If Judge John G. Roberts is confirmed for a seat on the Supreme Court, he will become one of the historically small number of Catholic justices --- the first of whom joined the court as its chief justice in 1836, more than 50 years after the court was established.
Roberts, a federal appeals judge for the District of Columbia, was nominated July 19 to fill the vacancy created by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement. Roberts graduated from Catholic elementary and high schools in Indiana, and he and his family are members of the Church of the Little Flower in Bethesda, Md.
Should he be confirmed to the court, Roberts will be the 10th Catholic justice in history and the fourth among current members, the most ever at one time.
The first Catholic justice went straight to the top.
After serving as attorney general and acting secretary of war, Roger B. Taney was rejected by the Senate the first time President Andrew Jackson nominated him to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1835. That apparently was due more to the Senate's ongoing political battles with Jackson, though, rather than to Taney or his religion, according to encyclopedia references.
Taney was confirmed as chief justice when that position opened up a year later, and he served until 1864.
The son of a Maryland plantation owner and slaveholder, Taney is perhaps best known for writing the majority opinion in Dred Scott vs. Sandford in 1857. It said Negroes could not become citizens and that Congress had no authority to prohibit the territories from allowing slavery.
The ruling became hotly divisive and was a factor in creating the political climate that led to the Civil War.
The second Catholic named to the court was not seated for another 30 years after Taney's death, but he also became chief justice, the only other Catholic to have held that post.
Edward Douglas White, a U.S. senator from a wealthy and politically powerful Louisiana family, was appointed to the court in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland after his two previous nominees were rejected by the Senate. White had attended Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Md., and Georgetown University and served in the Confederate Army before entering politics.
The Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court notes that White's nomination sailed through, apparently at least in part because he was a member of the Senate. In 1910, White was elevated to the seat of chief justice, which he held until his death in 1921.
White was joined on the court in 1898 by Joseph McKenna, the son of Irish immigrants who was U.S. attorney general at the time of his nomination. McKenna had also served as a judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and as a member of Congress. Although anti-Catholic sentiment of the 1880s was a factor in McKenna's defeat in his first two runs for Congress, such attitudes were apparently not in play in his confirmation to the court.
Six other Catholics have served on the court since then. Since 1894, the longest period when there was no Catholic was the seven-year gap between the 1949 death of Frank Murphy and William J. Brennan's confirmation in 1956.
Some sources list Sherman Minton, who took one of two seats vacated by deaths in 1949, as being Catholic. That would mean the longest gap without a Catholic on the court since the 19th century was the 12-week period between the November 1939 death of Pierce Butler, the fourth Catholic on the court, and the swearing-in of Frank Murphy in February 1940.
However, Minton didn't become a Catholic until 1961, after he retired from the court in 1956.
Minton's seat in turn went to Brennan, who would be the sole Catholic on the court for 30 years. He was joined by Antonin Scalia in 1986, and two years later by Anthony Kennedy.
At the time Justice Clarence Thomas was confirmed in 1991, he said that despite having been raised Catholic and having spent several years in a seminary, he was not a practicing Catholic. In 1996 he told fellow alumni at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., that he had recently returned to the church, making him the third Catholic among current justices.
The longest-serving Catholic on the court has been Brennan, who retired in poor health in 1990 after 33 years in the post. The shortest term for one of the Catholics was Murphy's nine years.
It was not until after three Catholics had served on the court and 127 years after its founding that the first non-Christian was appointed. Louis Brandeis, who was Jewish, was confirmed in 1916. Since then, there have been six other Jewish justices. None has served as chief justice.
According to the Web site, www.adherents.com, of the court's 107 justices, 33 have been Episcopalian, 18 Presbyterian, 15 were listed simply as Protestant, 10 have been Catholic (the site includes Minton) and nine were Unitarians. The rest included five Methodists, three Baptists and one each described as members of the Congregational Church, the Disciples of Christ, the Quakers, the Church of Disciples and Trinity Church. Only one justice has said he was not a member of any church, David Davis, who served from 1862-77. ---CNS |