Catholics who oppose abortion apparently are “supercharged Christian national[ists]” who don’t belong on the Supreme Court. So said MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough during a round table discussion with like-minded progressives about House Speaker Mike Johnson’s religious beliefs. “We have to talk about the Supreme Court,” Scarborough said. It’s full of Catholic extremists: “They’re all Catholics. They all have a view of abortion and other issues that have led them to overturn against all public opinion polls, and I would say against pretty good, strong 50-year precedent, to overturn the right to abortion.” Added regular progressive panelist Michael Steele, “It’s the reimagination of judicial constitutional principles in a religious way, and so that’s the connection that draws these individuals to this space.” 

“These individuals,” these “Catholic extremists,” are Catholics who follow the teaching of their Church. It is clear what Scarborough, Steele, and the progressive crowd at MSNBC think of believing, faithful Catholics — they are dangerous extremists who took away a so-called constitutional right that liberals on the Supreme Court discovered in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, a decision that was based on, in the words of Episcopalian Justice Byron White, “raw judicial power.” Scarborough and Steele manifest the same mentality that led an FBI agent in Richmond, Virginia, to characterize Catholics who attend Latin Mass as “domestic extrem[ists].” The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia regularly attended Latin Mass. He, therefore, fit the profile of “extremist.” Scarborough would undoubtedly agree. He couldn’t be clearer — he wants a religious test for seats on the Supreme Court, and traditional Catholics need not apply. This progressive anti-Catholicism is now out in the open, just as progressive anti-Semitism is now out in the open. Progressives, of course, don’t hate all Catholics and Jews — just the most faithful. The secular Catholics (like Justice Sonia Sotomayor) and Jews are okay — they support abortion. 

And abortion is the progressive’s god. It is their faith. That should be clear. Anyone who challenges that faith becomes their target. Perhaps that was, for them, Donald Trump’s greatest sin — not Jan. 6; not his tweets; not his border policies; not his “America First” agenda. Donald Trump became progressive enemy No. 1 when he appointed “extremist Catholics” to the Supreme Court who overturned Roe v. Wade, the progressives’ legal bible. Trump said during his campaign that he would do that, and he did. That was unforgivable. That is why progressives are constantly attacking Justice Clarence Thomas on phony “ethics” allegations. That is why Sen. Diane Feinstein at Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing expressed concern that the “dogma lives loudly within you” — the “dogma” she was talking about is the Catholic dogma; more specifically, the Catholic dogma on abortion. That is why the progressive New York Times lamented that “there is an astonishing preponderance of Catholics on the Supreme Court.” That is why the progressive New Yorker wrote about “The Sins of the High Court’s Supreme Catholics.” It is why the progressive Nation magazine has written about the “Catholic authoritarian vanguard” on the Supreme Court. It is why the Globalist expressed concern that the Supreme Court is now a “Roman Catholic institution” that makes “unaccountable and undemocratic decisions, much like the Vatican Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.” It is why Salon accused the “Supreme Court’s right-wing Catholics” of “destroying true religious freedom.” 

Progressives’ fear of “white Christian nationalists” is really fear of Christians — believing Christians, especially faithful Catholics, who are in positions of power. “White nationalists” aren’t necessarily opposed to abortion. And even many Christians aren’t. But all faithful Catholics are opposed to abortion. That is what makes them so “dangerous” and “extreme” in the eyes of Joe Scarborough and his fellow progressives. 

Scarborough’s remarks and the progressive ire against faithful Catholics in positions of power are a reminder that the struggle that Whittaker Chambers (a Quaker) wrote about so eloquently in Witness is still with us. One side — our modern-day progressives — clings to what Chambers called “man’s second oldest faith,” which is the promise “whispered in the first days of Creation under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.” The progressive vision:

is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. 

Abortion fits neatly within that vision. What can be more god-like than deciding who lives and who dies? Progressives know that faithful Catholics oppose that vision. And that is why they are against faithful Catholics sitting on the Supreme Court.