National overview
The New Republic’s shameful anti-Catholic cover floor
Why do progressives have the reputation of openly hating Catholics and Catholicism? Just because they keep publishing like Peter Hammond Schwartz’s latest essay in The New Republic, entitled “Originalism Is Dead. Long live the Catholic Natural Law. To get the full taste, start with the illustration of Judge Amy Coney Barrett as the Pope: The powers that challenge the modernist ideal in America are now being decisively led by conservative Catholics, not evangelical Protestants, with a new focus on claiming influence and power. via U.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 tulip image. 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 classic of the genre from Harper’s Weekly in 1871, which depicts the insidious threat of Catholic schooling: The American River Ganges by Thomas Nast, from the September 30, 1871 issue of Harper’s Weekly. Tony Auth started a controversy with a 2007 cartoon about the Supreme Court ruling to ban partial abortion in Gonzales v. Carhart, who portrays the five Catholic judges in the majority because of the caption ‘Church and State’. TNR’s editors and illustrator Michelle Rohn – and Schwartz, when using the image of Amy Coney Barrett, had to know exactly what card they were playing here. Schwartz complains quite openly that there are too many Catholics in Congress and the courts: Members of Congress are becoming increasingly Catholic, especially in the Republican Party. As of the 2016 election, the representation of Catholics in Congress has increased by a remarkable 68 percent since 1960, from 100 to 168, a total of more than 31 percent of Congress (even though Catholics have declined nationally to 21 percent of the population, less than the 23 percent who declared “None” in 2014 as their religious affiliation). Between the 2008 and 2016 elections, the Republican House of Representatives group nearly doubled, from 37 to 70, while the number of Catholic House Democrats dropped from 98 to 74. Despite this significant Catholic over-representation in Congress, traditionalist Catholics – for whom the nineteenth-century Blaine Amendments, in which states try to prevent public funding of religious education, remain the bloody shirt they can not stop waving – incessantly over constant prejudice and discrimination. Catholics are even more over-represented in the judiciary. Nearly 30 percent of the judges serving on the federal bench are Catholics. Six Catholics currently serve as judges in the Supreme Court, including five Conservatives appointed by the Republican. A seventh, Neil Gorsuch, is a formerly devout Catholic who now worships as an Episcopal. Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, the judges who replaced Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were also Catholics. Which means nine of the most recent 13 judges have a Catholic background. Yes, Schwartz complains that Catholics’ incessantly ‘twist’ and ‘the bloody shirt’ of 19th-century laws explicitly aimed at Catholics and that the Supreme Court only struck in June 2020 with a 5-4 vote on the objections from the liberals of the court and to the horror of progressive commentators. The atmosphere of the essay is full of familiar tropics from the left. A sharp, extreme, well-funded conspiracy is aimed at imposing theocracy on America through the courts: ‘a 50-year saga of Catholic intellectual and theological penetration of the halls of power. “Obviously,” William F. Buckley, the religious and mystical-leaning Catholic, is implied as part of this “doorway to the medieval past.” Predictably, reference is made to the Koch brothers, despite their strikingly libertarian social views. The main villains are ‘the three Leos – the nineteenth-century Pope Leo XIII, the twentieth-century German-American philosopher Leo Strauss and the twenty-first-century impresario Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society’. Schwartz uses the language of viral infection to describe the influence of Catholic thought: The intellectual connections and moral sensitivities of the new law of nature have penetrated many of the country’s most important media, political, legal and educational institutions in recent decades. NNL has seamlessly transitioned into the conservative intellectual bloodstream through organizations closely affiliated with the Federalist Society. For Leonard Leo – portrayed as ‘more than a trace of Cardinal Wolsey’ of 16th-century England – Schwartz relies on the views of Jeffrey Toobin, if you want a particularly clear picture of the mood of this essay. The Federalist Society is accused of carrying an Abrahamic fetish of the text as a revelation to our general ratification of the Constitution. Schwartz portrays the law of nature as a conspiracy to impose on Catholic theology: The moral philosophy of natural law absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (in public discourse and legal practice) a very specific understanding of the human individual as the crown of God’s creation, formed in the image of God himself. Ideas about natural law date back almost 800 years to the great synthesis of Aristotle and Augustine in the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas. These ideas presuppose intrinsic rational abilities of human beings to absorb and pursue unique human goods, and to derive a system of moral precepts and ethics from these goods which becomes the framework for the elucidation and codification of the positive law. As Thomas wrote: “It is the first law of the law that ‘good must be done and pursued, and evil must be avoided’. All other precepts of the law of nature are based on this: so that the practical reason which is naturally regarded as man’s good (or evil) belongs to the precepts of the law of nature as something to be done or avoided. Of course, as even Schwartz has to admit, the Catholic roots of natural law do not change the fact that it was also the philosophy that underpinned the political philosophy of the World Enlightenment, especially the Declaration of Independence and, yes, the American Constitution. But he regards its modern existence as ‘sinister’. Obviously, there is a deviation from sexual abuse by priests, not even the faintest attempt to deal with its actual development. To understand how elite enthusiasm for 13th-century Catholic philosophy relates to modern American politics, “we need look no further than Fox News,” Schwartz recommends. Natural. He warns against ‘extreme and edgy publications’ delivering a ‘Catholic fundamentalist message’, and does not make it think that the nature of religious fundamentalism is incompatible with the hierarchical and traditional Roman Catholic Church. The fundamental bait-and-switch of Schwartz’s article is his attempt to tell the story of Catholic integralism of Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari and Patrick Deneen as if it influenced forensic originals like Barrett. We are told that “even legal conservatives like Harvard’s professor of constitutional law, Adrian Vermeule, now concede these obvious shortcomings of originalism.” And it proves that ‘it seems that the true utility of originalism is the transaction value as a means to other legal principles’, as if Vermeule is 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 it is a debate between ‘two sides of the same coin demarcated into a medieval coin’. What is lost here is the fact that Vermeule, despite the interest he inspires in some circles, is a completely marginal figure among the kind of people who staff the federal legal staff and are active in the Federalist Society – in particular, Judge Barrett , who even admits Schwartz is a legal follower of Antonin Scalia, the monumental leader of the original camp. Nothing is quoted that suggests Justice Barrett has any legal-political sympathy with Vermeule, but that does not spare her from the caricature. Schwartz presents Justice Barrett as’ the first judge to obtain her law degree from a Catholic university ‘who’ spent almost her entire life in the ‘flying’ places of America where ‘gentry liberalism’ is not the dominant way. ‘It ignores the fact that Notre Dame is hardly a bastion of Catholic Orthodoxy (it gave Mario Cuomo an honorary degree in 1984), and that the mayor of Barrett’s city was Pete Buttigieg. The New Republic should be ashamed and ashamed of this if its editors are still capable of such sentiment.