Jesuit Father James Martin has blasted the Supreme Court for its immunity ruling, warning “the President can now order the execution of his political enemies.”
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of former President Donald Trump, holding in a 6-3 decision that presidents are covered by “limited immunity” from criminal prosecutions for actions taken while in office.
“Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” the Court decided.
“And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts,” it added.
“I suppose the President can now order the execution of his political enemies,” Father Martin, a Democrat, declared on X (former Twitter). “So let’s stop calling this a Christian or Catholic court.”
I suppose the President can now order the execution of his political enemies. So let's stop calling this a Christian or Catholic court. I suppose he can also sleep outside if he's homeless. Too bad the poor cannot. Again, Christian and Catholic in name only.
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) July 2, 2024
The priest appeared to believe ordering the execution of political enemies falls within the president’s “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority.”
Father Martin, who offered the invocation for the Democratic National Convention in August 2020, has criticized the harsh language used by certain Catholic prelates and priests to describe the Democratic Party and its pro-abortion platform.
Martin has insisted that pro-abortion Catholic politicians have the right to receive Holy Communion, a position that drew a sharp rebuke from Springfield Bishop Thomas Paprocki and moral theologian Father Brian Graebe, who reminded the priest that Canon Law precludes Catholics who persist in “manifest, public, grave sin” from receiving Communion.
On the other hand, Martin has never hidden his disdain for Donald Trump and in 2020 said that Trump represented a “unique threat to the Constitution” and must not be reelected.
“President Trump has undermined the constitutional order to a degree unprecedented in modern U.S. history, which prompts the editors of this review to register this unprecedented warning,” wrote the editors of America magazine, the flagship Jesuit publication in the United States, of which Father Martin is editor-at-large.
Trump “represents a proven threat to the constitutional order,” the editors added. “That threat is real.”
As part of his scaremongering, Father Martin said Tuesday the president “can also sleep outside if he’s homeless. Too bad the poor cannot.”
File/Father James Martin speaking at the world meeting of families in Dublin on how the Catholic Church can welcome members of the LGBTQI+ community. Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty)
“Again, Christian and Catholic in name only,” he added, in reference to the Court’s ruling Friday that it is not “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Eighth Amendment to remove homeless people from encampments and to imprison them for repeatedly violating anti-camping laws.
Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch expressed sympathy for the homeless, acknowledging that the issue is complex and difficult to resolve.
He noted, however, that laws against encampments were “commonplace,” and that the Eighth Amendment was a “poor foundation” on which to mount a challenge against them.
The correct forum in which to debate responses to homelessness was in democratically elected governments, not in the federal courts, he stated.
All these legal subtleties were apparently lost on Father Martin, who accused the Court of being “Christian and Catholic in name only,” something the Court itself has never claimed.
As guardian and interpreter of the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court is charged with ensuring the American people the promise of equal justice under the law but has no mandate to enforce biblical principles or confessional religious norms.
