Religion & The Supreme Court

The Current U.S. Supreme Court Justices

Anthony McLeod Kennedy, born into a middle class family in California, is a Catholic. He served as an altar boy at his church and is currently a member of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in Washington, DC. The Reverend William Byrne, the pastor, has told the media that Kennedy mostly comes to church around the time of St. Patrick’s Day. His daughter Kristin was married at St. Peter’s in December 1993.

John Paul Stevens comes from a prominent Protestant Chicago family, but has kept his religious beliefs and affiliations private. He is frequently quoted as saying: “The government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward religion.” Stevens turned 88 in April 2008 and is the 10th longest-serving justice in the Supreme Court’s history.

John Glover Roberts, Jr., son of a steel executive, attended Notre Dame Elementary School, a Catholic grade school in Long Beach, Indiana, and then La Lumiere School, an all-male Catholic boarding school in LaPorte, Indiana. While in high school, he was a sacristan, assisting with upkeep and care of the sacred vessels used in Mass. Currently he attends Church of the Little Flower, a Bethesda, Maryland, parish. Roberts’ wife Jane, a graduate of the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, is a college trustee and a member of the board of governors of the John Carroll Society, a Catholic charitable organization. The Reverend Michael McFarland, Holy Cross president, has been frequently quoted in the media as saying that the two are “devout Catholics.”

Antonin Gregory Scalia has been the most outspoken about his Catholicism on the current Supreme Court. The first Italian-American on the Court, he currently attends St. John the Beloved Church in McLean, Virginia, where one of his nine children, the Reverend Paul Scalia, is a priest. His wife Maureen also teaches in the parish Sunday school. The church, known for its traditional approach, has a monument to unborn children on its grounds. Paradoxically, Scalia has said that his religious beliefs do not influence his judicial opinions but that he would quit the Court if Church dogma ever contradicted his interpretation of the Constitution.

David Hackett Souter, an Episcopalian, was born in Massachusetts and moved to a 10-acre farm in Weare, New Hampshire, at age 11. Except for attending Harvard and Oxford, Souter lived on the family farm until his appointment to the Court in 1990. Despite having served in a variety of state positions, little was known about his legal, let alone his religious, views when
President George H.W. Bush nominated him to the Court. At his confirmation hearings, Souter said, “My own religion is a religion which I wish to exercise in private and with as little ...expression in the political arena as is possible.”

Stephen Gerald Breyer attended religious school at a San Francisco reform congregation, was a bar mitzvah and attended a Jewish youth camp. In Great Jewish Men, authors Elinor Slater and Robert Slater quote Breyer as saying that the rabbis and camp “had a significant influence on me.” On how Judaism has affected his career, Breyer highlighted “the practical nature of Jewish religious beliefs...in requiring people to have a sense of justice and to think about other people.” When Breyer married a British aristocrat, the Anglican ceremony was carefully edited to remove references to Christ. One of his three children, Chloe, is an Episcopal priest in Manhattan.

Clarence Thomas is a Catholic, but has belonged to other Christian denominations in the past. Born into a Baptist family, he converted to Catholicism as a second-grader in rural Georgia. At age 19, Thomas studied at the Benedictine Conception Seminary in Missouri, where he considered entering the priesthood. He has said that he rejected the Catholic Church in 1968 when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, because a white seminarian said, “I hope the SOB dies.” He was attending a conservative Episcopal church in Virginia when he joined the Court in 1991. In 1996, he returned to the Catholic Church. In his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son (2007), Thomas describes the importance of his faith in overcoming personal and public controversies. A copy of Cardinal Merry del Val’s “Litany of Humility,” which asks divine help in overcoming fears of persecution and desires of pride, hangs in his Court chambers.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the second woman and the first Jewish woman appointed to the Supreme Court. As a youngster, Ginsburg was a “summer camp rabbi” and worked hard to be confirmed at Brooklyn’s East Midwood Jewish Center. However, according to an exclusive 2006 interview with Moment, Ginsburg, at age 17, turned away from organized religion when her mother died. “The house was filled with women, but only men could participate in the minyan,” Ginsburg noted. She further explained, while pointing to the mezuzah hanging on her Supreme Court office door, that she’s like other non-observant Jews who “identify themselves proudly as Jews but don’t take part in the rituals.”

When Samuel Anthony Alito, Jr. joined the Court in 2006, he made history by creating a Catholic majority on the Supreme Court bench and becoming the second Italian-American justice. While serving as a federal appeals court judge, Alito and his wife Martha-Ann belonged to Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament Parish in Roseland, New Jersey. A Newark Archdiocese spokesman reports that Alito attended Mass weekly, and his wife taught religious education classes at the church, where his children were also confirmed. Alito’s mother has said that her son grew up participating in Mass and reading from the Bible and continues to hold fast to his Catholic values.