In 1928, the Democratic Party became the first major party to nominate a Catholic as its presidential candidate when it chose New York Gov. Al Smith.
The nomination touched off a wave of anti-Catholic hysteria, which became the defining problem of the election. Prominent leaders across the mostly Protestant nation warned that if Smith were successful in his White House bid, he would cede his authority to the pope, who would move to the United States and govern the nation as a sort of puppet master, dictating Smith’s every move.
None of these bigoted notions were true, of course, but they helped Smith lose the election. Herbert Hoover won the race in a landslide, earning 444 electoral votes and 58% of the national popular vote.
The country has come a long way since then. In 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected the nation’s first Catholic president, and in 2020, President Joe Biden became the second. However, New York Magazine, which ironically is based in Smith’s home state of New York, is doing its part to bring back the idea that American Catholics in public office are duty-bound to do the bidding of the pope.
In a new and astonishingly bigoted hit piece on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, magazine contributor Nina Burleigh suggested that because Alito was admitted into the Constantinian Order of St. George, an order of knighthood recognized by the Vatican that does humanitarian work all over the world, his affiliation somehow violated his oath to the Constitution because he swore an oath to Jesus Christ.
Here’s how Burleigh described the oath and the justice’s admittance into the order: “Alitov… accepted the Knight Grand Cross of Merit, the highest rank available to non-nobles in the order, at a mass in St. Matthews Cathedral in Washington, D.C., in 2017. He pledged the requisite oath: ‘We declare and promise to Almighty God, to Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, the maternal protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the powerful intercession of Saint George the Martyr, to observe as true soldiers of Christ everything that is asked and recommended of us.’”
The majority of the rest of the article details the Constantinian order’s long history and ties to the royal families of Europe. However, near the end of the article, Burleigh quotes vague “legal experts” and Alex Aronson, the executive director of Court Accountability and a former staffer of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who shamelessly embraces the same strain of anti-Catholic bigotry that was at the core of the anti-Smith campaign in 1928.
“A Supreme Court justice should not accept a knighthood, let alone from a far-right, monarchical, foreign religious-military order,” Aronson said. “The fact that Samuel Alito accepted such a knighthood, which very well might violate the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, is further evidence of his contempt for the American people and our Constitution.”
It’s not hard not to imagine Aronson and Burleigh, in another life, leading a Protestant church and telling their congregation that a vote for Smith was a vote for the pope to rule the U.S.
The suggestion that Alito is beholden to the pope and foreign royals is even more offensive if you consider what the Constantinian Order of St. George actually does. Far from being a forum for royalist “cosplay,” as Burleigh described it, members of the order engage in charity and humanitarian work all over the world.
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The order has raised funds and delivered humanitarian assistance to the victims and refugees of the war in Ukraine, donated to cancer research, among other activities. In fact, the order has been recognized by the United Nations for its charity work and has consultative status.
If Aronson and Burleigh want to use Alito’s membership in a Catholic international order that primarily engages in humanitarian work as evidence that he cannot serve his country honorably as a Supreme Court justice, they might as well declare that no Catholic who professes his or her faith can be in public office. It’s a bigoted smear that is just as ugly today as it was in 1928.