By Chris Satullo

Let me get this out of the way at the top: I was baptized and raised Catholic.

I remain a believer who confesses Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. I now practice my faith as a high-church Episcopalian – which is to say, close to Catholicism in liturgy and some points of theology, but without the weighty, top-down clerical structure.

Also: I have repeatedly – and not long ago in this space – expressed my deep annoyance with secular liberals who mistake the First Amendment, which protects religious belief, as calling for the separation of church and life; who have no problem with “imposing one’s morality on other people,” so long as it’s their morality that’s being imposed. Treating anyone’s faith as something that renders their views on public issues illegitimate is obnoxious to me.

Nevertheless, it’s not OK that Amy Coney Barrett is poised to become the fifth member of a nine-person U.S. Supreme Court who comes from one particular strand of Catholicism.

It’s a strand that, when donning black robes, tends to disguise its angry quarrel with the Constitution as currently written – and its distaste for the diverse, morphing reality of modern America – beneath lofty terms such as originalism and strict constructionism.

I have nothing against Judge Barrett personally. From what I’ve read, she seems a learned, accomplished person who might well qualify for a seat on the nation’s high court some day – just not this seat, at this time, in this way. To say this while invoking her Catholicism as a point to be considered is not, not, not anti-Catholic or anti-religion – no matter how much Robert P. George huffs and puffs or Mitch McConnell pretends to be a Defender of the Faith.

The Supreme Court only has nine seats, all of them lifetime gigs. The court has been the focus of a fierce, partisan tug-of-war for so long, we have lost sight of a simple, vital point:

The Court should never have a lopsided ideological tilt in any direction, left or right.

Sooner or later, thanks to those decades-long tenures, the ideological tilt that seemed so wonderful to some in one moment will fall out of step with the particular needs and leanings of a new era (cf. the Court and the New Deal). The Court should never become the lapdog of partisans of any bent. 

Ideally, the court should always be balanced according to the following formula: three/three/three. In other words, three outstanding conservatives, three outstanding liberals, and three eclectic “swing” justices whose hearts, minds and votes the other six must constantly strive to win.  

The logical result of that formula: When a justice retires or dies, the new nominee should be someone who preserves the Court’s productive balance of viewpoints.

The idea of Barrett replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg clearly fails this test, through no fault of Barrett’s own, and implying no defect in her credentials or character. (Were she some day – not at this red-hot, hypocritical moment – to be nominated to replace, say, a retiring Clarence Thomas, that would be different.)

The GOP Senate majority’s foul bad faith in ramming through her nomination even as a presidential election unfolds – after not even so much as granting a hearing to an Obama nominee in 2016 – makes her confirmation even more unpalatable. Again, through no fault of her own.

But the part of my objection that does bear on her personally is this Catholic thing. So, let’s juggle the dynamite, shall we?

The issue is not an a priori dislike of Catholicism. I grew up steeped in Catholic practice and theology, still revere much of it and at least respect the parts to which my conscience and sense of the Gospel no longer permit me to conform. 

No, my unease relates back to the idea that, to avoid falling out of step with the times or devolving into a tool of any one faction, the court should always reflect the philosophical diversity of America. Having five out of nine justices – Roberts, Alito, Cavanaugh, Thomas and Barrett – come from just one, narrow strand of judicial philosophy is just too much. 

Admittedly, my views here do hinge on a critique of their particular brand of conservative Catholic thinking and how it has become interwoven with a judicial philosophy that I find both flawed and too influential, even without Barrett on the bench. (Note: American Catholics are still a varied bunch. To the point, Sonia Sotomayor is Catholic, too.)

Let me take an explanatory step back: Generalizing wildly, Christians’ understanding of what it means to be a church falls into two camps.

One I would call the fortress church – which holds that the faith resides in a fixed place, which needs to be defended stoutly against all incursions by a fundamentally immoral secular world.  The other is the pilgrim church, which is on a journey through the world. The pilgrims trust they’re headed to a place of greater healing, justice and agape, but the path is never certain and sometimes perilous. So the pilgrim church embraces strength in numbers, joyfully welcoming anyone who’s game for the trek, even if they look or think a little differently.

When I was growing up Catholic post-Vatican II, my church was broad enough to contain both modes, however uneasily. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI took care of that. They doubled down on the fortress – leaving me and millions of others to discover we’d been exiled outside the gates.

Thanks in part, but not totally, to the centrality of the abortion issue in their thinking, the American Catholics who are most comfortable in the fortress have come to align ever more steadily with American social conservatism. They think of themselves as a righteous remnant holding fast heroically against the rampaging evil outside the wall. They tend toward an imaginative Manichaeism that imputes all of America’s ills to the supposed immorality of those who don’t share their precise views. This penchant was exemplified by Attorney General William Barr’s extraordinary speech to Notre Dame Law School a year ago.

Many such Catholics tend to equate their particular views with the One True Faith and sneeringly dismiss those of us who discern different priorities from the Gospels as “cafeteria Catholics.” This is why Pope Francis drives them mad, because he reveals them also to be pick-and-choose Catholics – big on opposing abortion, birth control, divorce and gay marriage, but very slow to heed Francis’ call to question capitalism, pursue social justice, love the poor and generally heed the Beatitudes.

Another thing to understand about most American Catholics: They spend little time actually reading the Bible. The hierarchical church interposes itself between the faithful and the Good Book, claiming a role as the sole interpreter of the sacred text, the keeper of the true history, the guardian of the so-called depositum.

This thick layer of doctrine, dogma and practice that church leaders weave becomes the content of faith for much of the flock. For the weavers, it’s a heady power. This is why they tend to react ferociously to any suggestion that they’ve misinterpreted the legacy or that a better way of living the Gospel is unfolding in our time.

You can easily guess what happens when people ensconced comfortably in this fortress tradition pass through the church/state membrane, moving from theology to jurisprudence.

America, too, has a sacred text: the Constitution. It, too, has a robed priesthood empowered to interpret that text: the Supreme Court. As we’ve seen, the conservative Catholic turn of mind is conditioned to view the meaning of sacred text as immutable but revealed only to the righteous few, who must safeguard it against the ravages of slovenly, amoral modernity.   

They’re inclined to treasure the intellectual scaffolding they’ve constructed around the text, loath to consider whether their handiwork might sometimes obscure, not reveal. They are hostile to new scholarship that suggests their understandings of the original are ahistorical, flawed, a mistake of translation. After all, they are the originalists. Nothing theoretical or agenda-driven going on here!

They tend to ignore later amendments which, to them, diminish, rather than improve, an original which, they’ve convinced themselves, sanctifies their deepest preferences.

It would be arrogance comparable to that of the late Antonin Scalia for me to declare that this cast of mind has no place on the Supreme Court. It does have a place, given that at least a third of the nation shares this outlook that I’ve been so critically describing. But it in no way deserves a majority of the spots on our highest tribunal.

Please, God: Less fortress. More pilgrim.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.