The New York Times’ chief Washington correspondent, Carl Hulse, sincerely believes a shadowy “cabal” of Roman Catholic operatives has been working quietly to stack the Supreme Court with anti-abortion activists. His colleague, columnist Maureen Dowd, also believes a sort of Catholic “deep state” has infiltrated the court.
Dowd interviewed Hulse earlier this month and asked him about six of the nine justices on the Court being Catholic [Catholics were 20.8% of the population as of 2018. One of the six is the Obama-nominated liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and another was baptised and raised Catholic but is now a member of the Episcopalian Church] and the numerous Catholics involved in proposing the Trump Administration’s judicial picks.
Hulse said, “It’s just a fact, hard to explain. I honestly think that anti-abortion ideology is part of this, but there is a serious Catholic sort of mafia, which is probably not another term I should be using, that is driving this.”
The previous month, during a separate interview with Dowd, Hulse said, “There is a Catholic cabal . . . And it totally plays into the abortion rights fight.”
He added, “There is, like, a real Catholic underground that is influencing this probably in an outsized way.”
