Uh-oh, Amy Coney Barrett. They’ve got you now!
New from South Bend for @POLITICOMag: How Amy Coney Barrett’s People of Praise helped shape a city. New details on the group’s South Bend presence here.https://t.co/vshSyX2Q0o
— Adam Wren (@adamwren) September 27, 2020
Amy Coney Barrett was a trustee at a South Bend private school that described “homosexual acts” as “at odds with Scripture” & said marriage was between “one man and one woman” years after Obergefell v. Hodges. For @POLITICOMag. https://t.co/vshSyX2Q0o
— Adam Wren (@adamwren) September 27, 2020
This is the first story placing Amy Coney Barrett inside a People of Praise meeting. For @POLITICOMag. https://t.co/vshSyX2Q0o pic.twitter.com/MrYxGw1fDI
— Adam Wren (@adamwren) September 28, 2020
Dear God. She’s toast.
Great work, Adam! I’m starting to think she might be a Catholic!
— Joey Jo-Jo (@joey_jj_jr) September 28, 2020
Adam, I have heard a disturbing rumor that the pope is Catholic. Can you confirm?
— Max Nordau (@MaxNordau) September 28, 2020
Narrator: It was a private Christian school https://t.co/ZrPdWOcA0k
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) September 28, 2020
BREAKING: Christian school thinks Christian things about stuff. https://t.co/2QVg08CFqb
— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) September 28, 2020
But People of Praise! You know, the Handmaid’s Tale people!
Adam Wren reports:
Her spiritual group, however, has drawn more questions. People of Praise is one of a number of groups that rose up in the 1960s and ’70s to offer intense, highly supportive religious communities, in the style of evangelical churches, within the Catholic tradition. The group, though mostly Catholic, is outside control of the church itself. The group has a website, but doesn’t let reporters visit its worship center. When Barrett was nominated for her federal judgeship in 2017, she didn’t disclose her involvement. Critics, even those wary of making religion an issue in a judicial appointment, have questioned what role its member agreements—it’s “neither an oath nor a vow, but it is an important personal commitment,” the website notes—plays in her legal philosophy. Former members have called it “secretive” and a “cult”—and, above all, it has remained something of an opaque chapter attached to the life of an increasingly public figure.
What’s difficult to understand outside South Bend, however, is just how deeply integrated this group is into the local community. Though the group has only a few thousand local members, and keeps a low profile as an organization, its influence and footprint in the city are significant. That influence, and its resistance to liberal changes in the wider culture, are likely to arise as issues in her Supreme Court nomination hearings, expected to begin Oct. 12.
People of Praise includes several prominent local families, including real estate agents and local financial advisers, who act as a sort of professional network for families in the group and provide considerable social capital to its members. In South Bend mayoral elections, campaigns have been known to strategize about winning over People of Praise as a constituency, given the fact that they live close together in several neighborhoods. The group runs Trinity School at Greenlawn, a private intermediate and high school that is considered by some to be the best—and most conservative—school in South Bend. Families from Notre Dame and elsewhere, even unaffiliated with the group, pay $14,000 to attend grades 9-12 and $13,000 for grades 6-8. Barrett served on its board from 2015 to 2017, and her husband, Jesse, a former assistant U.S. attorney who is now a partner in a law firm here, advised the school’s nationally recognized mock trial team.
Mitch McConnell et al. might as well call the whole thing off.
Like every Catholic school everywhere. Big scoop. lol
— Heather (@booksandprayer) September 28, 2020
… is this supposed to be news?
BREAKING: CATHOLIC SCHOOL FOLLOWS BIBLE https://t.co/tJNvZ0WLzN
— Brad Polumbo 🇺🇸⚽️ 🏳️🌈 (@brad_polumbo) September 28, 2020
Congratulations, you just described basic Christian theology.
— Aaron Reale (Ree-Al-EE) (@Calanon24) September 28, 2020
They also probably taught 2+2=4
— Unchained Virtue (@UnchainedVirtue) September 28, 2020
Amy Coney Barrett can’t seem to distance herself from religious Christians. It’s like she’s not even trying!
Amy Coney Barrett was a paid speaker five times at the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, founded to show law students “how God can use them as judges, law professors and practicing attorneys to help keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel in America.” https://t.co/6LpEEx1dIV
— emma brown (@emmersbrown) September 28, 2020
Blackstone is run by Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal advocacy group whose founding leader has questioned the “so-called separation of church and state” as it is often understood.
— emma brown (@emmersbrown) September 28, 2020
A suggested reading list for the fellowship, published on Blackstone’s site in most of the years Barrett spoke, included “The Homosexual Agenda,” co-authored by that founding leader, who wrote that same-sex relationships led to “despair, disease and early death.”
— emma brown (@emmersbrown) September 28, 2020
In 2017, asked about ADF’s stance on LGBTQ rights, Barrett told senators that she learned Blackstone was run by ADF only after she agreed to speak there.
She spoke at Blackstone in five separate years, four times in Phoenix and once in Alexandria, Va.
— emma brown (@emmersbrown) September 28, 2020
Barrett herself has said: “I don’t feel like affiliation with a group commits me to all of that group’s policy positions.”
— emma brown (@emmersbrown) September 28, 2020
They’ve got her, for sure. Wait, what?
Al Franken tried this at her 2017 hearing. That dog won’t hunt.
— Thomas Galvin (@ThomasGalvin) September 28, 2020
He tried. He failed. But by all means, keep trying.
Barrett has also said that her personal views would have “no bearing on the discharge of my duties as a judge”
— Patrick Gannon (@pgeezy68) September 28, 2020
You know, maybe it’s the media who should be calling it off. Because they literally have nothing on Amy Coney Barrett that suggests she’s anything other than a practicing Catholic and devoted mother. Not to mention a fair and brilliant jurist.
