Judgment Day

I have it on good authority that someplace on that huge roll of parchment is something kind of like: “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”

Without naming names, were you to look at the rosters of the Alameda County District Attorney’s office, the Superior Court, and the Oakland Police Department you would find that many current and former cops, district attorneys, and judges in Alameda County have in common the fact that they’re Catholic.  And this is not just an Alameda County-specific thing.  Six United States Supreme Court justices are Catholic:  Kennedy, Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, Sotomayor, and Alito.  That’s all the more startling and interesting because there are only nine justices total.  (The other three, Kagan, Breyer and Ginsberg are Jewish.  What happened to the Protestants?  Who knows?)  6/9 = 2/3.  I don’t even have to look it up to know that two-thirds of the population of the United States is not Catholic.  

Anyway, as someone who was raised Catholic, works in the judicial system, and is writing about nuns, cops, judges and district attorneys, many of whom are Catholic (well, obviously the nun is), I really feel I should have a better idea of why so many Catholic people work in those particular jobs.

I’ve asked a couple of people about this and got one quick and clear “sense of duty,” one shrug of the shoulders, and one longer opinion (from my brother, actually), which is that when it comes to inquisition, judgment and punishment — all things that DA’s, cops and judges do — we Catholics are kind of experts.  Oh, also, we know all about confessions.  In fact, you would not believe how good some police officers are at chatting up suspects and not doing anything other than asking innocent-seeming questions and then all of a sudden the suspect is confessing every bad thing they ever did and some other stuff that other people did without a single constitutional right being violated.  I am certain those cops are the ones who went to Catholic grammar school and Catholic high school.  See?  Something good came from having nuns and priests ferret out your wrongdoing:  they turn out to be useful role models when you become a homicide detective.

The thing is, I know there’s much more to this and I don’t at all mean to sound glib about it.  It’s one of those things that’s been in the back of my mind for a long time and I’ve never really worked out a complete answer.  I suppose if I googled it, I’d discover that somebody at the New Yorker had written a long, eloquent article on this exact topic, but I’d rather just ask around and see what the people I know think.  That’s my favorite kind of research, in fact.  Just ask people what they think.  It’s amazing what you’ll find out.