(LifeSiteNews) — On Sunday, the Feast of Pentecost, U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke warned graduates of Thomas Aquinas College about the potential “devastating” impact the upcoming October meeting of the Synod of Bishops may have on “the universal Church.”
Cardinal Burke this wknd to @TACollege grads:
“The rebellion before God, the revolution against His Truth & Love handed down to us in the Church, has reached an unimaginable level…The current sessions of the Synod of Bishops threaten to extend the same devastation to the… pic.twitter.com/BZftg7uXpZ— Michael Haynes 🇻🇦 (@MLJHaynes) May 20, 2024
“We live in very troubled and troubling, sometimes seemingly apocalyptic, times,” His Eminence remarked in his commencement address.
“We witness in the world the denial of our very nature as God has created us. What is more, the rebellion and revolution is sustained by some from within the Church, even by some who are called and ordained to shepherd the flock.”
“We witness the devastating results for the Church in Germany,” he continued. “The current sessions of the Synod of Bishops threaten to extend the same devastation to the universal Church.”
Thomas Aquinas College is a Catholic liberal arts school founded in 1971. It operates two campuses, one in Santa Paula, California and the other in Northfield, Massachusetts, which opened in 2019 and is where Burke spoke this weekend.
Endorsed by the Cardinal Newman Society, the college utilizes a Great Books curriculum and offers students the opportunity to attend the Traditional Latin Mass daily.
Graduating senior Paul Habsburg, the son of Hungary’s Ambassador to the Vatican Eduard Habsburg, also spoke at the commencement ceremony. He urged his former classmates to “go out into the world and let the light of Christ shine through us.”
Burke further told his audience that devout Catholics are “rightly disheartened and discouraged, and justifiably angry at the profound suffering inflicted upon the Mystical Body of Christ by the apostasy, the abandonment of Christ to embrace the ways of a world in rebellion before God.”
He also urged them to “not leave the Church” amid the “unprecedented” situation she is experiencing.
“What are we to do in the contemporary situation of the Church and of the world which, in certain respects, are unprecedented in the history of the Church?” he rhetorically asked. “Certainly, the answer is not to leave Christ Who is alive for us in the Church but to remain faithfully with Him in the Church,” he responded. To be faithful to Christ means repenting of sins, adhering to Catholic truth “as handed down to us in an unbroken line through the Apostolic Tradition,” and to faithfully participate at Mass, he added.
In a recent essay published by the German magazine Herder Korrespondenz entitled “Church on the horizon of modernity,” dissident German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who rejects Catholic teaching on numerous topics, including its ban on women deacons, claimed that the Synod in Rome is seeking to establish a “global, synodal Church” of “the future” that will have “greater participation of all.”