All of official Washington shut down on Sept. 24 as Pope Francis came to the U.S. Capitol to give a speech before a joint session of Congress. Journalists scrambled to cover details large and small regarding this historic speech, from the type of car that transported Pope Francis to the Capitol (a black Fiat 500) to which member of Congress drank from the pope’s discarded water glass (Rep. Robert Brady, D-Pennsylvania) and how often Speaker of the House John Boehner cried during the pope’s visit (at least twice, according to CNN). In short, nothing related to the pope’s visit was too trivial when it came to the wall-to-wall news coverage.

As judicial scholars, we were pleased to see that the individual justices of the U.S. Supreme Court did not escape notice. Before the pope had even ended his visit to Washington, electronic media sources were reporting that only four Supreme Court justices—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor—attended the pope’s speech (later we learned that Justices Samuel Alito, Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia had out-of-town engagements on or close to the day of the pope’s address.) “Notably absent were Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, all of whom are Catholic,” Politico reported. While news reporters noted in passing that Ginsburg was the only non-Catholic to attend the speech, they were more interested in timing how long the justice slept before Sotomayor poked her.

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