Burke says farewell in final St. Louis Mass

[SwizzleStick]

stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/religion/story/2C864C10CE1D144B862574A9000CDB85?OpenDocument

God bless you, Archbishop Burke! The good Lord certainly blessed us when He sent you to St. Louis as our Archbishop. Thank you, Your Grace, for your strong leadership and guidance here and for being such a wonderful example of pastoral love, humility, generosity, and integrity! We are losing a wonderful, pastoral Archbishop unafraid to uphold the teachings of Holy Mother Church. We know you are bound to upholding the teachings of the Church, and we also found you to be humble, gentle, respectful and kind when we had the honor to meet with you three times. Our respect and affection for you is boundless. Our loss is great and we will miss you here in St. Louis. We can only pray that God will send us an equally strong spiritual shepherd to fill the void left by your absence. But, what a wonderful gift and blessing you are for the universal Catholic Church! May God bless and keep you! Deo Gratias!

To borrow two excerpts from the latest edition of “The St. Louis Review”:

"Ecce sacerdos magnus, qui in diebus suis, placuit Deo (Behold the great priest, who in his days, pleased God).

Ecce sacerdos magnus. Thank you Archbishop Burke for being our shepherd. As our bishop, thank you for being Christ for us. Ad multos annos (Many years)!"

 

[frommi]

That’s interesting how he is now the archbishop emeritus of St Louis…that’s a different approach to such things.

 

[thomasf]

We just got a new bishop in the Lansing diocese and the former bishop is denoted by bishop emeritus, and is included in the eucharistic prayer.

 

[frommi]

We just got a new bishop in the Lansing diocese and the former bishop is denoted by bishop emeritus, and is included in the eucharistic prayer.

Oh absolutely…guess I wasn’t clear…a retired bishop is the ‘bishop emeritus’…

All bishops have to be assigned to be the head of a diocese (even auxilary bishops), so in many cases they end up the canonical head of a diocese that no longer exists.

In Raymond Burke’s case he is keeping his bond to the archdiocese of St Louis instead of getting a titular diocese.

Burke did not retire, Carl Mengeling did…that’s the unique part of this.

As another example, there was a bishop in France (who’s name always escapes me), and after running afoul of the vatican a bunch of times on very high profile issues, they wanted him to resign, and when he didn’t, the Pope reassigned him to a non existent diocese.