August 16, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Cardinal Raymond Burke rebuked Vatican advisor Fr. Thomas Rosica on EWTN's The World Over Thursday night.
The controversial Basilian priest claimed in a recent article that under Pope Francis, the Church “is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.”
“This is nonsense,” Cardinal Burke, the former head of the Apostolic Signatura, essentially the Vatican Supreme Court, told host Raymond Arroyo.
“Our Church has indeed entered a new phase,” Rosica wrote. “With the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.”
However, Burke responded:
Jesus Christ is the head of the mystical body of the Church and Jesus Christ comes to us through the Holy Scriptures, through the Church’s tradition. We love the Scriptures. We love the truth as it’s taught to us in the Church’s magisterium because we love Jesus Christ and he speaks to us in this way.
“The head of the Church is never a person other than someone who is acting in the name of Jesus Christ and in fidelity to the tradition,” the cardinal explained. “This has always been understood about the Roman Pontiff, that…he has the fullness of power to safeguard and to promote the transmission of the truths of the faith, the beauty of the sacred liturgy, the goodness of her discipline, but not to govern the Church as some kind of self-made autocrat.”
Burke said describing the pope this way is “a great disservice to [the pope’s] office.”
Rosica, who runs Salt and Light TV, is a Vatican communications advisor. He has a history of making questionable statements.