Does Coach Majerus really think he can out play Abp. Burke?

You probably have heard the story on the news by now: an orthodox Archbishop has publicly questioned a Division I basketball coach at a Roman Catholic University within his Archdiocese about the coach's pro-abortion comments while the coach protests all the while to be "Catholic." What are to we make of this as the talking heads on ESPN and other outlets tell the good Archbishop to "mind his own business?"

Fortunately, a superb canonist, Edward N. Peters, writes a blog on Canon Law called, In Light of the Law, and he has weighed in on the case:

I'm not making this up.

Jesuit-run St. Louis University's basketball coach Rick Majerus (yes, a basketball coach) is telling St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke (yes, the canonist archbishop), to mind his own business regarding Majerus' outspoken support for (get ready for it) abortion and experimentation on embryonic humans! If it weren't that expressing support for such deeply offensive conduct is so deadly serious, I'd be laughing.

Majerus boasts a long career in lefty politics going back to the 1960s, so maybe that's why he apparently never noticed that the Second Vatican Council, in its only display of anger, denounced abortion as an "unspeakable crime" (GS 51). An unspeakable crime, folks, for which Catholics are liable to excommunication (1983 CIC 1398), which St. Louis University official Rick Majerus publicly and repeatedly supports.

Majerus' claim that the "First Amendment right to free speech supersedes anything that the archbishop would order me to do" rated (sorry, I couldn't help it) an 8.5 on the laugh-out-loud scale. SLU's basketball coach should walk across the quad to SLU's law school and ask any second year student to explain the notion of "state action" before he asserts any more grandiloquently wrong theories about the law of Church and state.

And if Majerus thinks that the Post-Dispatch is on his side, he should think again. News reporter Bernie Miklasz opined "If Burke is expecting an apology or silence from Majerus, it won't happen" and "If Burke hopes Majerus will fall in line with the Roman Catholic church's official positions on these two issues, it won't happen." That's not reporting news, that's fanning the flames of conflict. The secular press loves to play "Let's you and him fight", especially when the 'him' is a faithful Catholic bishop. Majerus is walking right into it.

If you haven't been to this blog before, you are missing an excellent education in the fine points of Canon Law. Please follow the story from there....