Dr. Kevin Pybas’s latest publication, Disestablishment in the Louisiana and Missouri Territories, in Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776–1833 (Carl H. Esbeck & Jonathan J. Den Hartog eds., 2019), is cited in an amici curiae brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in the companion cases of Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Agnes Morrissey-Berru and St. James School v. Darryl Biel.
The cases, both from California, raise the question of the extent to which government can regulate the employment decisions of Catholic (and, by extension, all religious) schools respecting teachers who teach religion. The oral arguments in the cases were to have been held April 1, 2020, but because of Covid19 are now going to be held by telephone conference in May. The brief was filed by fifteen constitutional law professors who specialize in religious liberty who are on the law school faculties of the University of Virginia, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and Notre Dame, among others.
Dr. Pybas’s work illuminates Thomas Jefferson and James Madison’s views on church-state and religious liberty issues with specific reference to the Catholic Church. The United States purchased Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 during President Jefferson’s first term. Under French, then Spanish, then French rule again, Catholicism was the established religion in the territory from 1682 until the U.S. took possession of it in December 1803. When the U.S. took possession, the Catholic establishment immediately ended. But the adjustment to U.S. rule was not without some difficulties, for both Catholic Church officials and Protestant civil authorities unaccustomed to large numbers of Catholics under their charge.
Dr. Pybas highlights several conflicts, actual and potential, between Catholic officials and civil authorities. Each time President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison affirm that it is not the legitimate business of government to interfere with the affairs of the Catholic Church, that, as Jefferson wrote to a convent of nuns in New Orleans, “the principles of the constitution and government of the United States are a guarantee to you that [the Catholic Church and its institutions] will be permitted to govern [themselves] according to [your own] voluntary rules, without interference from the civil authority.”
Dr. Pybas’s work is thus cited by the law professors in support of their argument that the First Amendment guarantees to the Catholic schools at issue autonomy in selecting teachers to educate children in the Catholic faith.