The Catholic Court

Shaun Pierce

With the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, a pending approval would create a Catholic majority on the Court. The beauty of a protestant president responsible for a Catholic court majority makes me smile, but I digress.

Why have recent Republican presidents turned again and again to Catholic jurists when making appointments to the Supreme Court? It may be partly an effort to woo Catholic voters, but mostly it's because so many of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament are Catholics. But why is that?

It may also be because in the 1960s, many conservative Catholics went into the legal profession because they felt the constitutional jurisprudence of the country was not reflecting their values on abortion, funding for parochial schools and restrictions on religion in public places.

How are others responding to all this? Welcome to "the reality of social conservatism: Evangelicals supply the political energy, Catholics the intellectual heft," Franklin Foer wrote in The New Republic. "Evangelicals didn't just need Catholic bodies; they needed Catholic minds to supply them with rhetoric that relied more heavily on morality than biblical quotation." Well that could spark a firestorm of debate!

Four Catholics currently serve on the court: Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and the new chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr. Alito would be only the 12th Catholic in the Court's 110-justice history. From the moment that President Bush announced Alito's nomination, there has been an undercurrent of debate about the prospect of a five-member Catholic majority.

To many scholars, what's most impressive about the rising number of Catholics on the court is that it's a nonissue, at least compared with the blatant anti-Catholicism that dogged Alfred E. Smith when he ran for president in 1928 and that still faced John F. Kennedy in 1960.

So what does all this mean? My guess is not very much. Anyone who expects papal encyclicals to suddenly dictate American law is wrong. A judge is solemnly pledged to uphold the Constitution not the teaching of amy denomiation.

If anything "Catholic" can be applied to the laws of this nation, I hope it would be the belief in "natural law," a basic set of moral principles that the church says is written in the hearts of all people and true for all societies.