It’s open season on Amy Coney Barrett, the appeals-court judge reported to top President Trump’s list of candidates to fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. Barrett is a devout Roman Catholic and a member of an ecumenical charismatic community, so naturally, Democrats and their media allies are trying to cast her as Dangerous Theocrat.
But the least they can do is get the facts right. Sadly, it seems that’s too much to ask. Witness Villanova professor Massimo Faggioli’s flatulent hit piece published at Politico Thursday. Faggioli charges Barrett with membership in a “Christian group with a highly authoritarian internal structure.” This, he argues, means interrogating her religious faith is within bounds in a potential confirmation battle.
Never mind that the US Constitution bars such interrogation (“no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”). It’s harder still to take Faggioli seriously when he makes three basic factual errors in a short piece.
First error: Barrett’s “community covenant” is no secret
Faggioli wants the Senate to “examine any covenant — a solemn contract binding before God — that she signed in the course of becoming a full member of People of Praise,” the charismatic community to which she belongs. “What is its nature and scope? What are the consequences of violating it?”
Actually, senators won’t need to go sleuthing in dusty Vatican archives — because they can find the PoP’s “Community Covenant” with a simple Google search. And it’s about as anodyne as you’d expect the vows of an ecumenical group devoted to living wholesome, godly lives to be: “We commit ourselves to live our lives in true righteousness and holiness. All of our lives must be worthy of the calling to which we have been called,” etc. etc.
Charismatic Christianity — arm-swaying and “worship songs” — isn’t most Catholics’ cup of tea. But this isn’t some nefarious vow, signed in blood, pledging PoP members to infiltrate the US government and enact a real-life version of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Second error: Opus Dei members don’t take vows
Comparing PoP disfavorably with Opus Dei, another Catholic order that haunts liberal imaginations, Faggioli writes: “Some people might understandably balk at having a member of a religious order or Opus Dei sit on the Supreme Court. But at least in these communities, the vow of obedience that such a person has made would be visible, formal and accountable.”
Actually, Opus Dei members don’t profess any vows at all. As the group’s US Web site states, “Opus Dei faithful are lay people. For this reason, they do not profess vows because they are not consecrated persons as in the case of members of a religious order.”
Third error: Pope Francis doesn’t disdain Barrett’s group
Finally, Faggioli tries to paint PoP as somehow a renegade Catholic order, disdained by the pope. “The Catholic Church’s official stance toward these new Catholic movements and communities is instructive,” Faggioli says, citing Pope Francis’ 2014 warning for church communities, like PoP, not to “usurp the individual freedom” of members.
The pope’s warning, of course, is a valid one. But it applies not just to Barrett’s community but to any group within the Catholic Church. It also applies to groups outside the church. But it’s misleading to suggest that Pope Francis somehow holds PoP in odium. He emphatically doesn’t. In fact, in 2014, Francis appointed a member of Barrett’s community, Peter Leslie Smith, as auxiliary bishop of Portland, Ore.
“I’m a Catholic scholar,” Faggioli boasts, and “I’ve written two books on the type of religious community that Barrett is a member of.” Judging by his Politico whoopsies, he might hit the Villanova library before venturing again to shape a Supreme Court nomination.
Sohrab Ahmari is The Post’s op-ed editor.
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