Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/18-1195_g314.pdf
Page Number: 43

Cite as:  591 U. S. ____ (2020) 

9 

ALITO, J., concurring 

was going to fund religious public education, it should also
support church schools.  The militia needed to be called to 
protect St. Patrick’s Cathedral.13  Most notorious were the 
Philadelphia Bible Riots.  In 1844, a rumor circulated in the 
city’s nativist newspapers that a school director, who was 
Catholic,  had  ordered  that  Bible  reading  be  stopped.14 
Months of scaremongering broke out into riots that left two 
of  the  city’s  Catholic  churches  burned  and  several  people 
dead.  Only by calling out the militia and positioning a can-
non  in  front  of  a  Catholic  church—which  itself  had  been 
taking cannon fire—were the riots ultimately quelled.15 

Catholic and Jewish schools sprang up because the com-
mon schools were not neutral on matters of religion.  “Faced 
with  public  schools  that  were  culturally  Protestant  and 
with curriculum[s] and textbooks that were, consequently,
rife with material that Catholics and Jews found offensive, 
many  Catholics  and  Orthodox  Jews  created  separate 
schools,” and those “who could afford to do so sent their chil-
dren to” those schools.16 

But  schools  require  significant  funding,  and  when  reli-
gious organizations requested state assistance, Mann and 
others  labeled  them  “sectarian”—that  is,  people  who  had 
separated from the prevailing orthodoxy.  See, e.g., Jeffries 
& Ryan 298, 301.  The Blaine movement quickly followed. 

—————— 

13 See  Viteritti,  Choosing  Equality:  School  Choice,  the  Constitution, 

and Civil Society 151 (1999). 

14 See Sekulow & Tedesco, The Story Behind Vidal v. Girard’s Execu-
tors: Joseph Story, the Philadelphia Bible Riots, and Religious Liberty, 
32 Pepperdine L. Rev. 605, 630 (2005). 

15 See id., at 633–638. 
16 Brief  for  Union  of  Orthodox  Jewish  Congregations  of  America  as 
Amicus Curiae in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, 
O.  T.  2016,  No. 15–577,  p.  15  (internal  quotation  marks,  citation,  and 
brackets omitted).