traditional family and marriage, both historic pillars of the West.

The tradition of the Catholic Church collected by the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of the year 381 and received millennia later by the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) determines the founding aspects of the institution: One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman.

This last one, directly associated with the Roman Empire both of the West and the East. After the successive Schisms, the Catholic Church began to recognize certain rites, the main one being the Latin (or Western) rite, professed in the homonymous hemisphere. Therefore, it is fair to say that the Church as an institution has shaped the Western way of life tradition and its profound framework of values, constituting itself as a sort of natural heir of the Roman Empire.

Now, if the institution in charge of safeguarding the values that made the West prosperous is headed by a person who constantly questions them even beyond what is reflected in the Holy Scriptures, that framework of values creaks and loses strength in the face of the modern vicissitudes of international wokism and Islamic essentialism often turned into terrorism, which are nothing but evolved forms of a single and traditional greater evil: socialism and the curtailment of freedoms.

This is why a figure like Cardinal Raymond Burke is the right one to steer the Ship of Peter, the Church commanded to be built by Jesus Christ himself when he said, "[...] You are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my Church, and the gates of the realm of death will not prevail against it" (Mt. 16:18).

A central idea that reflects Burke's thinking for the Church is the so-called Hermeneutic of Continuity, which proposes that the Church's reforms must be understood in continuity with the ancient tradition, and not against it.

This concept was coined by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI), although not strongly exercised during his pontificate despite having strong allies like Burke himself or the Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, whose disadvantage compared to the American when looking at the papacy is none other than age: Sarah is 79 years old, a factor that by a few months did not leave him out of the conclave and its age limit of 80; not to mention that in those age ranges, just a few years can make a difference regarding physical and health issues.