the leader of the Catholic Church. In an interview in the German daily Die Welt on April 24, 2015, concerning the Fourteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, Burke renewed his criticism of German Cardinal Walter Kasper, whose "merciful" solution for remarried divorcees who wish to receive communion was discussed at the 2014 Extraordinary Synod. “We are bound by the Magisterium. But some Synod Fathers, above all Cardinal Kasper, want to change it. So I had to make myself very clear. Clashes at Synods, incidentally, are nothing unusual. Think of the early Councils, the Arian heresy, for instance, when Athanasius even became physically aggressive”, Burke recalled. He also mentioned that Pope John Paul II had ruled out women's ordination “once and for all”. Burke, along with three other cardinals, issued a set of dubia, or doubts, to Pope Francis, asking him to clarify various points of doctrine in his 2016 apostolic exhortation, Amoris laetitia and on general Christian life. The other cardinals were Italian Carlo Caffarra and Germans Brandmüller and Joachim Meisner. Since the 2014 synod, some bishops had begun allowing Catholics who had been divorced and remarried to receive Holy Communion, despite the fact that such persons are traditionally said to be committing adultery and living in mortal sin and therefore ineligible to participate according to official church law. A footnote in Amoris laetitia was seen as allowing that under some circumstances. Burke said that if divorced and remarried Catholics were permitted to receive Holy Communion, "then the Church's teaching on marriage is finished." The four cardinals submitted the dubia in private, followed by a public letter ("Seeking Clarity: A Plea to Untie the Knots in Amoris Laetitia") in November 2016, asking Francis to clarify various points of doctrine. The first dubia asked about the reception of the sacraments by the divorced and remarried. The public letter asked about fundamental issues of the Christian life and referenced Pope John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis splendor. In April 2017, following no reply to their letter, the cardinals requested a meeting with Francis, but there has been no response to this request. On April 7, 2018, Burke, along with Brandmüller and Schneider, participated in a conference rejecting the outline proposed by German bishops to allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive the Eucharist. Citing chapter 19 of the Gospel of Matthew, he disputed the notion that anyone, including the pope,