It is not merely coincidental that California Senator Diane Feinstein was the center of the Kavanaugh controversy. In September of 2017, she vehemently opposed the nomination of Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, for a very inappropriate reason. In a stunning round of questioning, Senator Dick Durbin asked the nominee “Do you consider yourself an Orthodox Catholic,” a query which was followed by the even more offensive comment by Senator Feinstein that “The [Catholic] dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.”
George Parry, writing for the American Spectator “Questioning of judicial nominee’s Catholicism by Feinstein and Durbin would make the Klan proud. Article VI of the Constitution prohibits a religious test for public office. Nevertheless, last week in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Diane Feinstein grilled a judicial nominee about the depth of her Catholic faith and made clear that, in their estimation, she was ‘too Catholic’ to hold office.”
Noah Feldman wrote in Bloomberg last month that “Feinstein’s anti-Catholic Questions are an outrage. Senator Dianne Feinstein owes a public apology to judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett — and an explanation to all Americans who condemn religious bias. During Barrett’s confirmation hearings last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Feinstein, the California Democrat, insinuated an anti-Catholic stereotype that goes back at least 150 years in the U.S. — that Catholics are unable to separate church and state because they place their religious allegiances before their oath to the Constitution.”
The media, concentrating solely on the uncorroborated allegations made by Ms. Ford, ignored the extremely controversial issue that Kavanaugh was targeted for his faith.
James S. Robbins, writing in USA Today, reported “We’ve seen anti-Catholic bigotry hurled at Supreme Court justices before from groups like the KKK. Now it’s coming from the modern left…These days liberals have taken to portraying people in public life who exhibit almost any kind of faith orientation as dangerous extremists. In a discussion of the high court, CNN contributor Dean Obeidallah maintained that “there are people who want to impose Christian Sharia law in this country.” It was an ironic comment since progressives would be thrilled to support a Muslim court nominee whose jurisprudence was informed by actual Sharia. And the Daily Beast tells us that President Trump is ‘carrying out the agenda of a small, secretive network of extremely conservative Catholic activists.’”
The issue of the Democrat Left’s anti-Catholicism has been noted by Church leaders. In March, New York’s Cardinal Dolan wrote in the Wall Street Journal “The Democrats Abandon Catholics… I’m a pastor, not a politician, and I’ve certainly had spats and disappointments with politicians from both of America’s leading parties. But it saddens me, and weakens the democracy millions of Americans cherish, when the party that once embraced Catholics now slams the door on us.”
The issue of left-wing, Progressive and Democrat anti-Catholicism has been growing for several decades. George Weigal, writing in Commentary in 1992, gave several examples. Among them:
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In 1992, “… the editors of the [New York] Times thought it appropriate to warn the Catholic bishops of the United States that a too-vigorous exercise of their teaching office might destroy the ‘truce of tolerance’ that has permitted Catholics to operate in this country at the sufferance of its non-Catholic majority…
“In February 1990, agitated by statements by Cardinal O’Connor and New York auxiliary bishop Austin Vaughan critical of Governor Mario Cuomo’s record on abortion, the well-known historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. informed readers of the Times‘s op-ed page that O’Connor and Vaughan were doing their best to verify the fears long cherished by the No-Nothings [sic] in the 1850’s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s, and a succession of anti-Catholic demagogues that the Roman Catholic Church would try to overrule the American democratic process.
“During a debate over school-choice legislation in Pennsylvania, ‘Jack Grier, the teachers’ union president in Easton, Pennsylvania, told the local school board that ‘The enemy to public education in the state of Pennsylvania is the Catholic Church. If the Catholic Church were to cease to exist and disappear today, it would be better for all of us.’”
Emma Green reported in The Atlantic that Michael Wear, the former director of Barack Obama’s 2012 faith-outreach efforts, found that “The administration was unnecessarily antagonistic toward religious conservatives…”
The anti-Catholic bent of the Democrat Left is not restricted to that one faith. The rejection of Evangelicals, and the acceptance of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic beliefs on the part of that party has become a major issue, even if the media refuses to acknowledge it.
Illustration: St. Patrick’s Cathedral (Archdiocese of New York)