The Cardinal Burke on one of the most listened-to podcasts in the United States – INFOVATICANA
The American cardinal, a leading figure of traditional Catholicism, will star in “one of the most personal and important interviews” on the most-listened-to program among young North Americans.
Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke is about to enter millions of homes that have never set foot in a church. Shawn Ryan, a former member of the U.S. Navy’s special operations teams (SEAL) and the CIA, and host of one of the most-listened-to interview programs in the world, has announced that next week he will release a two-part conversation with the cardinal, dedicated to the Old and New Testaments.
“Next week I will share something that is very personal to me. This could be one of the most personal interviews I have done to date, and I believe also one of the most important,” Ryan wrote on his social media. “I have felt a real pull toward understanding the Bible better and using this platform to help bring greater understanding of it to my audience and to people around the world.”
An audience the Church does not reach
To gauge the magnitude of the announcement, it is worth recalling who Shawn Ryan is. His program has more than five million subscribers on YouTube and consistently ranks among the most-listened-to shows in the United States, ahead of virtually all Catholic media outlets in the world combined. His audience is, moreover, the one the Church has spent decades failing to reach: young men, many of them active-duty or veterans, detached from any religious practice yet with a growing spiritual thirst.
Ryan, himself a convert after years marked by war and its aftermath, had already opened his program to the supernatural: his interview with Father Carlos Martins, an exorcist, was one of the most-watched episodes of 2024 and sparked a wave of conversions attested to by listeners themselves. Now he is taking a further step: not a priest, but a cardinal of the Roman Church. And not just any cardinal.
Burke, from the curial periphery to the center of the cultural debate
That the chosen figure is precisely Raymond Burke is no minor detail. Former prefect of the Apostolic Signatura and patron emeritus of the Order of Malta, Burke has for more than a decade been the most visible voice of Catholicism faithful to tradition: defender of the traditional liturgy, signatory of the dubia on Amoris Laetitia, and the object of successive curial marginalizations that removed him from positions of governance in the Church.
The paradox is eloquent: while doors were closing on him in Rome, the secular world is opening them wide. An interview of this caliber gives the cardinal a platform incomparably larger than any dicastery: tens of millions of people will hear a prince of the Church explain Sacred Scripture for hours.
The sign of a change of era
The announcement fits into a phenomenon no one now disputes: the turn of Western youth—and especially young men—toward Christianity in its most demanding and traditional form. Parishes with reverent liturgy are filling with twenty-somethings, adult catechumenates are growing in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, and the figures who succeed in the new communication ecosystem are not the accommodating preachers, but those who present the faith whole, with all its demands.
That Shawn Ryan—the archetype of the man this culture admires: soldier, family man, survivor—chooses Cardinal Burke as his teacher to bring the Bible to his audience says a great deal about which way the wind is blowing. Traditional Catholicism, so often caricatured as a nostalgic relic, is revealing itself to be what it has always been: the most radical and most attractive proposal for a world tired of substitutes.
The two-part interview will be released next week on Shawn Ryan’s channel.