Court Opinion

ID: 9749220
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 16:28:26.489248+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:45.230710
License: Public Domain

*691Hammond, J.,
filed the following opinion, dissenting in part, in which Hornby and Marbury, JJ., concurred.
I agree with my brethren of the majority that the individual appellants have standing and that the capital grants under review do not offend or violate Art. 15, Art. 23 or Art. 36 of the Maryland Declaration of Rights. I cannot agree with their conclusions that the grants by the State of Maryland to Western Maryland College for buildings to be used as a science wing and a dining hall and to St. Joseph College and the College of Notre Dame of Maryland for science buildings, amount to the establishment of religion by the State contrary to the mandate of the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, made binding on the states, under the decisions of the Supreme Court, by the fourteenth amendment.
There can be no rational doubt from the evidence in the record and facts that properly can be judicially noted, of the following :
(1) that the State of Maryland has for over a hundred and eighty years followed a general, systematic and non-discriminatory pattern of financial assistance to private institutions furnishing a higher secular education. In 1784 the Legislature granted an annual sum of 1250 pounds for the use of St. Johns College (Ch. 37). By Ch. 107 of the Laws of 1798 there was authorized an annual grant to Charlotte Hall School (which had been founded by the established church before the Revolution). In Johns Hopkins Univ. v. Williams, 199 Md. 382, 399-400, Chief Judge Marbury, for the Court, listed capital grants by the State to institutions of higher learning in Maryland from 1904 to 1937.1
*692(2) that under both Maryland law and federal constitutional standards such grants are for a public use and purpose. The Maryland Declaration of Rights provides in the opening sentence of Art. 43:
“That the Legislature ought to encourage the diffusion of knowledge and virtue, the extension of a judi*693cious system of general education, the promotion of literature, the arts, sciences, agriculture, commerce and manufactures, and the general melioration of the condition of the People.”
In his dissent in Board of Education v. Wheat, 174 Md. 314, 335-37, Judge Parke well summarized practice and law in a discussion, as to the correctness of which, there can be no real disagreement. He said:
“Neither the payment of money by the State to a private person, whether corporate or otherwise, nor the nature and occupation of that person, is determinative of the purpose of the payment. Thus appropriations by the General Assembly of public funds are customarily made and paid to various bodies and institutions throughout the state, which are privately owned and managed, and which are, in many instances, of sectarian origin and character. It will be found, upon examination, that this employment of public funds has not been for a private purpose but for a public one. It is upon this ground that this employment of public moneys has been sanctioned by the decisions of this court. If an incidental or direct benefit result to the recipient, this resultant advantage becomes immaterial and negligible because of the paramount public and essential nature of the service rendered and of the further factor that the State has either not undertaken or not fully assumed the performance of the public service or function involved. Clark v. Maryland Institute, 87 Md. 643, 41 A. 126; Article 43 of Declaration of Rights. The validity of such grants, when so limited, is not affected by any sectarian circumstance. St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys v. Brown, 45 Md. 310, 335, 336. Thus, grants to educational institutions which supply instruction and training in learning and mechanical, industrial, agricultural and other arts of which the State does not offer or undertake to afford universal service are freely made without reference to whether the recipient be denominational or otherwise. *694St. John’s College v. State, 15 Md. 330; St. John’s College v. Purnell, 23 Md. 629; Allegany County School v. Maffit, 22 Md. 121 * * *.
* * H*
“In these grants the State advisedly makes no distinction between denominational and non-denominational institutions, nor has it limited its appropriations to race or color. The grants so made for special public purposes find at once their justification and vindication in the promotion of the general welfare in those matters of public concern in respect of which the government had not theretofore undertaken completely to perform. In short, although paid to a private person, the money is appropriated and expended for a public use.”
In Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S. 1, 7, 91 L. Ed. 711, 719, Justice Black, for the majority of the Court, found New Jersey constitutionally could tax A to reimburse B for the cost of transporting B’s children to a church school. He said:
“It is much too late to argue that legislation intended to facilitate the opportunity of children to get a secular education serves no public purpose. Cochran v. Louisiana State Board of Education, 281 U. S. 370 * * *.”
