c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The nomination of Samuel Alito Jr. to be a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court is especially significant for what it says about social change in American life over the last 30 years and the realignment it has produced between the two major political parties.

First, if confirmed, Alito would give the court a Roman Catholic majority _ five of the nine justices _ for the first time in its history. Second, despite the long history of American Catholics as a vital part of the Democratic Party base, all five Catholic justices would be the selections of Republican presidents, not Democrats.

The presence of Catholics on the court is not unprecedented. Beginning with Chief Justice Roger Taney in 1834, Catholics have been represented on the court, though only intermittently _ and never more than one at a time, with a lone exception at the beginning of the 20th century. For a period following Franklin Roosevelt’s selection of Michigan Gov. Frank Murphy for the court in 1940, there was a kind of unwritten “one seat” rule for Catholics, as there seems to be today for African-Americans.

It’s been overwhelmingly a Protestant-dominated bench _ until now. Only Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter on the current court are Protestant. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer are Jewish.

The surprising thing about the sudden surge of Catholic justices is how little public alarm it has produced. (Recall that John F. Kennedy only a generation ago had to submit to a virtual Protestant inquisition about his religion during the 1960 presidential campaign.)

Over the years since Kennedy’s election, Catholics have become not merely part of the American mainstream but part of the country’s conservative establishment and, in the process, a new and vital element in the Republican Party base.

It’s been a revolutionary change.

Beginning with their arrival from Europe as immigrants, Catholics who clustered in the nation’s Eastern and Midwestern cities looked to the urban Democratic machines for political leadership and initiation into the life of the country. The Great Depression of the 1930s reinforced those partisan ties. The tie that bound them throughout those decades was economic need; the Democratic machine satisfied that need and, in return, earned Catholic votes.

Catholics, in short, identified with those beneath them on the economic ladder in those days. The prosperity of the second half of the 20th century altered all that.

Beginning with the GI Bill following World War II, Catholics in large numbers began to acquire education and a ticket to the middle class. The sons of grammar school-educated mill workers and long shoremen and bus drivers came out of college and into the professions. Inevitably, as they and their children moved further from the paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle of their fathers, their economic need and allegiance to the Democratic Party weakened.

For many Catholics, the social and racial upheaval of the late 1960s _ and the Democratic Party’s identification with the turmoil _ raised major questions about whether Democratic liberalism represented their interests any longer.

Beginning with the 1970s and escalating through the Reagan era in the 1980s, Catholics began to identify economically with those above them on the prosperity ladder rather than with those below. (Remember the Reagan Democrats?)

It’s worth noting in this connection that last year most Catholics voted against Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat and their co-religionist, and for President Bush, a Republican and a Protestant.

John Green, who monitors religion and politics as director of the Ray Bliss Institute at Akron University in Ohio, expressed no surprise at the Alito selection. Catholics today are perceived as part of mainstream America in a way they were not when Kennedy ran for president, he said.

With this accelerating movement into the mainstream, Green said, the Catholic population has acquired all the diversity of the country at large _ liberals, conservatives, libertarians, independents and Republicans as well as traditional Democrats.

It’s “no longer homogenous in any respect,” Green said of the Catholic population. “The typical swing voter today is a middle-aged, white, Catholic male,” he added.

That diversity can be found even among the four Catholics now on the court, Green said. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are very conservative, he noted. Chief Justice John Roberts appears to be somewhat less conservative, and Anthony Kennedy votes at times with the court’s liberals. He rated Alito as likely to prove less conservative than Scalia or Thomas, perhaps closer to Roberts.

Nevertheless, Alito’s nomination by a Republican Protestant president to a court that already has four Catholic members is “an important historical marker,” Green said. “This is really the end of the long Catholic-Protestant conflict.”

MO/JL END RNS

(John Farmer writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)