His parents were Christian, he was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church, his wife’s parents were persecuted for their faith, and former President Ronald Reagan suspected he was a “closet believer,” but during the years he led the officially atheistic Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev insisted he held only a pantheistic view that “nature” was his god. This week in Italy, however, the last leader of the Soviet Communist regime publicly acknowledged that he is, in fact, a Christian. Gorbachev’s beliefs were revealed when he, along with his daughter Irina, was visiting the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi, where he kneeled and prayed silently for half an hour. “It was through St. Francis that I arrived at the Church, so it was important that I came to visit his tomb,” the 77-year-old Gorbachev told the Telegraph of London. “I feel very emotional to be here at such an important place not only for the Catholic faith, but for all humanity.”

HT: SteveG

A Roman Catholic basketball coach from St. Louis University (SLU), a Catholic institution, got himself in a spot of trouble at a Clinton rally last weekend: Coach Rick Majerus looked into a television camera and declared, “Personally, I’m pro-choice.” According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Majerus also professed himself a strong advocate of stem cell research.

Upon which the Archbishop of St. Louis landed on the coach’s head with both feet.

Raymond Burke, the same church official who in 2004 said he would deny holy communion to John Kerry, said of Majerus, “It is not possible to be a Catholic and hold those positions.” Burke called for SLU to “deal with the question of a public representative making declarations that are inconsistent with the Catholic faith. When you take a position in a Catholic university, you don’t have to embrace everything the Catholic church teaches. But you can’t make statements which call into question that identity and mission of the Catholic church.”

The controversy has tongues wagging at SLU, with some folks declaring that a diversity of opinion promotes healthy academic debate, others (inaccurately) invoking Majerus’s right to “freedom of speech,” and still others saying the coach’s public declaration expressed his private sentiments and not necessarily those of SLU.

How do you think the university should handle this? Should employees of religious universities be prohibited from publicly expressing opinions that deviate from institutional doctrine? Or is this case somewhat like professors being drummed out of secular universities for rejecting the theory of evolution?