c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) America’s Supreme Court has become the secularist equivalent of the Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals.

This lifetime appointment clothes them in special robes and media attention and gives them good seats at big dinners because of the presumption that they wield great power when, gathered in marbled palaces, they make decisions that shape the moral outlook of millions of people.

Small wonder that storm warnings flutter across the political frontier and the news media have gone into elliptical fits on the occasion of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement from the court.

Is the Supreme Court really our College of Cardinals or do we have a distorted sense of what both bodies actually do?

Like the College of Cardinals, membership is an ambitious target, but what you actually do is quite limited. The principal activity of cardinals is to elect a new pope. Unless they have other positions, there is nothing much for cardinals to do except to look religious, as judges are meant to look judicious, in group pictures.

The cardinals, however, have a rule that would empty the chamber if the Supreme Court justices adopted it: after they turn 80, members can no longer vote or go to the meeting, called a conclave, at which a new pope is elected.

That rule keeps this august group in better perspective than the Supreme Court. Catholics know that cardinals look nice but don’t really do much. Americans don’t care much how their Supreme Court justices look but they think that they do everything.

Supreme Court justices actually do only one highly limited thing: make judgments on the constitutionality of various laws and legal actions. While the implications of these decisions may be very great, as in providing equal educational opportunities for African-Americans after Brown v. Board of Education, the great campaign for desegregated schools was waged by African-Americans themselves.

The Supreme Court was not the source of this moral insight; it merely passed on the constitutionality of a victory won at a far lower level by thousands of heroic but anonymous men and women. Good laws never precede but always follow moral movements that originate in the hearts of ordinary people. This impulse for justice, as in the drive against slavery and the whip of its evils that still cracks long after its abolition, has often been strongly supported by organized religion.

The 14th Amendment granting voting rights to all did not inspire but followed the conversion of heart accomplished by crusaders, many of whose names are lost to history. By design, the Supreme Court is not in the vanguard but at the end of the parade.

The Supreme Court has not demanded this exalted position for itself. It has become the default source of judgment because of the collapse or misuse of authority in such other broadly construed institutions as big business, the media, higher education, organized religion and even sports.

Courts are forced to decide matters that should be handled by common sense or by other institutions. Is it the court’s real job to decide when the semester begins or World Series will be played or, indeed, whether abortion is a free moral choice?

The urgent moral issue is not who the next justice of the Supreme Court should be but why our vacuous institutions have lost so much of their own authority that the law and the courts have become their surrogates. Congress and lobbyists would serve the country better if they devoted a fraction of the energy and the money they are expending on choosing a new justice to discovering why authority has failed so disastrously in so many institutions.

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(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)