More than two centuries of Protestant domination on the Supreme Court will end if Samuel Alito is confirmed as its next justice. For the first time in the nation’s history, five Roman Catholics — a majority — would be on the high court.
Only two Protestants would remain on the Supreme Court — David Souter and John Paul Stevens. The two other justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — are Jewish.
Interesting bit of trivia. Do you think it means anything?
I guess it means that your specific religion is not as important as it once was in the political arena.
I look forward to the day when the majority are not even christian.
Judge Sam Alito’s mother: “Of course, he’s against abortion,” 90-year-old Rose Alito said of her son, a Catholic.
This confirmation promises to get real ugly, real quick. I can’t wait! (hee-hee). Hey…I gotta get my jollies where I can 
T.
I thought Justice Thomas converted to the Episcopalian faith. Still though, point taken.
I should have brushed and googled before opening mouth. Thomas evidently went back to the Catholic Church in the 90’s.
From Father Richard Neuhaus, another take on the matter, which apparently seems to some folks more than simple evidence of religious tolerance.
The storyline reappears in an essay in the current issue of The New Republic by senior editor Franklin Foer, reflecting on the prospect of a Catholic majority on the Supreme Court. He writes, among other things: “This unprecedented Catholic majority, assuming Alito’s confirmation, might seem a historical accident. When George H.W. Bush appointed Thomas, it’s a good bet that his Catholicism wasn’t foremost on the president’s mind. But the emergence of the Court’s Catholic bloc reflects the reality of social conservatism: Evangelicals supply the political energy, Catholics the intellectual heft.”
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“It is no accident that . . .” as our Marxist friends used to say. At one level, Mr. Foer’s argument is a repeat of the notorious Washington Post claim of several years ago that evangelicals are poor, uneducated, and easily led. And, of course, we crafty Catholics are doing the leading. That, in fact, is the suspicion voiced by the declining number of evangelical critics of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Their fear is that we Catholics are leading naïve evangelical leaders down the garden path in a vast “Jesuitical” conspiracy. (It has been a long time since anybody accused the Society of Jesus of engaging in conspiracy on behalf of the Catholic Church.)
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It is true that Catholics have a much longer and richer intellectual tradition of social doctrine. In evangelicalism there is the legacy of Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian and politician, but that is still largely the property of those of a Calvinist persuasion who are in a minority among evangelicals. But evangelicals involved in Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) include some formidable minds. There are, to name but a few, J.I. Packer of Regent College and Timothy George of Beeson Divinity School who delivered the Erasmus Lecture this year. Thomas Oden, longtime professor of theology at Drew University, has a solid grasp of the “consensual tradition” of Christian thought, with a particular accent on the patristic period. And anyone who thinks Charles Colson does not have a sharp and theologically-informed mind does not know Charles Colson.