Reactions have erupted regarding a new piece of legislation that requires Louisiana public schools to display certain historical documents, including the Ten Commandments, with a coalition of families and organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, filing a legal challenge last Monday. 

Sam Grover, senior counsel at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, pushed back against suggestions that the Ten Commandments represent accepted moral laws or are a part of the American tradition. 

“Most of the Commandments have very little to do with morality. … Many of the Commandments actively contradict the values and laws that we’ve put forward in the Constitution,” Grover told the Register.

In response to the lawsuit, Attorney General of Louisiana Liz Murrill stated on the social-media platform X, “The 10 Commandments are pretty simple (don’t kill, steal, cheat on your wife), but they also are important to our country’s foundations.” Murrill’s press secretary, Lester Duhé, told the Register, “The attorney general’s job is to defend the law. She intends to do just that.”

Yet, how should Catholics understand this law? For American Catholics, the discussion must involve the moral value of the statute as well as its constitutionality.

The Register spoke with Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of the Conscience Project, a legal analyst and a frequent Register contributor, who commented that “including the Ten Commandments in our teaching and understanding of the American legal tradition, especially with young people, is entirely appropriate. … They continue to be a religious text, but they also have historical significance.”

Picciotti-Bayer said the attitude of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who called himself “a jurist that is Catholic,” could be helpful for Catholics in this case. She cautioned against the impulse to dismiss the display of religious texts as unconstitutional, stating that “society has been influenced by faith, especially American society.”

Professor Rick Garnett of the University of Notre Dame Law School emphasized that, for Catholics, a commitment to religious freedom does not necessitate the removal of faith from the public square. Garnett said religious freedom is “a fundamental human right and one that the Catholic social tradition embraces.” 

He noted that while the Second Vatican Council’s document Dignitatis Humanae presents that “there shouldn’t be any coercion in religious matters,” it also recognizes that it’s “generally speaking, fine to have acknowledgements of religious traditions and practices in the public square.”

“I don’t think it’s a Catholic view that religious symbols have to be erased from the public square or erased from education,” Garnett said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that this law actually would have the desired effects.” 

 

Supreme Court Precedents

The debate surrounding the Ten Commandments and the Catholic response will continue as the suit against Louisiana moves through federal district and appellate courts. 

According to legal analysts, the constitutionality of the law likely rests upon the U.S. Supreme Court’s willingness to potentially overturn its 1980 ruling Stone v. Graham, which struck down a similar Kentucky law. Garnett highlighted that “the Supreme Court’s approach to church-state controversies has evolved over the last 45 years.” 

Regarding the original meaning of the Constitution, he said, “When the 14th Amendment was ratified, we did have public schools, and they taught about religion all the time. So if you were going to be focused on the history of the relevant constitutional provisions, and say, ‘Well, what were people doing in schools at those times?,’ then, probably, this is permissible.” 

Picciotti-Bayer said that, for a period, “the court had a mistaken view that the Establishment Clause required neutrality on the part of the government that ended up always being hostile towards religion.”

More recent Supreme Court decisions allow a variety of public religious displays, such as the 2005 decision Van Orden v. Perry, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a Texas monument displaying the Ten Commandments was constitutional. The high court’s 2019 ruling American Legion v. American Humanists Association also allowed for the display of a World War I memorial cross on government-owned land. 

Grover strongly disagreed with the possible constitutionality of the statute, however. “This is a case where the state is trying to coerce students in the classroom into adhering to one certain set of religious beliefs, and that remains unconstitutional, even under the Supreme Court’s new parameters for evaluating the Establishment Clause,” he said.

Garnett offered a different assessment, saying, “We don’t necessarily know what the test is going to be for this Louisiana law. … This court cares about history. It cares about the original meaning of these provisions.”