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Amy Coney Barrett's Catholic faith, People of Praise ties likely to gain scrutiny in Supreme Court confirmation

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You are the owner of this article.You have permission to edit this article.Over the coming weeks, Amy Coney Barrett, a Metairie native who is now a judge on the federal appellate court in Chicago, will see almost every aspect of her life thoroughly examined as senators weigh her nomination by President Donald Trump for the open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.Trump officially nominated Barrett, 48, on Saturday evening after a week of rampant speculation that the staunchly conservative jurist who once clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia was the leading contender for the slot.The St. Mary’s Dominican High School graduate would, if confirmed, succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal icon who died last week at 87. She would be just the second Louisianan to serve on the high court and the first since Edward Douglass White served as chief justice a century ago. Given her relative youth, she could serve for decades if confirmed by the Senate.Barrett's confirmation process in the Senate will be a bruising political battle. Not only would Barrett’s ascension dramatically shift the court’s balance to the right, but her appointment itself would violate a rule Republicans articulated four years ago: that such battles should not be fought in the runup to a presidential election.While much of the fight will be over principle and precedent, some of it will inevitably center on Barrett herself, and that scrutiny is expected to focus on Barrett’s Roman Catholic faith and her longtime affiliation and reported membership in a small, little-known religious community known as the People of Praise.Barrett grew up in the community. Her parents, Mike and Linda Coney, were local leaders of an organization similar to the People of Praise in her childhood, and they were leaders of the local People of Praise branch from its outset. Sean Connolly, a national spokesman for People of Praise, said the New Orleans area chapter was founded in 1987 and now counts 48 adult members.Mike Coney, a retired Shell Oil attorney, is now a regional leader of the group, which has its roots around Notre Dame University, where Barrett graduated from law school and taught until 2017. A number of other families involved in People of Praise live along the same Old Metairie road as the Coneys, according to a 2006 piece in the group’s magazine, Vine &amp; Branches, about how the New Orleans area branch, led at the time by Mike Coney, had weathered Hurricane Katrina.Barrett’s 2017 confirmation hearing, after Trump nominated her for a spot on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal in Chicago, offers a foreshadowing of the next few weeks.Some Democrats then questioned Barrett aggressively over her faith, raising hackles on the right, particularly among religious conservatives. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a member of the Judiciary Committee, asked Barrett a series of questions aimed at teasing out whether Barrett’s religious faith was stronger than her fealty to the Constitution.“The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern,” Feinstein said in a video clip that gained instant notoriety.Feinstein’s line of questioning appeared aimed at Barrett’s — and the Catholic Church’s — conservative views on social issues, notably abortion. Those views have stoked political fears among liberals that Barrett might move to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion — as, indeed, many of her fervent Republican supporters earnestly hope.Conservative politicians and Catholics accused Feinstein of anti-Catholic bias and attempting a “religious test” on nominees. New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond excoriated Feinstein , the Clarion Herald, calling her questioning “a chilling reminder that religious freedom is eroding in the United States.”Now, with the stakes much higher than in 2017, Barrett’s long affiliation with the People of Praise — which shortly after her confirmation three years ago — has become the object of intense scrutiny in some corners of the national press.It could also become a bone of contention among Senate Democrats looking to block Barrett’s confirmation, although criticism from Democratic leaders has so far focused on Barrett’s potential impact on key Supreme Court cases, such as an effort from Republican attorneys general — including Louisiana’s Jeff Landry — to throw out the Affordable Care Act.The People of Praise is a small, close-knit and obscure group, qualities that might have helped fuel speculation about its practices. In fact, a spokesperson wouldn’t even confirm Barrett’s affiliation with the group, saying it is “up to its members to decide whether to publicly disclose their involvement in the community,” although it is well-established. Around the same time The Times story reported Barrett’s membership, back issues of the group’s magazine featuring photos or mentions of her vanished from the group’s website.Some basics are well-known: The People of Praise are charismatic, meaning they believe in “gifts of the spirit,” such as speaking in tongues, and ecumenical, or non-denominational, although the group is largely Catholic. People of Praise was founded in South Bend, Indiana, the home of Notre Dame, in the early 1970s amid a flowering of numerous similar charismatic groups within Catholicism in the years after the Vatican II reforms, which embraced lay organizations and new forms of spirituality.