A high-profile member of the USCCB was running for a committee office this week — and lost. And now some are wondering if there was a message in that, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

This week, St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke lost an election for the chairmanship of the U.S. bishops’ canon law committee to an auxiliary — or assistant — bishop from Chicago. This was surprising, in one sense, since Burke is widely recognized as one of the sharpest legal minds in the Catholic church. He is a sitting member of the Vatican’s highest judicial authority, the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signature in Rome.

By many accounts, Bishop Thomas Paprocki is no slouch as a canonist and is likely to get his own diocese some day. But by choosing Paprocki, 60 percent of Burke’s brother bishops might have been sending him a message. The Rev. Thomas Reese of the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington said it was “very unusual” for an archbishop to be defeated by an auxiliary bishop for a conference chairmanship.

“It’s because most of the bishops don’t want Communion and Catholic politicians
to be a high-profile issue, and (Burke) is seen as a man who’s pushing that issue,” said Reese. “Had he been elected, it could have been interpreted as endorsing his position.”

Several bishops rejected that notion.

Omaha’s Archbishop Elden Curtiss said many bishops may have voted for Paprocki
because they know the schedule of an archbishop can be very busy already. “Archbishop Burke’s plate is full,” he said. “Bishops tend not to vote for people with a heavy load.”

Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley said he did not believe the result of the election was a referendum on Burke’s outspoken positions. “They were both very good candidates,” he said.

“They’re both esteemed canonists,” said Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, who was elected the conference’s new president this week. George said the result was not a vote against the St. Louis archbishop. “I don’t know why you would assume that,” he said.

Burke has led a small band of bishops who oppose giving Holy Communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion rights. While most bishops agree that such politicians should not approach for Communion, a relatively small number say they would deny such politicians the sacrament.

Burke also said that all Catholics who give Communion — priests, deacons, lay
ministers — have a moral obligation to withhold Communion from Catholic politicians who they know have been warned about public views they hold that are contrary to church teaching.

In the summer of 2004, the bishops decided — after consultation with the Vatican — that their official position on the issue was to not have an official position. In a statement called “Catholics in Political Life,” they said each bishop can interpret canon law for himself and deal with wayward Catholic politicians according to his own interpretation.

But in a long article he wrote earlier this year in a prestigious canon law journal, Burke said “Catholics in Political Life” was flawed.

“…The question regarding the objective state of Catholic politicians who knowingly and willingly hold opinions contrary to the natural moral law would hardly seem to change from place to place,” he wrote.

He also castigated his brother bishops for their “confusion” over the canon law that pertained to the Catholic politician issue.

And he named names.

He cited public writings by some of the most powerful men in the U.S. church: Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington, and his successor, Archbishop Donald Wuerl. In doing so, he broke one of the unwritten fraternal rules of the bishops’ conference — to resist publicly criticizing one another for the sake of unity.

Mahony’s office did not return several phone calls seeking comment. Susan Gibbs, a spokeswoman for Wuerl and McCarrick, said they “have a different perspective on handling this issue” than Burke. “Each bishop deals with pastoral issues in his own way in his own diocese,” she said.

Burke did not attend the meeting in Baltimore (he was at the Vatican, on the bench of the Supreme Tribunal), but in a September interview, he said he did not believe he’d broken any unwritten gentlemanly agreements in his article. “If I thought I’d gone too far, I wouldn’t have done it,” he said. “I never published any of our private conversations, and if something is confused, I’m obliged to say something about it.”