Is Catholic Charities really Catholic? That’s a good question, an important question, a question that we have raised frequently on this site. But it’s not an appropriate question for the Supreme Court.
This past Monday, when Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin, a majority of the justices appeared to agree. As the New York Times put it, the arguments advanced by the State of Wisconsin “troubled justices across the ideological spectrum.”
The case involved a state agency’s determination—later affirmed by Wisconsin courts— that the Catholic Charities Bureau (CCB) did not qualify for a religious exemption from unemployment taxes, because its activities were not undertaken “primarily for religious purposes.” Wisconsin’s highest court found that while CCB might have “religious motives,” nevertheless those motives were “incidental to their primarily charitable functions.”
A secular organization could perform the same charitable activities, Wisconsin officials argued, and the state’s high court agreed, saying that a truly religious organization would be characterized by “distinctively religious activities” such as “worship, ritual, teaching the faith, or spreading a religious message.” Since the CCB did not “attempt to imbue program participants with the Catholic faith,” the court ruled, it was not a religious organization.
The Trump administration, siding with the CCB in the Supreme Court case, rejected the Wisconsin claim. To grant the state’s argument, the Trump legal team argued, would “permit government officials or judges to second-guess the sufficiency of religious values, inspect practitioners’ adherence to religious doctrine, and discriminate among various faiths.”
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