The virtues of a good judge are a product of the judge’s character and commitments, including one’s faith tradition.
The virtues of a good judge are a product of the judge’s character and commitments, including one’s faith tradition.
M y Villanova University colleague Massimo Faggioli has an online contribution at Politico about Judge Amy Coney Barrett arguing that as “a Catholic scholar” he thinks it is fine “to ask questions about Barrett’s religious beliefs.” Along the way, he sets up and knocks down a series of strawman arguments, engages in pernicious dual-loyalty arguments that are a longstanding staple of anti-Catholic (and anti-Semitic) bigotry in American public life, and asserts gratuitously that “Amy Coney Barrett is not Catholic like John F. Kennedy was Catholic.”
When John Carroll (the first bishop in the United States) asked the federal government for advice about various clergymen who might be bishops, James Madison declined to get involved. That the Constitution says there shall be no religious test means something. Faggioli is arguing for undue religious influence in a process that specifically forbids it, but from an unusual direction — by a fellow Catholic — than might be expected.
Faggioli asserts falsely that Judge Barrett’s supporters are “arguing that public questions about her religious beliefs should be off limits.” Hardly. No one doubts that senators can and should ask nominees about their commitments, jurisprudential or otherwise. The virtues of a good judge are a product of the judge’s character and commitments, including one’s faith tradition (as when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke about her Judaism and its commitment to justice) and upbringing (Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke movingly in the opening statement at her Senate hearing about growing up in a Bronx housing project and losing her father at an early age).
But Faggioli’s target is Judge Barrett’s Catholicism and her membership in People of Praise, an ecumenical, charismatic Christian community that started in the 1970s. He questions “Barrett’s independence as a judge” given promises made by those affiliated with People of Praise. He asks ominously, “To whom has Barrett made a vow of obedience? What is its nature and scope?” Well, it turns out the group’s Covenant Commitment is published online and includes such commonplace Christian promises as “to love and serve God” and to “commit ourselves as well to one another.”
People make vows and promises in life all the time — employment agreements, friendships, and, yes, in matters of religious faith when they are bar mitzvahed, baptized, confirmed, and married. All of this suspicion and innuendo in Faggioli’s piece about oaths and divided loyalty is about a group that is so secretive that it . . . has a website (peopleofpraise.org) with contact information for its chapters and operates three highly regarded schools in Indiana, Minnesota, and Virginia. Pope Francis (whom Faggioli misleadingly invokes when he quotes from a speech the pope delivered to leaders of new ecclesial movements) named a member of People of Praise to be a bishop in Portland, Ore.
Judge Barrett has already testified under oath in her hearing for confirmation to the federal bench that she “would never impose my own personal convictions upon the law.” In that respect she is following in the footsteps of Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked, when he said, “Just as there is no Catholic way to cook a hamburger, so also there is no Catholic way to interpret a text, analyze a historical tradition, or discern the meaning and legitimacy of prior judicial decisions — except, of course, to do those things honestly and perfectly.” Faggioli concludes by implying that Judge Barrett’s faith “could affect or supersede an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Judge Barrett has proven herself a highly capable legal scholar and jurist committed to the Constitution and the rule of law, and all Americans — including but especially Catholics — should recoil at the suggestion that her faith and personal life would prescribe otherwise.