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November
7, 2005 
VOL.
43, NO. 19Oakland,
CA
Judge Alito
would provide historic
Catholic majority on Supreme Court
WASHINGTON — If Judge Samuel Alito is confirmed
as the next member of the U.S. Supreme Court, he will usher in the court’s
first-ever Catholic majority.
Alito would join fellow Catholics Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony
Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts on the court. Justices John Paul
Stevens and David Souter are Protestants, while Ruth Bader Ginsburg and
Stephen Breyer are Jewish.
The development is significant in a number of ways, most notably as near-certain
proof that Catholics have finally exorcised the ghosts of anti-Catholicism
from politics past.
“It’s much deader than people have thought,” said Michael
Novak, a Catholic theologian at the American Enterprise Institute. “You
almost have to go looking for it. It’s not out there screaming at
you.”
And in a related way, Alito and Roberts’ strong support from evangelical
Christians shows how much relations between the two faiths have improved
over the past 40 years, when many Protestants were deeply skeptical of
Catholic John F. Kennedy’s run for the White House in 1960.
Many say that support shows that evangelicals have overcome their political
qualms in supporting Catholics in public life and cementing a powerful
social-political matrix based on shared values.
“The lines of demarcation between Catholics and Protestants are
much more blurred now than they were even 20 years ago,” said Chester
Gillis, a theology professor at Georgetown University in Washington.
Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist’s Ethics and
Religious Liberty Commission and a supporter of Alito, said the Second
Vatican Council healed many of those divisions and formed the foundation
for a shared alliance against abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality.
“I’ve got a lot more in common with Pope John Paul II as a
Baptist than I do with Jimmy Carter or Al Gore, who are both Southern
Baptists,” Land said.
But perhaps the most notable reaction to the potential of a Catholic majority
on the court has come from Catholics themselves, a mood that Novak summed
up as rather “ho-hum.”
“It’s remarkable that it’s so unremarkable,” said
Dennis Coyle, an associate professor of politics at Catholic University
and an expert on the court.
The Supreme Court has historically been dominated by mainline Protestants,
especially Episcopalians and Presbyterians. Indeed, of the 109 Supreme
Court justices in U.S. history, only 11 have been Catholic, and four of
those 11 are currently on the court.
According to an analysis by The New York Times, until 1988 there were
never two Catholic justices serving at once.
Catholic scholars and theologians, however, caution against reading too
much into Alito’s religion, or a Catholic majority on the court.
They point out that Justice William Brennan, a Catholic who served from
1956-1990, joined the majority opinion in the Roe vs. Wade decision that
legalized abortion, and that Justice Anthony Kennedy voted to uphold Roe
vs. Wade.
“All Catholics don’t think identically, either to Rome or
to each other,” said Gillis, of Georgetown. “To say that all
Catholics are ideologically identical and will vote in identical manners
is inaccurate.”
Judge Samuel Alito
