NEW YORK – If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court, she will be the sixth Roman Catholic of the nine justices.
But far from forming any unified bloc, the justices would represent the vast diversity of American Catholics, from weekly churchgoers to the occasional attendee. Sotomayor, a parochial school graduate, has said nothing since her nomination about how she practices her faith.
The White House said: “She currently does not belong to a particular parish or church, but she attends church with family and friends for important occasions.”
That would make her what religion experts call a “cultural Catholic,” someone who identifies with Catholicism and its traditions but is not active in the church.
More than half of U.S. Catholics rarely or never attend Mass, and they tend to have more liberal views than frequent churchgoers on abortion, gay marriage and other issues.
On the high court, Sotomayor would join a group of regular Mass attendees: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
One of Scalia’s sons is a priest. Roberts attended La Lumiere, a private Catholic prep school in La Porte, Ind., and his wife has been active in Feminists for Life.
Thomas, who once considered becoming a priest and briefly attended seminary, worshipped for many years at an Episcopal parish, then returned to the Catholic Church.
Justice Anthony Kennedy has voted with conservatives but has also been a swing vote in some cases, determining whether more liberal or conservative justices prevail. He regularly attends the annual Red Mass, a worship service for Catholics in the legal field, in the Archdiocese of Washington.
Two other justices – Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer – are Jewish. When Justice David Souter, an Episcopalian, soon retires, Justice John Paul Stevens will be the lone Protestant.
Sotomayor graduated from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx in 1972, attending at a time when nuns still wore habits, boys and girls were often separated, and it was common for teachers to ask students if they felt a calling to enter religious life.
Sergio Sotolongo, who went to high school and Princeton University with Sotomayor, said attending church was a given during the era when he and Sotomayor were enrolled at Cardinal Spellman.
“I’m of Hispanic descent as well,” said Sotolongo, who grew up in East Harlem and is now chief executive of the Student Funding Group. “You’d be hard pressed to find a Spanish family at that time that wasn’t religious.”
At Princeton, Sotolongo said the most popular Mass for students then was 4 p.m. on Sunday. He said he saw Sotomayor there “a couple of times.”
In 1976, Sotomayor married her high school boyfriend, Kevin Noonan, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They divorced seven years later and it is not known whether she sought an annulment.
As the daughter of Puerto Rican parents, Sotomayor represents the fast-growing Hispanic presence in the church. Studies have found that Latino Catholics tend to be more liberal on social justice issues such as immigration, but more conservative on marriage and other personal moral issues.
The strong Catholic presence on the court is a remarkable development for a faith that was once treated with contempt in the U.S. Religion has hardly been a definitive predictor in how justices vote.
Catholics have been among the most liberal Supreme Court justices, such as William J. Brennan, and among the most conservative, such as Antonin Scalia, noted Dennis J. Hutchinson, a court historian at the University of Chicago. Brennan, who served from 1956-1990, supported abortion rights and opposed the death penalty.
Still, the public sometimes sees faith behind rulings. In 2007, the court split 5-4 in a ruling that upheld a federal ban on the late-term abortion procedure dubbed “partial birth abortion.” The five judges who decided in favor the ban were Catholic.
A cartoonist at The Philadelphia Inquirer drew the five justices wearing bishops’ mitres, or traditional headgear, and called the drawing “Church & State.” Catholics were enraged, saying the cartoon implied that the judges took marching orders from the Vatican.
In a 2007 speech at Villanova University Law School, Scalia said: “There is no such thing as a ‘Catholic judge.’”
“The bottom line is that the Catholic faith seems to me to have little effect on my work as a judge,” he said, as reported by the journal First Things. “Just as there is no ‘Catholic’ way to cook a hamburger, I am hard pressed to tell you of a single opinion of mine that would have come out differently if I were not Catholic.”
Scalia has drawn a distinction between the moral duties of lawmakers and judges.
“That moral obligation may weigh heavily upon the voter and upon the legislator who enacts the laws, but a judge, I think, bears no moral guilt for the laws society has failed to enact,” he said at a 2002 conference on religion and the death penalty organized by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
In recent years, the nation’s bishops have been emphasizing the obligation of Catholic legislators to follow core church teachings, especially on abortion. Bishops have said that Catholic officials who back legalized abortion are cooperating in evil. Some church leaders have said these lawmakers should not receive Holy Communion.
However, the bishops generally don’t comment on individual judges. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said they don’t plan to comment on Sotomayor.
Associated Press – June 1, 2009
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