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Amy Coney Barrett’s “Cult”
When Notre Dame law professor and possible Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was nominated for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, her affiliation with a religious group called People of Praise raised red flags. It was some sort of cult, they implied. Sen. Dianne Feinstein famously reproved the nominee by intoning that “the dogma lives loudly within you and that’s of concern.”
It was an echo of the kind of anti-Catholic bigotry that characterized American life for centuries. When the Democrats nominated the first Roman Catholic for president, Al Smith in 1928, opponents warned that all Protestant marriages would be annulled and all Protestant children declared bastards if the Catholic were elected. Republicans circulated pictures of Smith posing before the almost-completed Holland Tunnel with a caption declaring that instead of emptying into New Jersey, it really led 3,500 miles under the Atlantic Ocean to the basement of the Vatican. After his loss to Herbert Hoover, Smith was reputed to have quipped that he had sent a one-word telegram to the Pope: “Unpack.”
But Feinstein’s comment and others’ insinuations that her religion is somehow creepy or suspicious reveals a broader anti-religious bias.
Barrett and her family are reportedly members of a religious group called People of Praise. The New York Times implied that the group, most, but not all of whose members are Catholic, departed from mainstream Catholic ideas and doctrines. My EPPC colleague Ed Whelan disposed of those suggestions.
Curious, I looked at their website. I suppose it’s possible that the benign image they attempt to convey to the world is mere window dressing. But then again, Pope Francis appointed one of their members as an auxiliary bishop in Portland, Oregon. It seems doubtful, bordering on impossible, that he would have conferred that honor on a cult member.
Founded in 1971 as part of the lay Catholic ministries movement, People of Praise provides spiritual community, support for those in need, prayer and counseling, and guidance for successful marriages, among other things. More than 1000 couples have completed their Marriage in Christ program that instills habits of prayer and – this is shocking – conversation to improve relationships.
The first thing you see on the People of Praise website is a Louisiana picnic attended by a notably inter-racial group. One might have thought that such membership groups are far too rare – especially in the current climate. As Dorothy Anderson, an older African American woman put it, “In almost all of his speeches, Martin Luther King spoke about blacks and whites living together in unity. I didn’t think I’d live long enough to see it, but I saw it last Thursday night at the barbecue.”
People of Praise is ecumenical, with Lutheran, Methodist, Anglican, and other Christian members in addition to the Catholics. It contains both Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor. Like churches, they send missions to needy communities in the United States. More than 100 members have helped to build and renovate homes, run summer camps for thousands of kids, and found schools.
As for Barrett herself, it seems that she lives her faith. She and her husband have seven children including one with special needs and two adopted from Haiti. Her former colleagues on the Notre Dame law school faculty, many of whom have disagreements with Barrett, unanimously endorsed her nomination to the Circuit Court, describing her as “brilliant” and also “generous” and “warm.” They wrote: “She possesses in abundance all of the other qualities that shape extraordinary jurists: discipline, intellect, wisdom, impeccable temperament, and above all, fundamental decency and humanity.”
If Barrett is a glazed-eyed cultist, she’s done an incredible job of hiding it. She fooled her fellow clerks on the Supreme Court when she worked for Justice Antonin Scalia. Dozens of clerks, including some who worked for Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, endorsed her previous nomination, calling her a “woman of remarkable intellect and character.” She fooled her students, hundreds of whom signed an endorsement reading in part “Our religious, cultural, and political views span a wide spectrum. Despite the many and genuine differences among us, we are united in our conviction that Professor Barrett would make an exceptional federal judge.” And she fooled all of the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee along with three Democrats, who voted to approve her nomination.
The words “people of praise” raise hackles among secularists. Considering their charitable work and trans-racial, trans-class appeal, they deserve at least the benefit of the doubt. And that Barrett is reportedly a member is the best testimonial of all.
Published in Law, Politics
As another Ricochet member recently suggested, suspicions about that “cult” are probably less related to anti-Catholic bias than to suspicions about “communes” and planned communities.
Perhaps this is what Sen. Feinstein was referring to when she declared that, “dogma lives loudly within you and that’s of concern.” God forbid that people be allowed to help others; that’s government’s job.
Beautiful column, Mona. Thank you for it!
I hope she goes to the Supreme Court, if not now, someday.
Mona you are right on with this post. Keep up the good work. My grandma on my mother’s side had 8 kids, on my dads side 6, both Catholic. I can assure you neither were in a cult.
DiFi had her own cult experience: [emphasis added.]
See this from Salon for more on the topic.
The “lives loudly within you” thing is the most obnoxious statement I can imagine to describe someone who has strong religious beliefs. It seems intentionally formulated to embarrass or humiliate, to make Barrett seem like someone who has childish or two dimensional faith. Feinstein must have paid lawyers to come up with that phrase.
