'I could very well have been killed': Powerful interview with Cardinal Burke reveals doctors pressured his mother to abort him

Cardinal Raymond Burke, chaplain to the Order of Malta, opens up about the most personal details of his life in a new book titled, "Hope for the World."

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - According to the Catholic Herald, within his book-length interview with French journalist Guillaume d'Alancon, Cardinal Burke reveals that doctors advised his mother to abort him.

"You already have five children, it is important for you to be in good health so as to take care of them," the doctors told his sick mother, according to Cardinal Burke.

He explained that while his mother was pregnant with him she became seriously ill.

"I was therefore quite touched by this question of defending human life, because I could very well have been killed."

During his interview, he further urged Catholics to defend human life and expressed his feelings toward the current president, Barack Obama. Cardinal Burke explains we are struck with a "ferocious attack against human life."

"The federal government is trying to reduce religious liberty, contrary to the Constitution of the United States," Cardinal Burke said in the interview, referring to the many recent legal battles surrounding religious freedom. "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 claims that the Church may not intervene on the question of abortion, of homosexuality, but that the state alone must manage these questions."

According to Cardinal Burke, the world we live in today is threatened. We are facing "the loss of a sound metaphysics and, consequently, of a sense of an objective reality."

Together, Catholics must stand united against the face of evil that we have to live with today. Don't let the Devil win.