Wper Do progressives have a reputation for open hatred of Catholics and Catholicism? Just because they keep publishing things like Peter Hammond Schwartz’s latest essay in The new republic, entitled “Originalism Is Dead. Long live Catholic Natural Law. ”To get the full flavor, you must start with the illustration of Judge Amy Coney Barrett as the Pope:
The forces that challenge the modernist ideal in America are now decidedly led by conservative Catholics, not evangelical Protestants, with a new focus on claiming influence and power through America’s legal institutions, especially the federal courts .https: //t.co / BuL4LTTctk
– The New Republic (@newrepublic) February 3, 2021
There is a long and ugly tradition of anti-Catholic writers and cartoonists portraying their enemies in the mouth of a pope or bishop, dating back to the days of the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings of the 1850s and their heirs in the 1870s and 1880s. This is illustrated by this Thomas Nast’s classic of the genre of Harper’s Weekly in 1871, portraying the nefarious threat of the Catholic school:
Cartoonist Tony Auth raised controversy with a 2007 cartoon about the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the partial birth abortion ban in Gonzales v. Carhart, representing the five Catholic judges in the majority in the mitered caption “Church and State”.
TNREditors and illustrators Michelle Rohn – and Schwartz, if he approved using the image of Amy Coney Barrett – had to know exactly what card they were playing here.
Schwartz openly complains that there are many Catholics in Congress and in the courts:
Members of Congress are increasingly Catholic, especially in the Republican Party. In the 2016 election, Catholics’ representation in Congress increased by a notable 68 percent since 1960, from 100 to 168, a total of more than 31 percent from Congress (although Catholics nationally fell to 21 percent of the population, less than the 23 percent who in 2014 declared “None” as their religious affiliation). Between the 2008 and 2016 elections, the cohort of Republican Catholics nearly doubled, from 37 to 70, while the number of Democratic Catholics fell from 98 to 74. Despite this significant Catholic over-representation in Congress, traditionalist Catholics – for whom the nineteenth century- The century’s Blaine Amendments, through which states sought to block public funding for religious education, remain the bloody shirt that they cannot stop wearing – ceaselessly meow about continued prejudice and discrimination.
Catholics are even more overrepresented in the judiciary. Almost 30% of the judges who serve on the federal bench are Catholic. Six Catholics currently serve as Supreme Court judges, five of whom are conservatives appointed by Republicans. A seventh, Neil Gorsuch, is a devout Catholic who now adores as an Episcopal. Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, the judges replaced by Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were also Catholic. Which means that nine of the 13 most recent judges are Catholic.
Yes, Schwartz complains that Catholics “whine incessantly” and shake “the bloody shirt” of 19th century laws that were explicitly directed at Catholics and that the Supreme Court was overthrown by 5–4 votes only in June 2020, on the objections of the Liberals of the Court and on the horror of progressive commentators.
The rehearsal atmosphere is full of familiar tropes from the left. An obscure, extreme and well-funded conspiracy is trying to impose theocracy on America through the courts: “a saga of 50 years of Catholic theological and intellectual penetration into the halls of power.” Naturally, “William F. Buckley, the devout and mystically inclined Catholic” is implicated as part of this “gateway to the medieval past”. Predictably, the Koch brothers are referenced, despite their visibly libertarian social views. The main villains are “the three Leos – the 19th century Pope Leo XIII, the 20th century German-American philosopher Leo Strauss and the 21st century Federalist Society businessman Leonard Leo”. Schwartz uses the language of viral infection to describe the influence of Catholic thought:
The intellectual commitments and moral sensitivities of the new natural law have penetrated in the last decades in many of the most significant media, political, legal and educational institutions in the country. NNL has passed perfectly into the conservative intellectual bloodstream through organizations closely linked to the Federalist Society.
For Leonard Leo – described as having “more than a trace of Cardinal Wolsey” from 16th century England – Schwartz trusts Jeffrey Toobin’s views, if you want a particularly vivid mental image of the humor in this essay. The Federalist Society is accused of presenting, for our popularly ratified Constitution, “an Abrahamic fetish of the text as a revelation”.
Schwartz portrays natural law as a conspiracy to impose Catholic theology:
The moral philosophy of natural law absorbs (from revelation and scriptures) and communicates (in public discourse and legal practice) a very specific understanding of the human individual as the culmination of God’s creation, molded in the image of God Himself. Ideas about natural law date back almost 800 years ago, to the great synthesis of Aristotle and Augustine in Summa Theologica scored by Tomás de Aquino. These ideas presuppose intrinsic rational capacities of humans to properly perceive and seek exclusively human goods and to deduce from these goods a system of moral and ethical precepts that become the framework for elucidating and codifying positive law. As Thomas wrote: “This is the first precept of the law, that ‘good must be done and sought, and evil must be avoided’. All other precepts of natural law are based on this: so that anything that practical reason naturally perceives as the good (or evil) of man belongs to the precepts of natural law as something to be done or avoided. “
As even Schwartz must admit, of course, the Catholic roots of natural law do not change the fact that it was also the philosophy underlying much of the secular political philosophy of the Enlightenment, most notably the Declaration of Independence and, rather, the Constitution of States United. But he sees his modern survival as “sinister”. Of course, there is a digression about priestly sexual abuse, without even the vaguest effort to address its actual development.
To understand how the elite’s enthusiasm for 13th-century Catholic philosophy relates to modern American politics, “we don’t need to go beyond Fox News,” advises Schwartz. Clear. He warns of “extreme and bold publications” that convey a “Catholic fundamentalist message”, no matter that the very nature of religious fundamentalism is irreconcilable with the hierarchical and tradition-bound Roman Catholic Church.
The fundamental bait of Schwartz’s article is his effort to tell the story of Catholic integralism by Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari and Patrick Deneen as if he were influential in judicial originalists like Barrett. They say that “even legal conservatives, like Harvard constitutional law professor Adrian Vermeule, now admit these obvious flaws in originalism” And this proves that “it turns out that the real usefulness of originalism is its transactional value as a vehicle for others legal principles ”, as if Vermeule were not an open critic and enemy of originalism. Only much later in the article does Schwartz address the conflict between the two camps, while insisting that this is a debate between “two sides of the same coin demarcated in a medieval coin”.
What is lost here is the fact that Vermeule is, despite the interest it inspires in some circles, an entirely marginal figure among the types of people who work in the federal judiciary and are active in the Federalist Society – in particular, Judge Barrett, who even Schwartz admits that he is a jurisprudential follower of Antonin Scalia, the monumental leader of the originalist camp. Nothing is cited to suggest that Judge Barrett has any jurisprudential sympathy with Vermeule, but that does not spare her from the caricature. Schwartz classifies Judge Barrett as “the first judge to receive her law degree at a Catholic university” who “has spent most of her life in America’s ‘high places’ where ‘gentry liberalism’ is not the dominant fashion. ” This ignores the fact that Notre Dame is hardly a cloistered bastion of Catholic orthodoxy (he gave Mario Cuomo an honorary degree in 1984), and that the mayor of the city of Barrett was Pete Buttigieg.
The new republic should be ashamed and embarrassed about it, if its editors are still capable of such a feeling.