Thinking Citizen Blog — “The Catholic Court” — Who Counts? A Good Thing, A Bad Thing, Or Neither? A Little Historical Perspective
Thinking Citizen Blog — Saturday is Justice, Freedom, Law, and Values Day
Today’s Topic — “The Catholic Court” — who counts? a good thing, a bad thing, or neither? a little historical perspective
So how many Catholics are there on the Supreme Court? 5, or 6, or 7 ? Well, there are six conservative Catholic judges (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanagh, and Barrett) that is, if you count Gorsuch even though he does attend a Protestant rather than a Catholic church. There is one liberal Catholic (Sotomayor) who “attends Church for family and other important events.” So what?
Well, for one Catholics represent only 20% of the population. Does it make sense that their representation be, on the low end, 55%, on the high end, 88.8% of the judicial branch of the federal government? How do you explain this anomaly?
In Part One, a few details. In Part Two, a lament from New York Times editor, Jesse Wegman. In Part Three, a little historical perspective.
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
THE SIX CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC JUSTICES WERE APPOINTED BY REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTS
1. George Herbert Walker Bush: Clarence Thomas (1991)
2. George W. Bush: John Roberts (2005). Samuel Alito (2006)
3. Donald Trump: Neil Gorsuch (2017), Brett Kavanagh (2018). Amy Conant Barrrett (2020)
NB: Barack Obama: Sonia Sotomayor (2009)
“THE SINS OF THE HIGH COURT’S SUPREME CATHOLICS” (James Carroll, New Yorker) Have we seen a return to the “anti-Americanism” of Leo XIII (1810–1903)?
1. “As part of the Vatican’s war on “modernism” in 1899, Pope Leo XIII condemned as heresy the set of principles known as “Americanism.” But by 1865, at the Second Vatican Council, the Church had begun to embrace such supposedly odious ideas: pluralism, the separation of church and state, the primacy of conscience, the preference of experience over dogma, and — for that matter , the freedom of the press. This was a historic reversal of the Church’s panicked nineteenth-century repudiation of, in Pope Leo’s words, “modern popular theories and methods.”
2. “Now five Catholic Justices on the Supreme Court are reversing the Church’s reversal. (Neil Gorsuch, who is now an Episcopalian but was raised and educated a Catholic, joined his five colleagues in overturning Roe v. Wade), These justices are undermining not only basic elements of American democracy, such as the “wall of separation,” but also the essential spirit of Catholicism’s great twentieth century renewal.”
3. “It is no secret, of course, that the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, which had been summoned by the renewal-minded Pope John XXIII, generated a powerful pushback from traditionalists within the Church. The reforms set in motion by the council — composed of more than two thousand Catholic bishops, who met in St. Peter’s Basilica in four sessions, between 1962 and 1965 — upended sacrosanct doctrines and traditions from the language used in Mass to the idea of “no salvation outside the Church,” to the repudiation of ancient anti-Semitic Christ-killer slander. Indeed, Vatican II took a step away from monarchy and toward democracy.”
NB: “An ultra-conservative blowback ensued, defining the papacies of Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI,m and it proved to be obsessed, above all, with issues related to sexuality and the place of women. This focus emerged even before Vatican II ended, when a nervous Paul VI, who had succeeded Pope John after his death, kin 1963, made an extraordinary intervention in the proceedings by forbidding the Council from taking on the question of contraception. Paul’s dictum signalled what was to come, when, in 1968, he defied a consensus that was emerging among Catholics — even among bishops — to accept birth control, and formally condemned it in his encyclical “Humanae Vitae” (“Of Human Life”). As if foreseeing the clash, during the council’s deliberations, one of its most powerful leaders, Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens, of Belgium, protested the Pope’s intervention by rising in St. Peter’s and saying, “I beg you, my brother bishops, let us avoid another Galileo affair.
One is enough for the Church.”
NB: “But a new Galileo affair is what the Church got. This one, though, is about the relationship not of the Earth to the Sun but of women to men.”
A LITTLE AMERICAN HISTORY — below Roger Taney (1777–1864) the first Roman Catholic on the Supreme Court, whose most famous decisions were Charles Warren Bridge (1837) and Dred Scott (1855)
1. “When the Supreme Court was established in 1789, the first members came from among the ranks of the Founding Fathers and were almost uniformly Protestant. Of the 116 justices who have been appointed to the court, 92 have been from various Protestant denominations and 15 have been Catholics (one other justice, Sherman Minton, began practicing Catholicism after leaving the court).”
2. “Eight justices have been Jewish and one, David Davis, had no known religious affiliation.”
3. “Three of the 17 chief justices have been Catholics, and one Jewish justice, Abe Fortas, was nominated to be chief justice, though this nomination was withdrawn in the face of a filibuster.”
Opinion | Alito No Longer Tries to Hide His Theocratic Worldview
Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States — Wikipedia
The Sins of the High Court’s Supreme Catholics
How Catholic Is The Supreme Court?
Growing share of Americans see the Supreme Court as ‘friendly’ toward religion
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
For the last four years of posts organized by theme:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
Four special attachments below:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
#4 Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to justice, freedom, the law or basic values.
Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to justice, freedom, the law, or basic values.
Or just some random justice-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make someone’s day. Or to cement in your mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply about something dear to your heart.
