April 17, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — Dan Burke, the former president of EWTN News, is calling on Catholics to “stop desecrating” Christ by receiving the Eucharist in the hand and to start receiving it on their tongue while kneeling, the “humbler” way to receive it.
Burke was just released from the hospital after nearly losing his life to the coronavirus. He made his remarks during a taping of a special episode of the John-Henry Westen Show earlier today.
“I've come out of this with a resolute resoluteness,” Burke told Westen. And that is, “to cry out to the laity to repent and to stop desecrating Christ. Stop receiving him in a matter that is destructive, that allows for the stealing of the host, that allows for the dropping of particles, and the trampling of the Lord under our feet!”
Burke is the chairman of the Avila Institute for Spiritual Formation and recently published a new book entitled Spiritual Warfare and Discernment of Spirits (Sophia Institute Press). The book was released before he caught the coronavirus, which he believed he was going to die from due to an underlying asthma condition.
During his conversation with Westen, Burke explained that what “struck” him the most during his illness is that Catholics have to repent and stop offending God with liturgical irreverence.
“There are no issues of irreverence in the Latin Mass…there might be internally, but certainly not externally, as a norm. In the Ordinary Form of the Mass, every single day the Lord is desecrated — every single day, grave irreverence. Every single day we commit the most grave sins…against God himself in the realm of worship.”
“90 percent of the time, priests are unfaithful to their vows in the way that they provide the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass because they're making stuff up,” he continued. The laity too “need to repent for usurping the role of the priest” at mass. They also need to repent for “receiving the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin.”
“I believe that the highest order of demons are concerned with the disruption of worship, the proper worship of God,” he said.
Asked what he would do if a priest refused to adminster the Eucharist to him while kneeling, Burke said, “I would stay kneeling and see what happens…you have to take a spiritual stand.” If he was in a diocese where he couldn’t reverently receive the Lord, Burke said he would “leave the diocese.”
Westen brought up how 1 Corinthians 11: 27 warns against receiving communion unworthily. Burke responded by saying, “I think it's a demonic reality that that passage never appears in the Ordinary Form lectionary.”
Burke also relayed a story about how Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze once told him that communion in the hand “has been a disaster.”
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