(3) the four donee colleges here involved all furnish a secular liberal arts education comparable to that furnished by other first rank liberal arts colleges in the United States and are accredited by standard accrediting agencies. The courses taught in the four donee colleges are taught in substantially the same manner as at other similar colleges, for example, Johns Hopkins or Goucher, and are not used as vehicles for religious indoctrination ; the text books are chosen by the individual teachers for their merit in supplying knowledge of the course and are not chosen for their religious orientation or because of the religion of the author and, in most instances, are the same texts that are used at other public and private colleges. No doctrine, dogma or other teaching of any church enters into or inter*695feres with the teaching of the secular subjects that are taught. Graduates of the four donee colleges go on to take graduate studies and obtain degrees on an equal basis with graduates of other public and private colleges at universities offering the best post graduate courses, such as Johns Hopkins and Columbia. There are no religious requirements, oral or written, for admission of students to the donee colleges and, finally, the buildings to be erected with the funds granted will be places which will further the secular training offered by the colleges and not used for religious ceremonies or instruction.
(4) the factors of (a) a rapidly expanding population of the State and the Country, (b) an increasing proportion of that part of the population of college age which attends college, and (c) an ever more complex society which requires ever more highly developed skills of more people in order to supply individuals competent to conduct the affairs of government and the private economy and furnish professional and scientific services, have strained college facilities, physical and human, to the limit, if not beyond, and will combine to require more and more such facilities. Private colleges furnish a most significant help in offering the collegiate and graduate training now available. It is said that there are some 2000 private institutions of higher learning in the Country, of which 800 are church-related. See 109 Cong. Rec. 18406 (daily ed. Oct. 11, 1963). If they are to continue to do their part and bear the new load of increased enrollments, they must have new facilities and, since private colleges traditionally have financial problems which limit their expansion, much of the cost of new facilities must come from government, if it is to come at all. The State of Maryland, as has been noted, has recognized this since early times and the federal government likewise has been aiding institutions of higher learning since the passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. Federal funds which go to colleges and universities, a number of them sectarian, for research contracts, loans and outright grants currently exceed two billion dollars a year.
It is in this setting and with this background that the constitutionality of the grants made by the Maryland Legislature to Hood, Western Maryland, Notre Dame and St. Joseph Colleges should be considered and determined. The decisive issue *696cannot be said to be simple, but it is narrow—does State financial assistance to the secular educational facilities of a college which is sponsored or controlled by a church or a religious order and in which there is a religious atmosphere amount to the establishment of religion within the meaning of the words of the first amendment as those words have been construed recently by the Supreme Court. The case of Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S. 1, 91 L. Ed. 711, which occasioned the dicta by Justice Black as to what the State cannot do lest it breach the “wall of separation” between church and state, which he repeated in McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U. S. 203, 92 L. Ed 649, and Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U. S. 488, 6 L. Ed. 2d 982, and Chief Justice Warren quoted in McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U. S. 420, 6 L. Ed. 2d 393, which both the appellants and the majority of the Court heavily stress and rely on, held that the furnishing of money by the state to reimburse parents for the cost of transporting their children to parochial schools did not violate the provisions of the first amendment that no law shall be made “respecting an establishment of religion.” McCollum is not in point since it dealt with the action of a public school administration in relation to public sponsorship of religious exercise or instruction in the public schools.
Tor caso, as I read it, held that the Maryland prerequisite of an oath of belief in God to becoming a notary public was invalid because it employed an essentially religious, although nonsectarian, means to achieve a proper secular goal—worthy notaries public—to which the means had no reasonable relation. McGowan held that Sunday Closing Laws ás presently written and administered “bear no relationship to establishment of religion as those words are used in the Constitution of the United States,” since they serve a proper secular purpose and the aid they give to religion is incidental.
Following the decision of the Supreme Court in Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S. 421, 8 L. Ed. 2d 601, which held that the organized recital in New York public schools of the so-called Regent’s prayer violated the establishment of religion clause, public frustration and resentment with the Court’s views and interpretation of that clause increased and .there was widespread criticism of decisions on the point, ranging from the reasoned *697and tempered suggestions of Professor Sutherland in Establishment According to Engel in 76 Harv. L. Rev. 25 that the reasoning and result of Engel were unsound to ill-advised and intemperate comments, often based on a misunderstanding of the basis and effect of the decisions. In deciding Abington School Dist. v. Schempp, 374 U. S. 203, 10 L. Ed. 2d 844, which held that the reading, without comment, at the opening of each school day, of verses from the Bible and recitation in unison of the Lord’s prayer, violated the establishment clause, the Court, in the traditional way of courts, did not acknowledge error and adhered to its views but was particularly careful in its opinion to in effect answer criticism by specifying just what had been held before and was being held then, and to say, with words chosen even more carefully than usual, just what the law was. For this reason I ascribe great weight to Schempp as a guide to what will and what will not offend the establishment rule the Court has drawn.
