Reflection / Sean Gallagher

Amy Coney Barrett and the mission to transform the world into God’s kingdom

Catholics in the U.S. can take rightful pride in Judge Amy Coney Barrett, whom President Donald J. Trump nominated on Sept. 26 to the U.S. Supreme Court.

She is the first graduate of a Catholic law school to have been nominated to the nation’s highest court. If she is confirmed, six of the court’s nine justices would be Catholic.

But Barrett is also a Catholic whom her brothers and sisters in faith in this country would do well to emulate.

In many ways, she embodies the way in which the Second Vatican Council and popes during the past 50 years have called the Church’s laity to live out its timeless faith.

Vatican II emphasized that lay Catholics have a central role in the Church’s mission of evangelization in the middle of the world, in places where clergy and religious do not live and minister. The laity are the principal evangelizers in the workplace, government, education, economy and health care. They proclaim the Gospel in families, neighborhoods and in many other social relationships.

They are called, with the help of God’s grace, to transform the world more and more into his kingdom of holiness, justice, love and peace.

Barrett has done this in high-profile ways for the past three years in promoting justice, which is ultimately rooted in God, as a federal appeals court judge. And, if she is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, she may do it for decades to come as a Supreme Court Justice.

But she’s also done it in personal ways that don’t make headlines.

When her name was mentioned as a possible successor to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of Barrett’s former law students at the University of Notre Dame in northern Indiana wrote an essay about her professor that was posted on the website of First Things magazine.

Laura Wolk, who is legally blind, came to Notre Dame’s law school as a student in 2013. Technology that Notre Dame had ordered for her to keep up in her work was late in arriving. Then her laptop computer broke. That’s when then-Professor Barrett stepped in to help.

“… She did not merely help me to readjust the burden on my own shoulders; she took it from me and carried it herself,” Wolk recalled. “I will never forget the moment when she looked at me from across her desk and said, coolly and matter-of-factly, ‘Laura, this is not your problem anymore. It’s mine.’ ”

This is the action of a lay Catholic who knows how to witness to Christ in her career in the middle of the world. This is how the Gospel is proclaimed and spread forth—quietly, sometimes slowly, but no less surely—into the many corners of society.

Barrett also embraces the vision of marriage, life and the family of Vatican II and subsequent popes. As full as is her life as a judge and law professor, Barrett takes joy in being a wife and mother of seven children, two of whom were born in Haiti and adopted, and one of whom has special needs.

“While I am a judge, I am better known back home as a room parent, carpool driver and birthday party planner,” Barrett said on Sept. 26 at the White House when she was introduced as the president’s nominee. “ … Our children are my greatest joy even though they deprive me of any reasonable amount of sleep.”

Barrett is a lay Catholic working to spread the kingdom of God while under a white-hot spotlight. Most lay Catholics carry out the Church’s mission in hidden ways in their own corner of society.

Barrett’s contributions, as well as yours and mine, are all essential, however, if the world in which we live is to be transformed more and more into God’s kingdom.
 

(Sean Gallagher is a reporter for The Criterion, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.) †