ST. LOUIS – Cardinal Raymond Burke, Archbishop Emeritus of Saint-Louis, is on a ventilator due to COVID-19.
Burke announced to his Twitter followers on August 10 that he had tested positive for the virus.
Various tweets say doctors are encouraged by his progress and followers pray the Rosary for him.
The 73-year-old man was appointed Archbishop of Saint-Louis in December 2003 and installed in this post in January 2004. He led the Archdiocese until June 2008, when he was transferred to Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signature, the highest judicial authority of the Catholic Church, apart from the Pope.
Pope Francis then removed Burke from the apostolic signature in November 2014 and appointed him patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.
In March 2020, as the pandemic unfolded in the United States, Cardinal Burke issued a statement calling for churches and places of worship to remain open and appeared to implicate COVID as some kind of punishment.
“Likewise, a person of faith cannot consider the present calamity we find ourselves in without also considering how distant our popular culture is from God,” Burke wrote. “She is not only indifferent to his presence among us, but openly rebellious to him and to the good order with which he created us and sustains us in being. “
Later in the year, the the cardinal delivered a homily in a Wisconsin church promulgating a conspiracy theory that the virus was part of a conspiracy “by certain forces, hostile to families and the freedom of nations, to advance their evil agenda.”