Justice Clark, for the Court, pointed out that religion consistently has been identified with our history and government and that religious freedom is imbedded in our public and private life. He then reviewed the prior cases and their holdings and dicta, and said:
“As we have indicated, the Establishment Clause has been directly considered by this Court eight times in the past score of years and, with only one Justice dissenting on the point, it has consistently held that the clause withdrew all legislative power respecting religious belief or the expression thereof. The test may be stated as follows: what are the purpose and the primary effect of the enactment? If either is the advancement or inhibition of religion then the enactment exceeds the scope of legislative power as circumscribed by the Constitution. That is to say that to withstand the strictures of the Establishment Clause there must be a secular legislative purpose and a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion. Everson v. Board of Education, supra; McGowan v. Maryland, supra, at 442.” (Emphasis supplied.)
*698Murray, Etc. v. Comptroller, 241 Md. 383, 398, upheld the validity of tax exemptions (equated to direct grants which indubitably benefited the recipient religious group) to religious organizations and in its opinion by Judge Oppenheimer synopsized the Supreme Court decisions as holding that:
“If the primary purpose of the state action is to promote religion, that action is in violation of the Amendment, but if a statute furthers both secular and religious ends, an examination of the means used is necessary to determine whether the state could reasonably have attained the secular end by means which do not further the promotion of religion.”
I think that the four grants under consideration were made pursuant to long-established practice to further a secular public purpose and that any aid or benefit flowing from them to religion would be slight, vague and purely incidental. The grants will supply added facilities which will help the secular educational activities of religious groups and will aid students who now and hereafter attend the institutions and the people of the State of Maryland by increasing the number of those who can receive a college education and the quality of the education that the increased number will receive. The grants will not aid religion or a religious group; those who attend college are or are not at that age religiously inclined and if they are, have, in almost all cases, become attached to a particular faith. Students are not proselytized at any of the four donee colleges. It will not aid religion or the Catholic Church for more students, mostly Catholic, to be able to attend St. Joseph or Notre Dame, or the Methodist Church for more students, largely Methodists, to attend Western Maryland College (and in both cases to receive perhaps a better education because of the grants) to a degree greater than it will society in general. The benefit to religion or a religious sect is as small and as incidental as was the benefit to religion and most church groups in McGowan and to the parochial schools in Everson—more students were enabled to attend parochial schools by reason of the grants approved in Everson. If it be delicately suggested that perhaps Everson might not be decided in 1966 or thereafter as it was in 1947, *699there are at least two answers. One, the suggestion makes it only one of a relatively large number of cases and judges of a rank below the Supreme Court should not indulge in judicial speculation as to what that Court will do. Two, Everson has not yet been overruled and the Supreme Court in 365 U. S. 299, 5 L. Ed. 2d 688, dismissed the appeal in Snyder v. Town of Newton (Conn.), 161 A. 2d 770 (which upheld a Connecticut law authorizing transportation by a town of children to a parochial school) “for want of a substantial federal question,” 1 and Everson was cited with approval in Schempp.
There is no reasonable alternative to State aid to private institutions of higher learning. Theoretically, the State might enlarge State colleges enough to care for all actual and potential students or create new public colleges to do so. Tremendous sums would be required in either case and, what is more important, available physical facilities and faculty and administrative staffs could not be produced for years. In the Note, Constitutionality of Federal Financial Aid to Church-Related Colleges, 77 Harv. L. Rev. 1353, 1358, the author points out that of the 2,000 institutions of higher learning in the United States 800 are church-related, and says:
“To exclude these 800 institutions of higher learning from federal aid would seriously hamper the effort to increase enrollment capacity to the point where colleges will be able to handle the expected demand of 1970 and distort the present educational allocation of students between denominational and nondenominational schools. * * * Such pragmatic considerations would be irrelevant if the command of the Constitution were clear; the remedy would then be a constitutional amendment. However, the lack of an effective alternative should be highly relevant when a plausible constitutional defense can be made and where, in an area of church-state overlap, criteria can be formulated which minimize governmental intrusion into religious concerns without paralyzing governmental attempts to cope with urgent national problems.”
*700On the question of constitutionality, the author, at pp. 1356-57, says:
“On the other hand, the opinions of Justices Clark and Brennan in Schempp indicate that federal aid to education would be considered constitutional. For example, Justice Clark enunciated the test of constitutionality to be a secular legislative purpose and a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion. Similarly Justice Brennan would draw the line at legislation employing the organs of government for essentially religious purposes or using essentially religious means to serve governmental ends where secular means would suffice. Under either test, the act would appear to be free from constitutional flaws”
and indicates his view that state aid to church-related colleges is constitutional.
