I got the news this morning. We seminarians of Kenrick-Glennon will sorely miss Archbishop Burke but at the same time are proud of him and joyful for the whole Church.

Here are the Most Rev. Raymond Burke’s words:

June 27, 2008 – Memorial of Saint Cyril of Alexandria, Bishop and Doctor of the Church

TO THE MEMBERS OF THE ARCHDIOCESAN CURIA:

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Today, at noon in Rome (5 a.m. CDT), it was announced that His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, has named me Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, effective immediately. With the announcement, I ceased to be the Archbishop of Saint Louis.

I am deeply humbled by the trust which His Holiness has placed in me, and, in priestly obedience, I have pledged to serve our Holy Father to the best of my abilities. Although you will no longer pray for me as your Archbishop, I ask your continued prayers for me, that I may faithfully and generously cooperate with God’s grace in fulfilling my new responsibilities.

Leaving the service of the Church in the Archdiocese of Saint Louis is most sad for me. It has been an honor and gift for me to serve the Archdiocese over the past four years and five months. It had been my hope to serve here for a long time, but, as the Bishop who called me to priestly ordination often remarked, “Man proposes, but God disposes.” I trust that doing what our Holy Father has asked me to do will bring blessings to the Archdiocese of Saint Louis and to me. Saint Louis is a great archdiocese which will always have a most treasured place in my heart.

In a particular way, I am saddened to leave you who have worked so closely with me in the pastoral care and governance of the Archdiocese. I thank you for your faithful and generous cooperation and collaboration with me.

With regard to the governance of the Archdiocese, the College of Consultors will meet, in the early afternoon, to elect an Archdiocesan Administrator who, with the help of the Consultors, will govern the Archdiocese, until the new Archbishop is appointed and installed. Please pray for the College of Consultors and for the Archdiocesan Administrator whom they will elect.

Although I am not fond of long farewells, it will take me some time to put my papers in order and to make the transfer to Rome. I will travel to Rome on July 1st next and will return to the Archdiocese on July 10th next. After that time, I will have to dedicate myself intensely to preparing for my definitive departure for Rome, which is scheduled to take place on or around August 22nd next. Also, as you may be aware, I am committed to the celebration of the Solemn Dedication of the Church of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe at La Crosse, of which I am the founder, during the last days of July and the first days of August. I, however, trust that, before I depart for Rome, I will have an occasion to express to you, personally and directly, my heartfelt gratitude.

Again, I ask your prayers. You can count upon my daily prayers for you and for the Archdiocese of Saint Louis.

Asking God’s blessing upon you and your service of the Church, I remain

Yours devotedly in Christ,

(Most Rev.) Raymond L. Burke
Archbishop Emeritus of Saint Louis

There is a press conference this morning at 11:00 CST, I believe.

I haven’t had much time to post lately, choosing rather to study theology and finish my required work on time. I’ve had to put several personal projects on a series of back burners. That’s a bit frustrating for me. Though I am lazy, I don’t like to start things without finishing them. One of these projects has been consistently delayed for a long time.

When I have time to post again, I may decide to satisfy everyone’s craving for an exposition on the superiority of the UNIX design philosophy.

You can once again log in to this site by using an OpenID.

The theologians at Kenrick have a silent retreat beginning this evening and lasting until Friday, so I won’t be blogging.

Also, be sure to check out KDE 4.0, which came out on the eleventh. Ironically, though I am a long time KDE user, I’ve been using XFCE to manage my windows lately since it’s very fast.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. My family moved to Fulton, MO, and I don’t really have much Internet access.

The original reason for starting the website www.ipsissima-verba.org/ was to provide a place to archive Latin texts and translations. I wrote the original PHP software myself, and it was highly specialized for this task.

Once I made the switch to Drupal for content management, I could no longer achieve the same functionality, but the advantage was a stronger and more generic overall architecture.

Having learned a little bit about Drupal module writing for the Kenrick Liturgical Ministries website, I decided to try to improve the Latin Text Archive.

I now have the site in a much more usable configuration. When you view a Latin text, the translations, analysis, etc. that are associated with it appear in the right sidebar. If you view a translation or another piece of associated content, it appears side by side with the original text for comparison.

If I keep up this work, I’d like to develop a specialized way of categorizing texts. Right now, free tagging seems to be the best option since a hierarchy gets quite unwieldy when you have so many contingents (What is it? Which book is it in? Which edition of the book? Where is it in the book? etc.).

This site is now the first listed in the Google results for quid est veritas!

My friend Cory Stanley, who will be studying in Rome for the next several years, has just begun his new blog.

We expect big things soon!

I’ve enabled the use of gravatars on the blog, and I’ve re-worked the appearance of the comments a little bit to make things friendlier.

I’ve been working on renovating the collection of projects that make up my web presence. What was Ipsissima Verba is now a sub-project of Ipsissima Verba. Ipsissima Verba is now a collection of the various projects I have online.

http://www.ipsissima-verba.org/