Mona,
Let’s grasp just how shocking this statement by Feinstein really is. Diane Feinstein has been a US Senator for over 25 years. She has every resource available to her when she is evaluating a prospective Judicial nominee. Feinstein has been through the process many many times. How could she have so misjudged Barrett that she would make such a derogatory/inflammatory statement? I can only conclude that the left-wing prejudice of her entire group of staff people is without any redeeming quality whatsoever. The blind trivial groupthink that has become cloned throughout our academic/government/media has had a debilitating effect on someone who should know so much better.
This is why we must be on guard against the other side. Not because we think them all fools or evil but because they will be dragged down by their own new cohort of blind believers. We must stop hoping for anything but the worst from the other side. You can’t go on trying to profit from pure identity politics jibberish and not pay the price. It’s Feinstein’s credentials that aren’t worth a damn.
She is the one who is now a member of a cult.
Regards,
Jim
Thank you Ms Charon for this calm, dispassionate, reasoned examination of this one aspect of a woman, Mrs Amy Barrett, who seems almost too terrific to be real. And yet, real she is. Goodness, I saw her give a lecture for a group in Florida while she was still a law professor at Notre Dame. Here it is:
I would like to add, this is the Mona Charon that , for years, I looked forward to listening to and reading.
Moderator Note:
Attacks on public figures' minor children are generally out of bounds.I got a bad feeling about this one.
Far be it from me to question a SCOTUS nominee who appears to be enthusiastically supported by hard-core, fighting, red meat conservative Mona Charen, or a judge who main attractions listed by her partisans are her faith and the number of kids she has – [redacted]
But I was hoping for more the flint-eyed, hard-edged, one-sided partisan of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg mold. You know, someone traditional American conservatives could count on year in and year out, decade in and decade out, on every legal, social, moral and cultural issue – like Sonia Sotomayor is for progressives.
Someone we wouldn’t have to worry might be affected by photos of sad “immigrant” children at the border accompanied by audio tapes of their bawling.
Someone whose ecumenical and universalist sensibilities wouldn’t possibly be offended by the statements or tweets of a guy from Queens, perhaps affecting her jurisprudence.
Someone we wouldn’t have to wonder if, once on the Court, she might succumb to the prevailing ethos of the Imperial City, join Mona and best pal Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post for coffee, and decide that the Democrats really have “A nice agenda for nice people.”
In other words, someone we were absolutely 100% certain would not “grow” in the office, but would instead be a reliable SCOTUS vote for the Right.
I’m sorry to once again be the skunk in the garden party of center-right, soft-hearted, surface-loving Ricochet. I know people aren’t going to like reading this. I know we all want to believe.
But why can’t we have Ann Coulter?
I have a friend who used to do short term missions work in a communist country. The only time he was arrested was when he was handing out food. That was viewed as the government’s job.
According to the Democrats, so is killing babies.
C’mon, Freesmith. Really?
Because I don’t trust Ann Coulter. She has never been a judge. Does she know what it takes to be a judge? A judge should not just blindly defend whatever it is that conservatives want. It should not be a political position, and some conservatives are turning it into that. Antonin Scalia knew better. That is why he was so great. Sonya Sotomayor is a disgrace to the bench. We do not need a right-wing version of that.
If you don’t have time for the entire 55 minute video on comment#8, then just watch the first 10 minutes. See if you can get a feel for her @freesmith and anyone else. Then post your comment.
Whisper campaigning is an art. I remember when an Irish-Catholic Democrat started one against an Italian-Catholic Democrat in a primary. In that case not “cult” but “Mafia” was the trigger word. And then there was Bork.
If we had a halfway competent press, we might have a chance.
As she is reviewed in the MSM and even in the hallowed halls of Washington, you’ll see plenty of teeth-bearing and growling – the claws will be out for anyone that is pro-family and a strict Constitutionalist.
I watched the whole thing. I liked the old baseball analogy they mentioned. I’ll use it too, @cdor
There are two baseball teams, the Red Sox and the Blue Sox. They play each other every day, every year in a never-ending series of games. They are equal in terms of talent and effort.
Four umpires call all the games, circling the bases each four-day cycle so that one day an umpire is calling strikes and the next day he’s at third base, then second, then first.
Two of the umpires “call ’em as they see ’em.” They are completely impartial and loyal to the spirit of the game of baseball.
But the other two umpires favor the Blue Sox. On every close play, every critical strike-or-ball call, and every interpretable ground rule, those two umpires can be counted on to give the advantage to the Blues. And even though the Red Sox protest and rage, those two umpires keep judging play after play to favor the Blue Sox.