As did Judge Duckett below, I think the grants should be declared valid. Early federal and state cases which, in addition to authorities already cited, support this view include, in Maryland: Baltzell v. Church Home, 110 Md. 244 (the home was affiliated with and supported and controlled by the Episcopal Church, and the Court found a gift to it needed no legislative sanction as required for a gift to any “religious sect, order or denomination”) ; Mt. St. Mary's v. Williams, 132 Md. 184 (holding the Catholic college not to be a religious sect, order or denomination). See also St. John’s College v. State, 15 Md. 330 (St. John’s was then closely related to St. Anne’s Church in Annapolis) ; St. Mary’s Indust. School v. Brown, 45 Md. 310; Finan v. M. & C. C. of Cumberland, 154 Md. 563 (part of proceeds of a bond issue went to Sisters of Charity of the Catholic Church for their hospital) ; and Board of Education v. Wheat, 174 Md. 314, referred to earlier.
Federal cases include Colbert v. Speer, 24 App. D. C. 187, aff’d Speer v. Colbert, 200 U. S. 130, 50 L. Ed. 403 (Georgetown College, run by an Order (Society of Jesus) of the Catholic Church, was held not to be a sectarian institution or a religious sect, order or denomination) ; Bradfield v. Roberts, 175 U. S. 291, 44 L. Ed. 168 (Commissioners of the District of Co*701lumbia paid a Catholic hospital—run by the order which runs St. Joseph College—out of funds appropriated by Congress—so much per poor patient. It was held that neither the appropriation nor the payments violated the first amendment); and Cochran v. Board of Education, 281 U. S. 370, 74 L. Ed. 913 (it was held constitutional for the State to furnish free textbooks to all students, including those used by students in parochial schools).
Judge Horney and Judge Marbury concur in the view herein expressed and, as would I, would affirm.

. “Thus, in 1904, nearly fifty years ago, a public building loan in the amount of $1,625,000 was authorized by Chapter 228 of the Acts of that year. Of that amount $57,000 was for the purpose of construction and completion of buildings for the Maryland Agricultural College, which was the collegiate predecessor of the University of Maryland at College Park. At that time, the Maryland Agricultural College was a semi-public institution, having both public and private stockholders, and one-half of its property was owned by the State, so that the appropriation to it is not, perhaps, a perfect legislative interpretation. However, in the same act, $5,000 was given for the construction of buildings at Charlotte *692Hall School, a privately owned institution, $5,000 for construction of St. Mary’s Academy, a similar institution, and $175,000 for the purchase of a lot of ground in Baltimore for the Maryland Institute, also a private institution, and for the construction of a building thereon. This was followed in 1913 by Chapter 90 of that year,, which provided for the issuance of $600,000 worth of the State’s bonds, the proceeds of which were to be paid to the Johns Hopkins University for the erection of a technological school. That act also included an annual appropriation for maintenance, and provided for scholarships, and it might possibly be argued that the scholarships constituted a consideration. However, in 1933, by Chapter 464, a general construction loan of $1,750,000 provided for a gift from the proceeds of .$30,000 to St. John’s College for a new heating plant, and $30,000 to Washington College for and on account of its indebtedness. In 1934, there were four acts passed. Chapter 374 authorized a St. John’s College loan in the amount of $110,000, the proceeds of which were to pay the present indebtedness of the college. Chapter 380 created a state debt of $3,460,000, and of the proceeds $100,000 was given to St. John’s College for equipment and necessary construction purposes. By Chapter 366, the Western Maryland College loan of $135,000 was created, to be turned over to the Board of Trustees of Western Maryland College for the construction and equipment of a science building. By Chapter 369, a state debt of $100,000 was authorized, proceeds to be given to the Board of Visitors and Governors of Washington College for equipment and construction. In 1937, by Chapter 666, the Morgan College loan of $135,000 was created, the proceeds to be used for the construction and equipment of an industrial science .building at Morgan College, then a private institution, but later acquired by the State. In 1937, by Chapter 487, a general bond issue of $9,053,000 was authorized, of which $163,000 went for the construction of buildings at Bowie Normal School, and $35,000 for the construction of an improved water supply at the Maryland Training School for Boys. In 1939, by Chapter 363, a state debt of $50,000 was created, to be used for the payment of the deficit in constructing and equipping the new buildings at Charlotte Hall School. All of these recipients were private nonprofit corporations.”