to comment on the dust-up going on in St. Louis about SLU’s new multi-million-dollar basketball coach, Rick Majerus, and Catholic Archbishop Raymond Burke. The Post-Dispatch has reviewed (and commented on) the story today. And the Post’s quotations from the SLU Faculty Handbook are telling, as are comments by President Biondi, Provost Weixlmann, and various board members who have been interviewed.

Burke is widely regarded as a fascist and a bully here in the gateway to the west, and not just by protestants. His boast that he would deny communion to John Kerry during the 2004 election got him brief national exposure, and he seems to have been looking for more ever since: publicly forcing a Missouri Catholic school to rescind its invitation to Senator Claire McCaskill to speak at her daughter’s commencement because of her views about women’s reproductive rights, attempting on similar grounds to shut down a popular local fundraiser because it featured Cheryl Crow and Billy Crystal, turning the screws on the dissenting Polish congregation at St. Stanislaus church for exercising its legal right to hold on to its property and assets, excommunicating two local Catholic women, who allowed themselves to be ordained priests, and threatening the Jewish congregation that gave them “sanctuary” when local Christian spaces were closed to them.

Burke is a piece of work, but he is much praised around the Catholic blogosphere. The full extent to which Burke and his boss, the former Cardinal Ratzinger, espouse a reactionary social (and geopolitical) agenda ad majorem dei gloriam may perhaps be seen here. If the notion of human family seems innocuous, one might remind oneself that the devil is in the details. Here, not only does the Vatican wrench the discourse of world peace into a reactionary defense of hierarchical family values, but it also yokes the conception of world peace to a retrograde ideological position on the science of global warming.

In this regard I’m also thinking of the Vatican’s recent defense of its suppression of Galileo. There was an interesting discussion of this history at Entangled States a while back. My view pretty much jibes with that of the commentator who remarked that, “the problem wasn’t what Galileo said or thought. The problem was that the Church had the power to punish him for what he said and thought – and that it did. Nobody would care about this incident otherwise.”

And nobody would care about the present dust-up in St. Louis if Majerus weren’t a high profile sports figure. That’s why SLU is defending him, as Bill McClellan implied in a recent column. And sports columnist Brian Burwell carries that general view even further. After recalling Arthur Ashe and other morally heroic sports figures, Burwell defends Majerus thus hopefully: “Imagine the power and influence that many of today’s athletes could carry if they chose to spend as much energy in social and political movements as they invest in shilling sneakers and energy drinks.”