The Chancellor of the University of Oxford condemns two recent decisions by five Catholic justices on the Supreme Court of the United States as immoral and wicked
When I was growing up, I remember that the Catholic weekly paper that we used to buy at the back of the church on Sunday mornings was always full of items identifying Catholics who had been promoted to prominent or even not-so-prominent jobs: a Catholic Second Division goalkeeper here, a Catholic chief constable there. There is less of that today; I suppose it reflected a sort of desire to be seen as a full part of a community in which we had often had reason to think of ourselves as socially and culturally beleaguered outsiders. Among their many other attributes, I think that Basil Hume and Cormac Murphy-O’Connor helped to bury all that, assisted, no doubt, by “progress in a maturing society”.
But imagine the joy there would have been in the past at the discovery that the United States Supreme Court now has a majority of Catholic justices: five out of nine, with a sixth (Neil Gorsuch) who was brought up a Catholic, educated by Jesuits and still seems to believe himself to be a sort of Catholic, though he is formally tagged as an Episcopalian. American presidents used to talk about trying to ensure that there was a Catholic seat on the Supreme Court. Now it is dubbed a “Catholic Court”, and not only Catholic but way-out-conservative: a court fit for Donald Trump.