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[–] Publius1778 [S] ago 

All these points were in my mind when I wrote and I think they are all reasonable, but still fail to explain why so many.

First how conservative are catholics or their schools these day? Since Vatican II the church has been moving toward liberalism/socialism...

My thought is that they jesuit schools apart from excellent schools are feeders to high positions like the SCOTUS, in the same way all the elite schools are and the point is that these people get more than merely a good education and I am curious what else.

If you've read the Jesuit oath, I can't see why they would ever abandon or when they did, their original purposes as a kind of papal army. Otherwise its just an august name.

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[–] time3times ago 

My attempted explanation only covers part of the territory. I estimate about half of the situation is adequately explained. Your question is reasonable (while bits of your data seem not to be). I have wondered the same thing. I can only offer a hint of further explanation. I can't readily defend this idea but suggest it in the spirit of Occam's Razor. There are so many Catholic SCOTUS justices because God has some plan that we should trust. It seems that one could look at the unexpected situation (which didn't exist before Roe v Wade) and conclude that it is strangely bad or strangely good. I'm rooting for the good version. My guess is that we won't find a satisfactory answer to your question for a while.

Commentary below is secondary and a bit off topic:

Keep in mind that most Catholics on the SC started their lives before Vat II. And the false spirit of Vat II is not yet fully rolled out. First infiltrators avoided the old teachings whereever they could in select places and then years later replaced them with modernism and the like. The current catholic landscape is such that there is a minority of folks (ordained and lay) still out there holding their ground. Some have managed to wade through the mainstream nonsense and keep their principles. I have no doubt that Kavanagh and Coney Barrett were aware of the modcon issues at their higher ed. institutions, even when they were students. This is the standard struggle for conservative catholics in our generation. Same with conservative anglicans in England these days. Same with conservatives at state colleges - bite your tounge, get the degree, move on till you have some influence.

You needn't accept my advice, but here goes: Don't think of all Jesuits as the same anti-christs. Some are not at all. And beware that much of the same disease shows up in varying frequency in other catholic orders (as well as in other Christian denominations). It does happen that in general Jesuits deserve most of the reputation that they have, but this reputation is way older than Vat II. The hilarious british writer G.K. Chesterton coined the perjorative term Jesuistry over a hundred years ago.

Jesuits have long played the education angle in their mission work, thusly so many Jesuit colleges in the US. However students at these schools are not jesuits and they take no oath to the order (any more than Notre Dame students take an oath to the Order of the Holy Cross). I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most Fed-level judges that are catholic went to a jesuit school at some point in their past. However only a tiny minority would have made any specifically jesuit vow. The Jesuit oath or vow is irrelevant within topic of federal judges. Even among Jesuits in our time the vows of obedience, etc. are only adhered to in a pick-and-choose relativist way. As the 2 previous popes were generally conservative and fairly traditionalist, many jesuits simply ignored their vows of obedience and went their own way, often criticizing those popes. The current pope, possibly the most corrupt Jesuit ever, had to contravene his vows by accepting the papacy.