“We may not always be easy to understand, but that’s OK with us,” Connolly, the group’s communications director, in 2017. “We would never want to trade our birthright for positive attention or compromise the very qualities which are our only God-given advantage. Imperfect words will eventually fade, but we remain happy and proud to be the category-defying community God has called us to be, his People of Praise.”Rod Dreher, a conservative journalist, senior editor of The American Conservative magazine and author of the bestselling book “The Benedict Option,” about tight-knit Christian communities, said he had heard little of the People of Praise before reports of Barrett’s membership caused a stir in 2017.But Dreher insisted that he sees “nothing weird” in People of Praise, which appears to hew closely to Catholic teaching on most issues. He said the hand-wringing about Barrett’s affiliation, and depictions of the group as some sort of cult, struck him as totally unjustified.“They're charismatics, which is not to everybody's taste, but as far as I can tell, they're orthodox,” said Dreher. “The fact that liberal elites are going to pieces over a Catholic who actually believes what her church teaches, even the unpopular stuff, says more about the religious illiteracy and intolerance of elites than it does about Judge Barrett."&nbsp;was forced to issue a correction after reporting that the group inspired Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which envisions a radically patriarchal future America ruled by religious zealots. Both the Newsweek story and a similar piece &nbsp;prompted outrage among figures on the right, who alleged the stories were hyperbolic and evinced an ignorance about commonplace religious practices.Those stories drew in part on unusual nomenclature used by the People of Praise — until recently, for instance, female spiritual advisers were called “handmaids,” a term the group dropped after the television version of Atwood’s novel made it a byword for female oppression — and certain of the group’s practices that carry a whiff of patriarchy.The biggest stories in business, delivered to you every day. Sign up today.Massimo Faggioli, a Catholic scholar and professor at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, caused a stir among conservatives earlier this week when he argued that senators had a duty to dig into any covenants, oaths or other commitments Barrett might have made to People of Praise, which Faggioli described as having “a highly authoritarian internal structure.”The group’s relative secrecy, Faggioli argued, meant that discerning from the outside exactly what obligations members have to each other is difficult but absolutely necessary in order for senators to properly vet Barrett’s nomination.Connolly, the People of Praise spokesman, pushed back on that characterization, writing in an email that “each person is always responsible for his or her own decisions, and that no community member should ever violate his or her conscience.”A permanent covenant in People of Praise, Connolly said, “is not an oath or a vow” but “a commitment to be there for one another for the long run, to support one another through thick and thin, through all of life's seasons.”The People of Praise runs several schools across the country, including the Trinity School in South Bend, where Barrett is known to volunteer and has served on the school’s board.Barrett and her husband, Jesse Barrett, a former federal prosecutor who recently went into private practice, have seven children, all younger than 20 and two of whom were adopted from Haiti. During her 2017 confirmation hearing, Barrett described the couple’s youngest biological son, who has Down syndrome, as the clear favorite of the rest of the family.Another People of Praise-run school, Praise Academy, and was founded by a very active group of People of Praise members that moved into the city's Allendale neighborhood almost two decades ago amid a national push by the group to move into low-income neighborhoods. Dispatches from Shreveport regularly appear in Vine &amp; Branches.Dan Philpott, a Notre Dame political science professor who’s not in People of Praise but whose children attend Trinity School, said members generally skew politically conservative. The group’s stance on abortion and marriage hews to orthodox Catholic teachings and certainly puts it well to the right on those issues.“As a broad characterization, yes, but I’ve known People of Praise people to be of different persuasions,” Philpott said. “Most all of them are going to be pro-life, but that doesn’t necessarily translate directly to Republican politics” because of their commitments to social-justice issues.