From Joseph Bottum's latest post on the First Things blog, On the Square:
The Washington Post has taken up the question of Catholics on the Supreme Court. Mostly a set of quotations from various commentators, the story at least asks the right questions. “Why have recent Republican presidents turned again and again to Catholic jurists when making appointments to the Supreme Court? It may be partly an effort to woo Catholic voters, but mostly it’s because so many of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament are Catholics, several scholars said.”
Those scholars included Notre Dame’s Gerald Bradley, who told the Post: “I do think that there is an important truth in saying that Catholics are the intellectual pillars of social conservatism. Compared to their political allies in that movement, Catholics are heirs to a richer intellectual tradition and . . . are more inclined to believe that reason supplies good grounds for the moral and political positions characteristic of social conservatism. Call it the ‘natural law’ thing.”
