Canon law eventually led Burke to a seat on the Apostolic Signatura, the church’s high court. In 1994 he was named bishop of La Crosse; in 2004 he became archbishop of St Louis; and then in 2008, under Pope Benedict XVI, he was called back to Rome to become the Signatura’s prefect and made a cardinal in 2010.

Douthat: By this time you had a public reputation, not just as conservative, but as a leading “traditionalist.” Some of that was your reputation as a strict canon lawyer, but some of it had to do with your affinity for the traditional liturgy, the Latin Mass. Is that fair?

Burke: You have to know that in the church, even before the Second Vatican Council, but especially afterward, there was a loss of respect for church law, this sense that the code of canon law was no longer apt. And I became convinced of the importance of canon law — I was especially concerned about the easy granting of declarations of nullity of marriage. And that would have contributed in part to my reputation of being cold, legalist, rigid, as they say.

On the liturgical question, obviously I grew up with what’s now called the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite , the mass that existed until the reform after the Second Vatican Council. And I had a great appreciation for the beauty of this rite. So when John Paul II permitted its celebration, I took an interest. I have always celebrated both forms. People say that I speak against the ordinary form of the mass. I don’t, I speak against a way of celebrating the ordinary form which is not properly transcendent. But I suppose you’re accurate to say this would have marked me.

Douthat: As someone who experienced the transition through the Second Vatican Council and afterward, do you think the reformers of that era had a point? Do you think that the pre-Vatican II church was too stuffy, legalistic, rigid? You compared your own minor seminary experience to military school.

Burke: Well, this euphoria set in during the council years and after. Now suddenly we’re all free. The discipline of the seminary was looked upon as repressed, and any kind of check on the will of the individual was seen as negative. But I look back now, and I see all those rules as geared to curbing the effects of original sin, and disciplining us so that we could really be good men. And it worked. But in 1968, the seminary rule book was thrown out and there ensued chaos. And we know, for instance, that a lot of the sexual abuse of minors took place in that period, where there was this idea that any tendency that I have, because that’s my tendency, it’s good. Well, that isn’t true.

Douthat: But many of those abusers and their enablers were formed in this earlier world you described. If you look at the statistics on sex abuse, there is a spike in the 1960s and 1970s — but part of that spike includes men who were ordained before the Second Vatican Council. So there had to have been some defect already.