In 2016, the Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission ruled that the Catholic Charities Bureau is ineligible for an unemployment tax exemption. The state permits exemptions for organizations “operated primarily for religious purposes,” yet the Commission ultimately determined that Catholic Charities serves no “religious purpose” when it ministers to the poor, the elderly, and the infirm. Ignoring common sense, the Commission decided that Catholic Charities’ work is secular (and thus, non-exempt) because its activities resemble those of secular charities.
On March 31, the Commission will come before the U.S. Supreme Court to explain why it has any business setting thresholds of religiosity that a religious organization must satisfy (Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission). It maintains that it had to examine Catholic Charities’ work for “distinctively religious” acts to preserve objectivity in an inquiry that it must apply across religious claims. In truth, the Commission’s approach betrays a secular bias and a subordination of religion to the state—both impermissible under the First Amendment—that the Supreme Court ought to reject.
The branch of Catholic Charities involved in this case provides housing and job training to disabled and elderly persons in the Wisconsin Diocese of Superior, and it’s organized under the auspices of the local bishop. Both the Commission and the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which upheld the Commission’s decision, concede that its activities had “religious motives,” but that these motives are “incidental to their primarily charitable functions.” “Religious purposes” could be present only where an organization performed “distinctively religious” activities like “worship, ritual, teaching the faith, or spreading a religious message.” Of course, the obviously religious character of these examples doesn’t preclude other activities from having religious purposes.
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The briefs before the Supreme Court brim with citations of sacred Scripture and canon law demonstrating that for Catholics, charity toward the poor isn’t just religiously inspired but religiously obligatory. What Wisconsin blithely dismisses as “motive,” Catholics could better describe as the divine origin of duties incumbent on the Church and her ministries. Indeed, they could also point out that “charity” was the unique creation of the Christian faith; secular charities are unknowingly operating on a religious model.
True, motives alone may not determine an act’s character. But how sensible is it to try to understand an organization’s purpose by logically amputating that organization’s acts from both motives and ends? If only intrinsically religious acts can endow an organization with religious purpose, then qualifying activities are limited to those that have no rational explanation except religious observance. That biases the assessment in favor of secular explanations.
Not only does Catholic Charities act from religious motives; it pursues religious, not humanist, ends. Corporal works of mercy, like feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless, are means of carrying “on the redeeming work of our Lord,” ensuring the salvation of souls.
By assuming that proselytizing to the needy is religious but offering charity is not, Wisconsin denied corporal works of mercy the transcendent purpose that Catholic teaching gives them. And because the Commission was predisposed to accept secular explanations, it was content to rest its decision on a superficial similarity between what secular and religious charities do.
The secular bias of Wisconsin’s approach augments its belief in religious subordination. Whence comes the authority of the Commission or a court to make a casual survey of typical religious activities the binding criteria for any case in which religiosity is at issue? Ultimately, that authority derives from a post-Westphalian worldview in which religious peace demands that faith be tailored to fit the contours of secular modernity and that it manifest itself only in the ways and places allotted to it by the secular state.
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Government actors augment their apparent authority to make distinctions between “religious” and “non-religious” by appealing to objective criteria, supposedly eschewing value judgments. But such determinations necessarily begin with value judgments about how and to what extent religious bodies should relate to civil society.
The Commission’s inquiry takes a desacralized view of the world and applies a latter-day version of Occam’s razor: Whenever government can understand an activity through a secular lens, that secular explanation is sufficient, conclusive, and exclusive.
This does not accord with the Constitution. The Establishment and Free Exercises clauses guarantee church autonomy, insulating church teaching and church governance against government intrusion. These First Amendment protections, rather than confining churches, grant them instead greater liberty to engage with civil society and to mediate between persons and the state. And while there is no First Amendment guarantee of tax exemptions, as Archbishop Charles Chaput wrote, such arrangements are “nakedly practical” because “religious charities typically do better social-service work than government agencies and at lower cost.”
In the last few terms, the Court has shed much of its “wall of separation” mentality and recognized that the Constitution envisions a vital role for religion in civil society—a recognition clearly evident in its rulings on cases covering religious entities’ access to public grants and tuition assistance. One can reasonably hope for that same recognition to prevail here.
