Defending Religious Freedom

A JUSTICE FOR ALL  U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito stands with Bishop Serratelli at St. Paul Inside the Walls, Madison, before he delivered a talk March 15 about “Religious Freedom in the Constitution and in Federal Law.” The Bishop spoke about the importance of religious liberty before the justice’s well-received presentation, which was sponsored by Advocati Christi, a diocesan fellowship of lawyers and judges.

MADISON  A “hostile wind” has been kicking up in U.S. society that threatens not only people who profess “traditional moral beliefs” but also, more broadly, the foundation of our freedom of religious expression as enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution — one of our basic liberties that many Founding Fathers championed in the early days of the nation.

On the evening of March 15, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito sounded that urgent warning in front of 300 local lawyers and concerned Catholics in his talk, “Religious Freedom in the Constitution and in Federal Law” at St. Paul Inside the Walls: the Diocesan Center for Evangelization at Bayley-Ellard here. A Catholic, the guest speaker delivered an engaging hour-long presentation in the center’s auditorium as part of an ongoing lecture series by notable religious and legal minds about faith and the law. Sponsoring the talk was Advocati Christi, a diocesan fellowship of lawyers and judges, who are committed to the legal profession and the profession of their faith.

“One of those principles that we have always cherished in this country — one of those inalienable rights that were endowed on all of us — is the right to the free exercise of religion. Unfortunately, I think that we are heading into a period in which our dedication to religious liberty is going to be tested, and therefore all of us are going to be tested,” said Alito, who has served on the Supreme Court since 2006 after being appointed by President George W. Bush. “In the future, there will be pitched battles for religious freedom in courts and Congress, in state legislatures and town halls,” he said.

Raised in Trenton, Alito traveled from Washington, D.C. back to his home state to speak in the Diocese of Paterson. He has become one of the Supreme Court’s conservative voices in many cases of national importance, including such hot-button issues as same-sex marriage, partial-birth abortion and the exercise of religious conscience with regard to artificial contraception. He presented a talk — that referred to a wide range of Americans from George Washington to Bob Dylan — a few days before the U.S. Senate started hearings on March 20 for Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, also considered a conservative like Alito.

During his well-received talk, Alito echoed the warning about religious freedom that he raised in his dissent in the 2015 landmark case of Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the court ruled by a 5-4 decision in favor of same-sex marriage. He wrote that he “feared that the decision would be used to vilify Americans, who were unwilling to assent to a new orthodoxy.”

“I assume that people of all beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled bigots and treated as such by governments, employers and schools,” Alito wrote in his dissent.

He told the St. Paul’s audience, “It is vital to our country that we evangelize our fellow Americans about the importance of religious freedom, because if we don’t, we won’t keep the flame of religious liberty alive in this country. The United States will not be the place that it has been — the country that we love so much,” he said.

The religious liberty guaranteed by the Constitution followed a considerable period of anti-Catholic bigotry in the original colonies before the Revolutionary War. But that prejudice softened, largely because the predominantly Protestant colonists fought alongside Catholics and because many Catholics supported the cause of independence. George Washington also promoted respect for all religions throughout his life — even declaring in his farewell address in 1796, “religion and morality were indispensable if the new republic is to thrive.”

Alito said that he first noticed anti-Catholic sentiment in the U.S. as a young boy in 1960 during the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, whose victory he said “lifted me up from the status of second-class American.”

In 2007, Alito experienced anti-Catholic bias personally, after he and other Catholic justices of the Supreme Court voted to uphold the ban on partial-birth abortion. A newspaper cartoon showed the Catholic justices wearing bishops’ miters, perpetuating “the old slander that Catholics could not be trusted or could not exercise independent judgment,” said the associate justice, who visited St. Paul’s with his wife Martha-Ann.

Before the presentation, Bishop Serratelli greeted Alito in the mansion of the Evangelization Center with Father Paul Manning, St. Paul’s executive director and diocesan vicar for evangelization; Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News commentator; and other lawyers and St. Paul’s staffers. There, the Bishop made a presentation to honor Andrew Anselmi, an Advocati Christi member. Anselmi was named a Knight of St. Gregory, a papal order bestowed on him by the Vatican.

“Our culture marginalizes God,” said Bishop Serratelli in his remarks before Alito’s presentation. “Justice Alito’s office calls him to make legal decisions that conform not only with the Constitution of our country, but also with God’s law open to all through human reason. We pledge our prayers for the vocation that God has given you for the good of our great nation,” he said.

Like all the talks in the series, the event started with a 5:30 p.m. Mass in St. Paul’s chapel, followed by 6 p.m. cocktail hour and conversation; a 7 p.m. presentation, including questions and answers; and an 8 p.m. gathering of fellows of the Outreach for Lawyers, including private dinner with the speaker and discussion. Lawyers are eligible to earn Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credits for attending.

After Alito’s talk, Father Manning mentioned several takeaways, including that “Our nation’s dedication to religious liberty requires our dedication to our own religion.”

“Justice Alito’s presentation was inspiring. He told us that it’s important as lawyers for us to evangelize by preserving religious liberty,” Anselmi said.

[Information: (973) 377-1004 or www.insidethewalls.org.]