In a new book-length interview with a French journalist, Cardinal Raymond Burke revealed that his mother was advised to abort him when she became ill during pregnancy.

The Catholic Herald is reporting on the startling revelation made by Cardinal Burke to French journalist Guillaume d’Alancon who said doctors advised his mother to abort him after she became seriously ill during her pregnancy.

According to Cardinal Burke, the doctor said: “You already have five children, it is important for you to be in good health so as to take care of them.”

But his parents refused, the Cardinal said. “My parents told him that they believed in God and that Christ would give them the necessary help. My mother gave birth to me, and everything went well. I was therefore quite touched by this question of defending human life, because I could very well have been killed.”

In the book, entitled Hope for the World: To Unite All Things in Christ, Cardinal Burke argues that the “ferocious attack against life today” results from “the distortion of the sexual act by contraception”, and urges Catholics to defend human life.

“The devil, of course, wants to discourage us: he tries to sow doubt in our minds about defending human life publicly," he said. "And he subtly tempts us to remain silent, to mute our conscience, to tell ourselves that we are personally against abortion but do not have to express our faith and moral convictions in public.”

The Cardinal also commented on President Barack Obama, who he refers to as a “totally secularized man” who “wants to push the Church back behind the walls of her church buildings.”

He cites efforts by the current administration to force religious employers to fund insurance coverage for contraception and abortion, and demands of gender neutral bathrooms in public schools as examples of how Obama is trying to reduce religious liberty.

“President Obama wants to push the Church back behind the walls of her church buildings and to prevent her applying her law to her own hospitals and schools,” he says in the interview. “He claims that the Church may not intervene on the question of abortion, of homosexuality, but that the state alone must manage these questions.”

He also comments on the state of the Church and the world, citing the “rejection of God and the culture of death” as the cause of many of the ills we currently face.

It began with the French Revolution, he says, which began a process of secularization that led to the “grand capitalism of those who adore mammon” and to Marxism.

But, he adds, “All those who have turned away from Christ have seen that Satan is a bloody tyrant.”

Cardinal Burke, who served as the prefect of the Vatican’s highest court under Pope Benedict XVI, says the greatest danger of today is “the loss of a sound metaphysics and, consequently, of a sense of an objective reality.”

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