{"id":404,"date":"2008-01-25T19:32:48","date_gmt":"2008-01-25T19:32:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/01\/the-bishop-and-the-coach.html"},"modified":"2008-01-25T19:32:48","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T19:32:48","slug":"the-bishop-and-the-coach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/01\/the-bishop-and-the-coach.html","title":{"rendered":"The Bishop and the Coach"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, a lot of you are probably all over this already and are up on what’s being said in the sports media and out in St. Louis, but here are a couple of links:
\nCarl Olson has devoted several posts to the issue over at Insight Scoop.<\/a>
\nGood\u00a0coverage of the coverage at Get Religion. <\/a>
\nMy thoughts, as vaguely informed as they are, given that Michael\u00a0is out of town, and hence I’m not doing my usual watching-of-PTI<\/a>-during-the-last-stages-of-dinner, generally\u00a0track with Rick Garnett’s over at MOJ:<\/a><\/p>\n

Second, perhaps more noteworthy than Majerus’s statements about his “pro-choice” views — what a shocker!\u00a0 some Catholics are wrong about abortion! — is his later statement, commenting on Archbishop Burke, “He’s entitled to his opinion, but I should be entitled to mine.”\u00a0 Well, d’uh.\u00a0 The issue is not about who’s “entitled” to their opinions.\u00a0 The question — and it is a tricky one — is whether it is appopriate for someone in his position — a professing Catholic, at a Catholic university — to publicly endorse a position that is contrary to Catholic teaching, thereby effectively using that university as a platform, or as a credibility enhancing credential, in a way that could cause scandal.\u00a0 Majerus is getting a lot of praise for his said-to-be courageous insistence on taking stands for things he believes in.\u00a0 Fair enough.\u00a0 One would hope that some might question the appropriateness of his using his S.L.U. position to convert his views on a controversial position from “a private person’s views” to “the views of the Saint Louis University basketball coach.”
\nTo be clear, I don’t<\/em> think a university, Catholic or not, can or should expect that none of its faculty or staff, even one as visible as the basketball coach, is ever going to say misguided things.\u00a0 I do not<\/u> think that a Catholic university — even one that is serious about its Catholic mission — should criticize or admonish faculty for saying such things.\u00a0 (One wonders, though, what S.L.U.’s, or ESPN’s, reaction would have been had Majerus appeared at a Tom Tancredo rally and complained about immigration, or at a League of the South rally and complained about Emancipation.)\u00a0
\nThird, one can think that, at the end of the day, S.L.U. should not directly criticize Majerus for his comments, and also — see, for example, this comment<\/a> by my colleague Cathy Kaveny — that this was a missed opportunity for a different<\/em>, and perhaps more constructive, response by the Archbishop, without embracing the (silly, I think) view that Majerus’s comments are somehow none of the Archbishop’s business.\u00a0 Majerus, after all, is a Catholic.\u00a0 It’s entirely appropriate, it seems to me, wholly and apart from the question what the University should do, for the Archbishop to use the statements of one of the area’s most visible Catholic laypersons as an occasion to remind the Catholics he has been charged — he believes, by God — with teaching and pastoring of an important moral truth about the dignity of human life.
\nFinally, and contrary to what I’ve seen suggested in some of the sports-blogsphere, the fact that S.L.U. should not directly admonish Majerus for his misguided views does not mean that Catholic universities should not, as a general matter, care about the connection between their mission and identity, on the one hand, and the intellectual life of their faculty and students on the other.\u00a0 It would be unfortunate if the upshot of l’affaire<\/em> Majerus were that the mistaken view that a Catholic university can only be a “university” if it cordons off the faith from its intellectual life became more accepted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An almost-counterpoint to what Rick says in this last paragraph involves that sticky question of “mission and identity.” What has happened in many institutions of Catholic education is that the definition of mission has shifted in much the same way that the definition of Christian or Catholic identity has in the broader Church. Raised above anything specific Jesus says about anything or any particular teaching\u00a0that the Church presents as authoritatively rooted in Scripture and Tradition are the values of tolerance, acceptance and diversity usually rooted in the image of Jesus dining with the outcast.
\nIt’s pretty interesting to watch and a tension\u00a0worth discussing.
\nBecause, as Rick gently points out, this kind of appeal to tolerance of divergent views and perspectives as a touchstone of Catholic identity usually only goes so far, and usually in only one direction.
\nUpdate: <\/u>Fr. Robert Araujo, S.J. has chimed in at MOJ as well:<\/a>
\n(he is referring to a comment on another blog, claiming that the archbishop has no right to say anything, correct, etc)<\/p>\n

Still, the author of this commentary holds a radical and erroneous view that the Church (our Church, to borrow from earlier postings) cannot correct those whose views depart from the faith and its vital, essential teachings. And this is what Coach Majerus has done: his views on important issues (such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research) depart from the teachings of the Church to which he claims membership. It therefore becomes the responsibility of the principal teacher, i.e., the local ordinary\u2014Archbishop Burke, to correct those whom he has been ordained to teach and to lead when they fall into error. Coach Majerus has the responsibility to lead his team on the basketball court and to steer his charges away from making mistakes involving the game of basketball. When they do make mistakes, he has the duty and the authority of their coach to correct the mistakes made by members of the basketball team. In a parallel fashion, Archbishop Burke has his duty to lead the faithful and those who claim that they belong to the faith, and if Coach Majerus has different views on these matters which differ from those of the Church, he has committed a foul to which Archbishop Burke is the referee who has the corresponding obligation to take corrective action.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, a lot of you are probably all over this already and are up on what’s being said in the sports media and out in St. Louis, but here are a couple of links: Carl Olson has devoted several posts to the issue over at Insight Scoop. Good\u00a0coverage of the coverage at Get Religion. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}