The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take up a major case involving Colorado’s alleged infringement of Catholic families’ First Amendment rights.
The high court announced on Monday that it will hear arguments in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, which centers around Colorado’s apparent exclusion of Catholic families and preschools from its “universal” preschool program. As Andrea Picciotti-Bayer previously described in these pages, the state told Catholic parishes upon the program’s enactment that “they could participate — so long as they abandoned Church teaching on sexual orientation and human identity.”
“The price of the subsidy, in other words, is the surrender of the faith,” Picciotti-Bayer wrote. “Catholic families who refuse that bargain pay full tuition out of pocket while their tax dollars underwrite everyone else’s preschool — a hardship that for some has meant forgoing preschool entirely, undermining the very interest the state claims to be serving.”
St. Mary Catholic Parish and other co-plaintiffs filed a lawsuit challenging Colorado’s policy, in which they alleged that it violated their First Amendment rights.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado denied plaintiffs’ request to implement an injunction prohibiting the policy’s enforcement and further ruled that it does not violate the First Amendment. “However, the court did enjoin the state from enforcing the nondiscrimination requirement as to religious affiliation for as long as a congregation preference existed, a ruling not challenged on appeal,” according to Justia.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals later affirmed the lower court’s ruling, prompting plaintiffs to appeal to SCOTUS for relief.
In its Monday order, the Supreme Court agreed to address the questions of whether “proving a lack of general applicability under Employment Division v. Smith requires showing unfettered discretion or categorical exemptions for identical secular conduct,” and whether “Carson v. Makin displaces the rule of Employment Division v. Smith only when the government explicitly excludes religious people and institutions.”
In Smith, a majority of justices (6-3) ruled that the Supreme Court “has never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that government is free to regulate,” according to Oyez. Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia argued that permitting exceptions to every state rule involving religion “would open the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind.”
In their petition to SCOTUS, St. Mary Catholic Parish and its co-plaintiffs referred to Smith‘s established precedent as “rootless.” Quoting a past concurring opinion by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, they further argued that “Smith ‘paid shockingly little attention to the text of the [First Amendment’s] Free Exercise Clause,’” and that “Instead of examining what readers would have understood its words to mean when adopted, the opinion merely asked whether it was ‘permissible’ to read the text to have the meaning that the majority favored.”
“Religious people across the country are stuck in forever conflicts precisely because of the (sometimes willful) confusion among the lower courts over the meaning of the Free Exercise Clause,” the plaintiffs’ petition reads. “Religious people should not have to endure years of litigation because the law is unclear and state governments are unyielding.”
The high court did not agree in its Monday order to take up and address the question posed by plaintiffs of whether Employment Division v. Smith should be overruled.
Oral arguments in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy are likely to occur sometime during the court’s 2026-2027 term.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics and RealClearHealth. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
