https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/13/will-democrats-do-the-right-thing-respecting-catholics/
A coalition of prominent Catholics has asked prominent Democrats to step up and defend American Catholics against anti-Catholic bigotry. Will they do it?
Anti-Catholicism, it has been said, is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.
I’m not sure anyone would accuse Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) of being an intellectual. Her colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee such as Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) are also safe from that accusation (and simple courtesy requires that we pass by Hawaii’s Senator Mazie Hirono in silence). But by dint of long occupation in the corridors of power, they all have imbibed the shallow, pseudo-enlightened anti-Catholicism that comes with membership in The Club.
Examples are legion, but one memorable exhibition came in 2017. Amy Coney Barrett, a professor of law at Notre Dame Law School and a prominent Roman Catholic, was nominated by President Trump for a position on the Court of Appeals in the Seventh Circuit. Sen. Feinstein, like a mosquito buzzing furiously to get inside the netting and draw blood, clearly was troubled by Barrett’s Catholicism, especially as it related the question of abortion in general and Roe v. Wade in particular. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” Sen. Feinstein observed, “and that’s a concern.”
Judge Barrett pointed out that she would not, as an Appeals Court Judge, be in a position to adjudicate the Constitutionality of Roe v. Wade. Moreover, she said, her originalist judicial philosophy respected precedent and strove to keep politics out of the judicial process. We have politicians to do politics. She would follow the law, not her personal preferences, in deciding cases.
The exchange went viral, serving to highlight the reflexive hostility to Catholics, and indeed to practicing Christians generally, among our elites. It also highlighted a deep, er, tension between the habitual badgering of Catholic nominees about the niceties of their faith and the prohibition against religious tests for office enshrined with all possible clarity in Article VI of the Constitution. “[N]o religious Test,” that brief Article concludes, “shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The president of the Anti-Defamation League, the president of Princeton University, the president of Notre Dame University, and the Harvard Law Review, are among those who, stirred by Feinstein’s admonition, have publicly declared their concern about this violation of the spirit if not the letter of Article VI.
