God Bless This Honorable Court

Even as Americans start weighing the nomination of Judge Alito to the Supreme Court on its merits, we are struck with the thought that it holds a deeper message than a return to judicial restraint or conservative jurisprudence. Judge Alito turns out to be a Roman Catholic, and his confirmation would create the first Catholic majority in the court’s history.What that might mean in terms of his legal opinions is hard to say; three of the Catholics currently on the court – Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts – are viewed as conservative, while the fourth, Justice Kennedy, voted in support of abortion “rights” in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey case. As the nominations of Chief Justice Roberts and Harriet Miers proceeded, religion proved irrelevant.Judge Alito’s faith and its effect on the religious balance of the court has so far warranted but scant mention in the press. It seems that nearly all Americans are comfortable with the fact that any religious test for offices of trust under the United States is emphatically outlawed by the Constitution. No test is ever permitted for any such office, the Constitution says.Rather, the possibility of a Catholic majority on the highest court in the land is noteworthy for what it says about American society. Many alive today can remember the stir that was occasioned, only 50 years ago, by the possibility that a Catholic senator named John Fitzgerald Kennedy might be elevated to the presidency.It was only 80 years ago that the Supreme Court found itself having to strike down anti-Catholic legislation. Americans sometimes forget that religious bigotry was a significant fault line through society for many years. Starting in the 1830s as the first large waves of Roman Catholic immigrants began flooding into the country from the “wrong” parts of Europe, anti-Catholicism reached its tentacles into many elements of American life.Anti-Catholicism spawned fears of “papist conspiracies” to overthrow all that was right and good in America. The famous political cartoonist, Thomas Nast, who established the elephant and donkey as symbols for the political parties, also sketched images of Catholic bishops crawling on to America’s shores on all fours, their episcopal mitres shaped like the gaping jaws of alligators ready to devour the innocent – and Protestant – American children on the beach.Anti-Catholicism was the impetus for the “common school” movement; the original public schools required students to read from the Protestant King James translation of the Bible. It energized the nativist Know-Nothing Party of the mid-19-century. Its effects linger in the 37 state constitutions that contain so-called Blaine amendments, which bar any state aid for religious uses and were originally designed to make sure newly arrived Catholics would not receive the same state-funded benefits Protestants had enjoyed in early America.In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan set upon Catholics as well as African Americans, Jews, and other “undesirables.” Its anti-Catholic furies reached their apex with the passage of the Oregon school law in the early 1920s, which banned all private schools. The measure was explicitly targeted at Catholic immigrants. A Grand Dragon of the Klan, Fred Gifford, argued at the time that “these mongrel hordes must be Americanized; failing that, deportation is the only remedy.”The Supreme Court struck down the Oregon law in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, a case we described recently in our editorial “The Meaning of Meyer.” Since then, the tide has been turning. JFK’s accession was but one milestone. Catholic schools are now embraced by parents of all religious stripes. And now, the possibility of a Catholic majority on the Supreme Court — one that also includes two Jews — is treated as a curiosity instead of a threat, except, perhaps, among those special interests who would be worried by any conservative, whatever his or her religion. To which one can only say, God bless this honorable court and these United States.

God Bless This Honorable Court

God Bless This Honorable Court

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