Three Conservative Catholic Justices Skip Pope Address
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Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas didn’t attend the Pope’s address to Congress.
The conspicuous absences were a bit surprising, given that the current Supreme Court is sometimes characterized as the “Catholic court.” Six of the nine justices are Catholic — the other three, John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy and Sonia Sotomayor, were in attendance — and the most conservative members of the court have not been shy about identifying with their church.
They have not always agreed with the church, however. Scalia has been particularly candid about his disagreements: In 2002, he bluntly told a Georgetown audience that the church’s opposition to the death penalty was simply wrong. “No authority that I know of denies the 2,000-year-old tradition of the church approving capital punishment,” said Scalia. “I don’t see why there’s been a change.”
So, it might have been awkward for Scalia and his colleagues when Francis got to the “golden rule” part of his address. It was a nifty maneuver — the pope got the entire audience to stand up when he declared that “the golden rule … reminds us of our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development.”
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