The high court is weighing certiorari in U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops v. O’Connell, a putative class action filed by a Catholic parishioner who claims he was misled about the use of his donations to Peter’s Pence, an annual religious offering supporting the pope’s ministry.
The petitioner argues the D.C. Circuit erred by treating church autonomy as merely a defense to liability rather than an immunity that bars intrusive merits proceedings. Under the lower court’s ruling, civil courts can require churches to spend time and resources litigating religious disputes, even if they are ultimately shielded from paying damages.
The D.C. Circuit also denied immediate appeal of the church autonomy defense, joining four other courts in that position. That stance conflicts with six other courts, including the 5th Circuit, which holds that church autonomy warrants interlocutory review to prevent irreparable First Amendment harm.
Additionally, the D.C. Circuit adopted a rule allowing courts to bypass the church autonomy doctrine if plaintiffs plausibly allege claims arise under “neutral principles of law.” Five other courts have rejected that approach, with 16 dissenting or concurring judges warning it would render the doctrine a dead letter.
The underlying dispute centers on O’Connell’s allegation that a description of Peter’s Pence heard misled him into believing the funds would be used exclusively for specific religious purposes. He seeks the return of his offering and those of millions of other Catholics, along with an injunction dictating how the Catholic Church describes and uses the funds.
Georgetown Law Professor Stephanie Barclay, who joined an amicus brief urging the court to take the case, highlighted the intrusive discovery demands court, which sought private correspondence with the Holy See and the identities of millions of donors.
Barclay cited a concurrence by Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh in Cunningham v. Cornell University, which warned that “church autonomy without a meaningful immunity from suit collapses into an after-the-fact damages defense.” The Justices added that such a limited protection is “somewhat useful to the institution that survives the litigation, entirely useless to the institution that settles to escape it.”
The 5th Circuit recently concluded in McRaney v. NAMB that church autonomy is a constitutional immunity protecting against all judicial intrusion, echoing Supreme Court precedent that the “very process of inquiry” can violate the religion clauses.