Sotomayor Would Be Sixth Catholic Justice, but the Pigeonholing Ends There – NYTimes.com.
If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed for a seat on the Supreme Court, she will be the sixth of the nine justices who are Roman Catholic — a stunning robed portrait in a country where Catholics were once targets of discrimination and suspicion.
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Four of the Catholics on the court are reported to be committed attenders of Mass, and they make up the court’s solid conservative bloc — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. The fifth Catholic, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, often votes with them.
There are indications that Judge Sotomayor is more like the majority of American Catholics: those who were raised in the faith and shaped by its values, but who do not attend Mass regularly and are not particularly active in religious life. Like many Americans, Judge Sotomayor may be what religion scholars call a “cultural Catholic” — a category that could say something about her political and social attitudes.
Interviews with more than a dozen of Judge Sotomayor’s friends from high school, college, law school and professional life said they had never heard her talk about her faith, and had no recollection of her ever going to Mass or belonging to a parish. Her family did not return phone calls for comment.
A White House spokesman, speaking on background, put it this way: “She currently does not belong to a particular parish or church, but she attends church with family and friends for important occasions.”
Many of Judge Sotomayor’s friends and colleagues also said they believed that her expressed commitment to social justice and community service is a reflection of her Catholic upbringing.
“In law school, it was very clear she was committed to serving the community and using the law as an instrument of service to the greater good,” said Rachel Moran, a professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Law who is on leave to help establish a law school at the University of California, Irvine. “That’s a mark of religion, even if she didn’t say so.”
Studies have consistently shown that the 57 percent of Catholics who rarely or never attend Mass are far more liberal on political and cultural issues than Catholics who attend weekly or at least once a month.
In fact, 52 percent of Catholics who do not attend church regularly say abortion is morally acceptable, compared with 24 percent of churchgoing Catholics, according to a Gallup study released in March based on polling over the previous three years. Gallup found that 61 percent of non-churchgoing Catholics found same-sex relationships morally acceptable, compared with 44 percent of churchgoers.
But legal scholars say that while Judge Sotomayor’s Catholic identity will undoubtedly shape her perceptions, they will not determine how she would rule on the bench. After all, they point out, Justices William J. Brennan Jr. and Frank Murphy, both Catholics, had records as liberals, while Justice Scalia has been a reliable conservative. Their positions have differed, even on issues covered in Catholic teaching, like abortion.
“I don’t think there is any one Catholic stance on the law,” said M. Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at the University of Notre Dame. “Catholicism is a big tent, so different people are drawn to different aspects of it. A Dorothy Day Catholic is going to be different than an Opus Dei Catholic,” she said. (Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker movement that promotes justice for the poor; Opus Dei is a church prelature that promotes personal orthodoxy.)
“You’ll have judges who are pro-life personally who are going to rule that Roe v. Wade is the law of the land,” Ms. Kaveny said. “People recognize that the task of the judge is different than the task of a lawmaker.”
After her father died, Judge Sotomayor was brought up in the Bronx by her mother. She attended Cardinal Spellman High School, an academically rigorous Catholic school, in an era when boys and girls were segregated.
But it was also in the era after the Second Vatican Council, when the church was opening to modern culture. Mass at Spellman High was accompanied by a guitar, and girls were asking why they could not be altar servers, said Jane Morris, who knew Judge Sotomayor while both were student council leaders.
“We were allowed and encouraged to ask a lot of questions,” said Ms. Morris, who is now the girls athletic director at Spellman High. “We were asking, what’s wrong with the other religions, and why do you say everybody else is going to Hell?”
At Princeton, where Judge Sotomayor belonged to a Puerto Rican student group, a group of Latino students attended Mass every week, but she was not among them, a former classmate recalled.
Judge Sotomayor married her boyfriend from high school, Kevin E. Noonan, in a small chapel at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City in the summer of 1976, after both graduated from college, according to a friend of Judge Sotomayor. But within seven years they were divorced, and it is not known whether she obtained a marriage annulment from the church. She has not remarried and has no children.
As a Hispanic Catholic, Judge Sotomayor is part of the church’s most vibrant and growing wing. Hispanic Catholics, studies show, are more liberal than white Catholics on some social and economic issues, like immigration and health care reform, but more conservative on homosexuality and abortion.
Justice Scalia, whose son is a Catholic priest, and Justice Alito are of Italian Catholic ancestry. Justice Thomas is an African-American convert who once went to seminary, left the church for 28 years and rejoined in the mid-1990s.
Lucas A. Powe Jr., a professor of law and government at the University of Texas, Austin, said Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito are “Catholic and movement conservatives.”
“That combination is just golden for being anti-abortion and anti-affirmative action,” said Mr. Powe, author of “The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789-2008” (March 2009, Harvard University Press).
Justice Kennedy, who wrote two decisions favoring equal rights for gay people, is a “country club Republican,” which Mr. Powe described as “an economic conservative without some of the social conservatism.”
The court’s liberal wing is made up of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, who are Jewish, and John Paul Stevens, a Protestant.
The Rev. Joseph A. O’Hare, a Jesuit priest and the former president of Fordham University, who came to know Judge Sotomayor when they both served on the New York City Campaign Finance Board in the 1980s, said: “I just don’t think Sonia would fit in with Roberts, exactly, and certainly not Scalia. I think they’re very different Catholics.”
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