Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke at the March for Life in Rome, Italy, May 10, 2015. / Martha Calderon/CNA

Washington D.C., Oct 16, 2021 / 12:00 pm (CNA).

Cardinal Raymond Burke on Friday said that he is continuing to recover from a bout of COVID-19 and can offer daily Mass now, in a statement posted on his Facebook account.

“With heartfelt gratitude to all those who have prayed for my recovery, I write to inform you that, since my previous letter, physical therapy has aided my rehabilitation so greatly that I am now able to offer daily the Holy Mass,” the cardinal stated on Friday. “Words cannot adequately express my joy at this gift of God’s grace in my life.”

Burke added that his “recovery continues to remain an intensive process.”

The 73-year-old cardinal was hospitalized with COVID-19 in August and was placed on a ventilator. Normally based in Rome, he reportedly fell ill while in Wisconsin. By Aug. 21, the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Wisconsin – which provided official updates on Burke’s condition – stated that he was off the ventilator and was leaving the hospital ICU.

Cardinal Burke is prefect emeritus of the Apostolic Signatura and archbishop emeritus of the Archdiocese of St. Louis. He previously led the Diocese of La Crosse, his hometown diocese. 

In his Friday statement, he noted that offering daily Mass “unites me most fully to you in our spiritual bond as members of the Mystical Body of Christ.”

He also urged Catholics to pray the rosary daily during October, the month of the Holy Rosary.

This was the message of Our Lady of Fatima, he noted, Marian apparitions which were confirmed “in the Miracle of the Sun” on Oct. 13, 1917. In her request, “Our Lady indicated a specific intention: peace,” Burke noted.

This “peace,” he said, is not of the world but is “rather the peace obtained for us by the blood of the Cross of Jesus Christ.”

“The victory of peace is ultimately the victory over Satan who, since the sin of our First Parents, never ceases to tempt us to commit sin,” he said. “The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, is the privileged instrument through which God the Father sent God the Son into the world to win for us the victory.”

“The victory of peace, sought through the Immaculate Heart of Mary by praying the Holy Rosary and attained in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, overcomes the confusion, error and division, all the works of the Evil One, which so fiercely attack today the world and the Church,” he said.