In 2017, when Ms. Barrett was appointed as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, she faced a tense confirmation hearing in which Senator Dianne Feinstein infamously remarked that “the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.” A mother of seven and a devoted Roman Catholic, Ms. Barrett has continued to field concerns about whether she will be able or willing to resist the expectations of her church when it comes to cases involving relevant moral issues, and whether she will cater to the wishes of People of Praise, a mostly Catholic ecumenical organization with a distinctly traditional bent, of which she is a member.
The scrutiny focused on Ms. Barrett’s beliefs has provoked allegations of old-fashioned anti-Catholicism on behalf of her Democratic critics. A good amount of febrile nonsense has indeed been floated regarding Ms. Barrett’s spiritual life, such as the notion that People of Praise inspired Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a charge that is reminiscent of 19th-century myths of nuns kidnapping good Protestant girls to force the faith upon them.
But the animosity faced by Catholics in today’s America has little in common with its direct predecessor. Real sex-abuse scandals have replaced the imaginary ones circulated in the lurid tracts of yesteryear. White Catholics are no longer subject to the religious bigotry that once animated vicious rumors and, occasionally, violent attacks on Catholics and their places of learning and worship. Rather than regenerating a long-vanquished prejudice, Ms. Barrett’s nomination has merely renewed attention to a fundamental conflict, centuries underway, between Catholicism and the American ethos.
nytimes.com article
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