Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court has once again raised the question of the role of Catholicism in American public life. Catholic judges are often in the position. But in interesting ways, she may represent a different kind of Catholic judge. In some ways, the nomination process and its larger cultural conversation have proceeded the expected way: opponents argue Catholic judges represent some sort of alien importation into American life, and Catholics assuring these potential adversaries that in fact Catholics can be good “American” citizens just like anyone else.
The high point of this kind of soft bigotry was perhaps the treatment of Antonin Scalia, where in a somewhat infamous essay, the Yale Law Journal attributed Justice Scalia’s judicial perspective to his “literalist,” “pre-Vatican II” worldview. In this sense, “originalism” fits within a very specific kind of story about Catholics in America. Since Catholic judges should just “apply the law,” as the argument goes, they can just leave messy moral questions to the voters. A Catholic judge can therefore rule on issues in a way that they may not have in a fully Catholic social system out of deference to established norms.
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