Now I’m not asking anybody to tell me whether this is fair or just. I’m not asking if this is how things ought to be. I’m not proposing that we eliminate umpires or take our balls and go home. I’m just asking everybody one simple question:
Who would you bet on to win most of the goddamned games?
People with some religious background are likely to give others of faith a fair shake, and not treat them like the enemy who needs to be punished before they did anything. They are often used as a punching bag for someone on the left to prove their bonafides. In that, this is political posturing sometimes seen as necessary by those in a position to vote on candidates. I think it is done both to soothe the constituency of the senator(s), as well as to cover expectations of the team to put up a unified front against the president.
Given the times we live in I would be nervous of anyone whom everyone loves. It makes me nervous how reliable she will be. I would think that someone who is an effective and consistent,strong conservative voice would rile up the left, no matter how wonderful they are as human beings. I hope that if she is nominated she will behave more like Thomas than Souter.
That’s why we want Trump to pick more umpires to call ’em straight…by da books…because then we, the American people will always win.
She was approved for District Judge about a year ago 55-43 or something close to that. All the Republicans voted for her along with three Democrats. I do not believe we can rely on any Democrats this time and now we only have 50 voting R’s (not counting McCain). There is zero margin to pull this off. You listened to the video @freesmith and @wolverine . Given that was done before she was even a judge, did you find anything she said about abortion that could be interpreted by a Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski to be in favor of overturning Roe V Wade. And vice versa, dis you find anything she said to be against overturning? This is critical, can she be against the precedent in such a constitutional way that she never speaks to the actual issue? That is a true Supreme. That is the opposite of a Ginsburg.
As I expected, no one wants to answer my simple question. Folks instead want to wish that in the future the conditions will change.
But my baseball scenario describes accurately the arc of Supreme Court jurisprudence since Nixon, which is inexorably Left. The Blue Sox keep winning most of the games.
Unless we on the Right put our own Ginsburgs (former general counsel and lead litigator for the ACLU) and Kagans (former Clinton Administration Solicitor General) on the Supreme Court, then there will be only one side that is partisan. The other side will be neutral.
I’ve said this before: If you and a friend are holding opposite sides of a rope and he pulls on his end but you only try to keep the rope from touching the ground, in which direction will the rope – and you – go?
Start pulling!
What’s that old saying? Oh yea…”Be careful what you wish for.” Oh and then there is always this: “Beware of the unintended consequences.” It seems, @freesmith, you have no problem with politicizing the Supreme Court. You just don’t like which political side it has been on for a while. But I sure understand where you are coming from.
@cdor Worrying about unintended consequences is a luxury when the consequences that one is actually living with are so antagonistic to the kind of society a traditional American conservative would prefer.
Ideally, I do have a problem with politicizing the Supreme Court; but we don’t live in that ideal world, do we? I won’t, therefore, be overly inhibited by the dreams of philosophers and the siren songs of utopians.
You’re a bright guy, so I’m sure you’ve noticed that one of the most common synonyms for progressive jurists is that they are judicial activists. They do things. They push the envelope, move the Overton Window, make things happen, set the pace. There’s a lot to admire about that attitude in law, in sports, in battle, in romance and in life. To my way of thinking, it beats the opposite.
Today’s conservatives don’t seem to care for activists. With an air of sweet reason they proudly proclaim another stance: standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” Perhaps that’s your preference – standing, yelling…
Getting run over.
We are losing the America we love, the America we had. It will not be regained by standing in place. Ground needs to be taken from the forces who have been advancing for decades. Force needs to be met with force (figuratively speaking). The alternative is continuing decline.
Metaphorical attackers have to be driven back. Ideological bullies have to get their theoretical noses broken. Major Molyneux needs to get run out of town on a rail. Yes, it’s hard, dirty work. It’s exactly the kind of fighting that’s called partisan, but if you shy away from doing it, then the work simply won’t get done, despite the pretty promises offered you by the writers with the soft hands and comfortable sinecures.
Amy Coney Barrett is a nice professor and probably a good judge. But not for today. Too much has been sacrificed. Today, America needs conservative judicial activists, not umpires.
There are a lot of moldering progressive Supreme Court decisions that require less deference and more than fine-tuning – they need reversing. Let’s start pushing as hard as we can for that every chance we get.
Like the liberals who have been winning for 50 years, let’s stop negotiating with ourselves before we ever get to the bargaining table.
Let’s start thinking like winners and acting like winners.
MAGA!
I watched the video in offered in Comment# 8. Ms. Barrett makes the distinction between legislative and judicial responsibilities very clear. Towards the end of her presentation she makes it pretty clear that regardless of party there are those that have discovered that rather than do the work of legislation some advocacy groups have discovered that it is far easier to bypass the voter and appeal directly to the court to change the law as they see fit.
