Supreme Court Unanimously Slaps Down Wisconsin Ruling Against Catholic Charity

Justice Sotomayor – Not a Hard Call

Jesus told his followers that whatever “you do for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do for me.” He didn’t specify anyone who might be outside of the orbit of care, be they Samaritans or Greeks. Nor did he say that one must proselytize while providing food, clothing, or shelter to the needy.

It is on that basis that the Catholic Charities Bureau, the social ministry of the Catholic Diocese in Wisconsin, provides services for the disabled, the elderly, and the impoverished regardless of their faith. This generous, ecumenical care may square with Jesus, but it fell short of the high standards of Wisconsin regulators and the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The state court ruled that because the charity’s care was given to people of all faiths, it is not inherently religious. For that reason, the charity was forced into the state unemployment compensation system instead of being allowed, as other religions are, to pay into its own more efficient network.

The Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court – from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other – did not hold back in forcefully overturning this Wisconsin ruling on Thursday. “It is fundamental to our constitutional order that the government maintain ‘neutrality’ between religion and religion,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the Court. “There may be hard calls to make in policing that rule, but this is not one.”

Justice Sotomayor found that the Wisconsin Supreme Court had engaged in “denominational discrimination” for holding that Catholic Charities was not religious in character because it serves people of all faiths. The state, she wrote, had wrongly imposed “a denominational preference by differentiating between religions based on theological choices.”

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion criticizing the state court for ruling that the Catholic charity is a “distinct organization” from the Diocese.

“Both the basic principles of church autonomy and the history of religious corporations establish that religious institutions are more than the corporate entities that they form,” Justice Thomas wrote. “It follows that the government may not use such entities as a means of regulating the internal governance of religious institutions.” He added: “The First Amendment’s guarantee of church autonomy gives religious institutions the right to define their internal governance structures without state interference.”

Justice Sotomayor made a key distinction sure to resonate:
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“When the government distinguishes among religions based on theological differences in their provision of services, it imposes a denominational preference that must satisfy the highest level of judicial scrutiny. Because Wisconsin has transgressed that principle without the tailoring necessary to survive such scrutiny, the judgment of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is reversed.”

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