To Be (Catholic) or Not to Be, That Is the Legal Question

• In Event: Political Religious Elites and Religious Political Elites

Abstract

A defining characteristic of American religious culture is its radical heterogeneity. The intersection of democratic freedom with the desire for purity has yielded a fractalization of religious groups. Believers who can no longer abide by the doctrines of their faith simply splinter off and create a new sect that reflects their understanding of divine truth. Yet, within American Christianity, this familiar story does not—cannot—apply to Catholics in quite the same way. To leave the Church is to cease to be a Catholic, at least formally. Even so, the pulls of freedom and conviction tug at the Catholic conscience, too, and yield a range of political and social views similar to that found in other faith traditions. What distinguishes the heterodoxy of American Catholicism is the need to contain this diversity within a unitary system of doctrine and authority in which an “official” Church position exists on matters ranging from nuclear warfare to abortion. But how does the tension between Catholicism as an institutionalized faith tradition and the diversity of views among American Catholics play out in practice, especially within the legal sphere, where power, practice, and values converge in a highly politicized and consequential manner? Do Catholics actively support or oppose the hierarchy’s position in legal cases that matter deeply to them?
In this paper, we seek to address these and other questions by extending the analysis of Supreme Court amicus curiae briefs that we undertook in relation to White Protestants in our article, “Amicus Curiae Briefs and the Competing Legal Agendas of White Protestants in the United States, 1969–2020”, in this case by examining the filing of amicus briefs of different Catholic groups. Our research entails examining every brief signature attached to an amicus filing before the US Supreme Court by a group that claims a Catholic identity or affiliation between the years 1900 and 2023. These include not only “official” briefs filed by groups such as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, for example, but also briefs from other groups that self-identify as Catholic. Although we have a long way to go in the coding of the briefs as of the writing of this proposal, we have already observed that several lay Catholic groups actively file briefs that oppose the official position of the Church (and each other) on matters ranging from abortion to gay rights to immigration.
Despite the diverse set of groups and issues that we are analyzing (both qualitatively and quantitatively), our paper will limit itself to addressing three questions. First, which topics yield the most splintering and to what extent: Abortion? Social justice? Immigration? Peace and war? Second, to what extent do amicus filings that deviate from the positions maintained in official Church briefs reflect the desire to shape not only American law but the ability of American Catholics to carve autonomous moral space while remaining within the Catholic tradition? In other words, what does the dynamic that we are examining tell us about the capacity of Catholicism to accommodate a diversity of beliefs? Third, have conservative and liberal Catholic groups changed their behavior over time? If so, how? Do conservative groups, for example show a greater willingness to oppose the hierarchy now that it embraces more liberal views than they do? We expect our findings to provide us with an opportunity to examine other questions, but these are three that we will focus on for this paper.

Authors

• Jonathan Hensley, Towson University

• Paul T. McCartney, Towson University