If she is President Trump’s selection she will be a great choice for the Supreme Court.
Mona, I applaud you well reasoned post. Amy Coney Barrett appears to be a fine jurist, a strict constructionist and well qualified to be a Justice on the Supreme Court.
And no, I do not agree with Freesmith that she is likely to “grow” on the bench because she is a religious or compassionate person.
However, we live in troubling times. This next Justice, if a true strict constructionist, could along with the other four more conservative justices now on the court take the court back to a truer reading of the Constitution and a significantly better enforcement of our inalienable rights, which now due to the Left’s influence does not occur far often enough. This nomination is a very big deal, which could dramatically alter the political landscape in ways many are yet to grasp.
The Progressive/Marxist Left knows and understands this and will likely pull out all the stops to stop any Trump nominee. It is going to be a hellacious fight. Unfortunately, we live in a time of strident and unapologetic religious bigotry, where several generations of our school children have been taught to disdain religion and to think of a truly religious person as somewhat of a kook. Many people on the Left are simply religious bigots and will fall for any inflammatory mischaracterization of a religious person. Given the fact that Amy Comey Barrett is a deeply religious person and belongs to a strong religious interfaith group committed to helping people makes her even more of a target than the other potential nominees.
Because there are only 51 Republican Senators, with several looking for any excuse not to vote for a Trump nominee, I ‘m afraid the nomination of a deeply religious conservative may provide the excuse to vote her down. Since this nomination is so very important, perhaps it might be better to wait to nominate Mrs. Barrett.
That said, I firmly believe that because:
A. the Democrats must defend 28 Senate seats in November.
B. That Sessions and Rosenstein will be forced in the very near future to give up the treasure trove of incredibly damaging Hillary emails that will expose much of the Democrat party as not much more than a criminal front.
C. That the Progressive/ Marxist/ Nihilist Left will not be able to restrain themselves and will riot and create havoc in grotesquely criminal ways ( just watch videos the Portland Antifa riots of this last week) to protest Trump, the likely criminal hearings of the DOJ, FBI, CIA et al, and the Trump nominee.
The Democrats could lose several if not many Senate seats net, net which would allow a much more conservative or religious nominee to sail through the next time around perhaps as early as next year. Justice Ginsberg is 85 and a colon cancer survivor. Justice Breyer will be turning 80 in August. Both these justices may not be around much longer and will likely give Trump one or two more Supreme Court Nominations.
You are so wrong as to provoke anger in me.
First of all, the rulings from the Supreme Court lately have been going our way. Granted, by a very slim margin. But, if we do things your way, what guarantee do we have that once we get another president like Obama (and we might even do worse, with some of the Democrats out there today), we will not get a bunch of lefties on the Court that will rule all kinds of Leftist policies into law. If we ask how can we allow this to happen, they will have the perfect right of saying, “Because back when Donald Trump was president, people like Freesmith told us that, since this is not a perfect world, we have every right to politicize the Court, and make it rule the way we want it to.”
This Trump era has made people like you react on a purely emotional basis to something that should not be emotional. The fact that the Court has been too emotional since FDR’s time is one of the reasons why we are in the fix we are today. If we don’t get to the idea that the Constitution is our lodestar, and we have to live under the rule of law, not emotion, we are finished as a country. Please rethink your dangerous attitude?
I asked my daughter, who lives in South Bend and is Catholic, what she knew about the People of Praise, she reminded me that they run the school we have been so impressed by that three of her children attend. It’s not Catholic it’s ecumenical. It is the greatest blessing one could hope for your kids. They do the great books, including the Federalist papers starting as Freshmen, they learn and present Shakespeare. We traveled to South Bend to see our oldest, a junior, play Cassius. It couldn’t believe they were just high school kids. The year before we saw two of them in mock trial, they went on to state finals. Required subjects include Latin, music, art, not to mention of course literature, history, science and math. Their athletic program is also serious and for a tiny school they do well against the big ones. But the thing is they love it, like they love just about everything else. We also went to a fine arts night. Following an outstanding concert, all the kids participate, we toured the art work, it seems with good instruction even kids without talent can do impressive work and they clearly discover real talent among them. We weren’t the only grandparents flabbergasted with what we saw heard and learned. If this is a cult bring it on.
Catholics have many small Christian communities. I’ve never heard of P.O.P, but it sounds like many others. No big deal. If Democrats insist on calling it a cult, then they risk further alienating the Catholic swing states in the Midwest.
Diane Feinstein accuses someone of being dogmatic? Really???
Kettle, I’d like you to meet the Pot.
The very dogmatic hypocrisy of the Left knows no bounds.