“In my view, the phrases ‘right’ and ‘conservative’ aren’t really helpful. Most Catholic lay organizations are there to help people live faithful Christian lives,” said Philpott. “It’s hard to say that the causes it supports are really ‘left’ or ‘right.’ Its mission is really not political. That’s just not how it casts its vocation.”Before we turn to the approaching drama of the Senate confirmation hearings on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, let us consider a valuab…Philpott said those eagerly attempting to portray Barrett as the instrument of some sort of fringe group that devalues women aren’t looking at the example of her own life.“That’s the ultimate irony. They’re saying she’s subordinated and so forth, but she’s being considered for one of the most powerful posts in the United States,” he said. “I think her family entirely supports her in her work. She is a model of someone who’s combined her commitments to faith, family and career. I can’t see how either her family or her religious community has held her back in any way. If anything, they’ve encouraged her.”Matthew Sitman, an associate editor at Commonweal, a liberal lay-run Catholic magazine, said the People of Praise and Barrett both clearly hold “what we would call conservative views” on many issues. But that’s not the central issue, he said.“The only question is how that applies to her work,” Sitman said. “I don’t want to see her on the court. I’m on the left. I’m a Democrat. I don’t relish the thought of — for 40 years potentially — her being on the Supreme Court. That doesn’t mean she should be treated unfairly, and I think it only hurts the cause of Democrats, actually, to treat her religious faith as an odd eccentricity that invites lurid speculation and comments that just seem kind of bigoted.”Sitman doesn’t think Barrett should be rubber-stamped by the Senate, but he thinks Democrats should make sure to focus on the big picture -- how a nominee’s deep religious convictions might affect her jurisprudence — rather than caricature Barrett.“What gets lost in that is that it lets the right cry foul and play the victim when really there are legitimate questions that should be asked about how her faith relates to her role as a judge,” he said. “I just think the appropriate thing to do is approach those questions with seriousness, sobriety — but de-personalize it.”Sitman said pressing Barrett on any sworn commitments or obligations struck him as valid but but raised a dilemma, in that such questions could also evoke more conspiratorial implications about whether Barrett is under the sway of religious leaders, long an anti-Catholic trope.“I think the more you focus on the supposed ‘lurid’ details of the People of Praise, or the more you make it seem like simply being a serious Catholic is a problem, that’s more inappropriate than the legitimate questions of how she understands the relationship between her faith and the task of being a judge.”Jonathan Rowland, a retired theologian who now lives in Oxford, England, spent about five years involved in People of Praise in Indiana in the 1970s, not long after the group was formed.“I think inevitably it’d be ethically rather conservative compared to the general societal trends, but I don’t think that’s a particular People of Praise thing,” said Rowland. “I never had a sense of some sort of overbearing authority or necessity to march in this direction or such. I’ve never taken charges of cultic qualities very seriously because of my experience there. It was a very good experience for me.”In remarks at , Barrett said she thinks most questions posed to judges about the specifics of their religious beliefs are “irrelevant to the job and, in fact, it’s unconstitutional to consider it as a qualification for office.”“The public should be concerned about whether a nominee can set those aside in favor of following the law,” Barrett said, “but that’s not a problem just for religious people, that’s a challenge for everyone, and so I think it’s a dangerous road to go down to say that only religious people would not be able to separate moral convictions from their duty.”© Copyright 2022 , 840 St. Charles Avenue New Orleans, LA&nbsp;| &nbsp;|Powered by from .

You are the owner of this article.You have permission to edit this article.Over the coming weeks, Amy Coney Barrett, a Metairie native who is now a judge on the federal appellate court in Chicago, will see almost every aspect of her life thoroughly examined as senators weigh her nomination by President Donald Trump for the open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.Trump officially nominated Barrett, 48, on Saturday evening after a week of rampant speculation that the staunchly conservative jurist who once clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia was the leading contender for the slot.The St....

Amy Coney Barrett's Catholic faith, People of Praise ties likely to gain scrutiny in Supreme Court confirmation

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