THE ARCHBISHOP OF DENVER, Charles Chaput, has rebuked the Senate Democrats who have blocked the nomination of Alabama attorney general William Pryor in stark terms: “[A] new kind of religious discrimination is very welcome at the Capitol, even among elected officials who claim to be Catholic.” Chaput’s entire statement on the matter deserves to be read widely and quoted alongside every ringing denial of anti-Catholic bias issued by Patrick Leahy and other bigots caught in the act of denying federal judicial appointments to individuals professing belief in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The debate over Pryor in both the Senate and in the media has revealed a pathetic failure to understand the basics of Catholic theology, as Archbishop Chaput points out. The debate is also embarrassing for senators who, if not obliged to know what Catholics are and are not required to believe, ought at least to be familiar with the Religious Test Clause that appears at the conclusion of the Oath Clause in Article VI of the Constitution: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any office or public Trust under the United States.”

This barrier to religious bigotry was erected because of England’s unhappy experience with Test Acts. The most severe of the laws was passed following the restoration of Charles II to the English throne, and the monarch’s gesture of religious reconciliation to the Catholics of Great Britain in his Declaration of Indulgence. Historian Norman Davies writes on what followed in “The Isles”: