This article was written by Daniel R. Suhr and published in The Federalist.
It’s an astonishing proposition at first glance: the Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled that the social service ministries of Catholic Charities are not “churchy” enough, as though that is any business of the courts (or government in general) to decide. The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are apparently skeptical as well, for they have voted to review the case. On March 31, the court will hear oral arguments from lawyers for the Catholic Church and the state agency charged with administering the unemployment insurance system. The Supreme Court hears perhaps 80 cases per term, about 1 percent of those that seek review, and many of these deal with issues specific to the federal government. It’s rare, in other words, for a case from Wisconsin to draw the high court’s eye.
Yet this one has done so, and for good reason. Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Superior is an integral part of the Catholic Church in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, the organized expression of the church’s mission to serve the sick, the elderly, the poor, and the vulnerable in our communities, as Christ did and directed his followers to do. The particular subsidiary programs at issue in this case serve people with physical and developmental disabilities. Yet the bureaucrats at the state Department of Workforce Development decided that because these programs do not hand out Gospel tracts or require Mass attendance to participate, they did not qualify for the tax exemption for religious organizations.
Wisconsin Supreme Court’s Ruling
That befuddling conclusion was appealed up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which had to address the question both as a matter of state statutory interpretation (did the legislature’s enactment really mean that the department had to tax church-run social service programs?) and constitutional law (if so, does the First Amendment permit that?).
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