11:41 AM Fri, Jun 27, 2008
Raymond Burke, the archbishop of St. Louis and an outspoken defender of Catholic orthodoxy, has been appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to head the church's highest court.
Here's a story from the Associated Press.
Burke is famous -- some would say infamous -- for going out of his way to rebuke Catholics who don't toe the church line on abortion.
In 2004, he announced that he would deny Holy Communion to Sen. John Kerry, then the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, because of Kerry's support for abortion rights. (Kerry lives in Massachusetts, not Missouri.) In 2007, he made a similar pronouncement about Rudolph Giuliani, then a Republican presidential candidate. (Giuliani lives in New York, not Missouri.)
Earlier this year, Burke called on St. Louis University, a Catholic school, to discipline men's basketball coach Rick Majerus because Majerus told a TV station at a Hillary Clinton rally that he was "pro-choice, personally."
And in 2007, he sought unsuccessfully to have Sheryl Crow removed from a benefit for a Catholic children's medical center in St. Louis because she supports embryonic stem cell research.
The AP story doesn't explain what the new job entails. (The government model that the Vatican most closely resembles is a monarchy, and what need the pope-king would have for a Supreme Court isn't clear.)
The court "is nothing like the U.S. Supreme Court," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.
"It decides very few cases and focuses on procedural questions not substantive issues," Reese said. "It is concerned about whether church officials followed proper canonical procedures not whether their decisions were good or bad.
"For example, if the decision of a bishop to close a parish is appealed all the way to the Signatura, the court would only look at whether the bishop followed proper canonical procedures not at whether closing the parish was pastorally a good idea or not,"
The pope's decision has symbolic weight, Reese added:
"This appointment shows that Archbishop Burke is highly regarded as a canon lawyer by the pope and the Vatican," he said. "He will undoubtedly be made a cardinal."
Reese added: "The appointment should make pro-choice Catholic politicians very nervous. He will be a strong voice in the Vatican for cracking down on pro-choice politicians."
Source: http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/06/archbishop-burke-of-st-louis-t.html
P. S. Highlights added for emphasis. Blogman