Dear Amy Coney Barrett,
I write to you as one of the student organizers of the protest surrounding your visit to Notre Dame campus. As a fellow Catholic and member of the Notre Dame community, I want to express my frustrations with your recent opinions on the Supreme Court that I believe to be incongruent with the “Gospel of Life” we are called to as Catholics. I implore you and all students to read my statement with an open and discerning mind.
There are decisions you have made in your time as Supreme Court justice that are worthy of praise. Your opinion in the Dobbs Decision and similar cases have been inarguably in line with the anti-abortion advocacy the Catholic Church has championed for years. (I will note here that some of my fellow protestors are protesting your actions on this very issue. This is not the purpose of my piece. They can air their differing frustrations on their own if they wish.) I also appreciate that you recused yourself from voting on the fate of the religious charter school St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in Oklahoma. Your time as a professor at Notre Dame Law School, whose Lindsay and Matt Moroun Religious Liberty Clinic has done legal work to fight for the school’s right to exist, would have clearly been a conflict of interest.
I do, however, take issue with your failure to represent the entire scope of what the Catholic Church professes when we talk about being “pro-life”. Pope John Paul II talks about the totality of this view of a “Gospel of Life” in his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae. The document links the death penalty as going against the commandment, “You Shall Not Kill”, which is
included and more fully expressed in the positive command of love for one’s neighbour, is reaffirmed in all its force by the Lord Jesus. To the rich young man who asks him: ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?’, Jesus replies: ‘If you would enter life, keep the commandments’ (Mt 19:16,17). And he quotes, as the first of these: ‘You shall not kill’ (Mt 19:18) (Evangelium Vitae 41).
In consistently giving the floor to the states on cases of the death penalty such as in Arizona in 2023 and Oklahoma in 2025, you have failed to take a firm stance against this threat to human dignity. We are now even more fervently called to act against the injustice of this act as in John Paul II’s day. Pope Francis built upon this teaching, calling for the Catechism of the Catholic Church to be changed in 2018 to call the death penalty “inadmissible” in any possible circumstance,ratifying the change in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti. Excusing this a “states’ right’s issue”, or advocating for recusal as you have in the past, is far from enough and does not represent what the Church calls us to in the modern day.
Furthermore, your recent decisions on immigration during this current administration reflect a refusal to answer the Church’s unrelenting call to be a voice for the most vulnerable among us. Now, a minimum of 3,000 arrests are being made daily as required by Trump immigration policies. People are being arrested based on something as simple as having an accent when speaking English, thanks to your vote on Vasquez Perdomo vs. Noem. I cannot help but wonder how many Catholic families this has affected- as a Latino myself I have seen my parishes go “underground” for fear of having their congregation rounded up. This is not a moment to show contempt for thousands of families under a visage of “upholding the law”. On the contrary, it is these policies which are lawless. Trump can send hundreds to prison in El Salvador where they will never go outside or be visited by family again in complete defiance of court orders and no one is stopping him. Nowhere more clearly do John Paul II’s words ring true – “There can be no true democracy without a recognition of every person’s dignity and without respect for his or her rights” (Evangelium Vitae, 101).
In your time visiting Notre Dame (which prides itself on its authentically Catholic spirit), I implore you to reflect on the repercussions of your decisions on the Court. You once said that “it is never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions, whether they arise from faith or anywhere else, on the law.” What about when these civil laws reject the natural law, and in the words of Aquinas, “[cease] to be a law and becomes instead an act of violence”? (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 93, a. 3, ad 2um). Does what you promote (or enable) on the Supreme Court fully represent a Gospel of Life? I plead with you to discern these questions on behalf of the Notre Dame family, the Latino community, and anyone whose right to life is being violently attacked as a result of these policies.
Sincerely,
A Fellow Catholic