Robert J. Hutchinson – Well, the ailing Pope Francis has struck again. This time, the 86-year-old pontiff decided to remove the man he described as “his enemy,” the conservative gadfly Cardinal Raymond Burke. To this end, he canceled the Cardinal’s Vatican stipend (said to be around 5,000 euros per month) and, worse, forced him to give up his 4,400-square-foot Vatican apartment.

Although this is technically within the Pope’s prerogative as an absolute monarch, this action is almost without precedent within living memory—that is, that a Pope removes the financial support of a cardinal merely for his criticism of the Pope. During the papacies of both St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict, there were critics aplenty within the Vatican and even among the ranks of the cardinals, but none was “punished” in so flamboyant and humiliating a fashion as Cardinal Burke. Continue reading →