Leonard Leo bowed at the altar and ascended the marble pulpit of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. The casket below was draped in a white pall, lying beneath the blue and gold neo-Romanesque-Byzantine dome.
It still felt surreal, even seven days later. Justice Antonin Scalia was dead, found in his bed in the El Presidente suite of a luxury ranch in West Texas. He had been quail hunting with elite members of an exclusive fraternity for hunters, the International Order of St. Hubertus, and did not show up for breakfast. Leo was so close to Nino, as his friends called him, that he heard the news before it became public.
Leo’s voice echoed over the packed pews. “The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them,” he said, reading from the Catholic scripture. “Chastised a little, they shall be greatly blessed, because God tried them and found them worthy of himself.”
Through his horn-rimmed glasses, Leo could see all eight remaining justices of the Supreme Court, seated before him in the front. Normally, the basilica was filled with pilgrims. A million people came each year to pray at the site, the largest Roman Catholic church in North America, dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Now he saw hundreds from the conservative legal world who had revered Scalia as their unofficial leader. There were a host of high-level dignitaries—Vice President Joe Biden, former vice president Dick Cheney, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, and dozens of Catholic priests.
Scalia was a titan of conservative law. But few Americans had ever heard of this short, round man in a finely tailored three-piece suit with a pocket square, who led the Federalist Society. Leo preferred it that way, out of the public eye and the press, easier to maneuver behind the scenes. He was building power with the small group of people who mattered for his mission, and many of them were here, too: law clerks and attorneys and federal court judges who shared a vision to shift American law and culture along with it.
Leo wasn’t a litigator. He wasn’t a registered lobbyist. He had never worked for a major law firm. Leo was a power broker, a networker, the kind of pivotal Washington player who could navigate his way through the morass of politics to advance a mission. His connections at the court were deep: he met Samuel Alito in 1989, Clarence Thomas in 1990, and Antonin Scalia in 1991. He could get billionaires to donate enormous checks to further his causes, in service of the network of conservative Catholic and judicial organizations he was building, and presidents to rely on him. It made him one of the best-connected Catholics and conservatives in America, or, as Thomas once joked, “the third-most powerful person in the world.” And even on this day, there were hints that Leo’s legacy might prove, in the end, even larger than Scalia’s.
Leo’s rise to power began after law school when he took a job with the Federalist Society, which was established in 1982 with a goal to train, credential, and grow a generation of elite conservative lawyers who could ascend to the highest levels of American government. Its vision was long-term: to build a strong network that over decades would create a pipeline for conservative lawyers and law students to government, academia, and the judiciary, even the Supreme Court. It was a secular group, not connected to any broader Christian vision, and some of its members supported abortion rights.
The Federalist Society helped steer promising conservative law students into clerkships, jobs, and eventually judgeships, making sure they got jobs in places of influence across the entire legal landscape. And it helped expand the intellectual class of government officials, academics, and advocates who could create the scholarship and legal theories that would provide a foundation for upending decades-old decisions—like Roe.
Scalia had been one of the group’s early advisers, and he infused the Federalist Society with his method of legal interpretation called originalism. Originalists argue that judges should hew as closely as possible to the original intent of America’s founders in the Constitution and interpret laws based on the meaning they had for the people who wrote them. In practice, it meant that if America’s founders did not believe they were establishing a right to abortion or gay marriage or limiting assault weapons, then modern judges should not either when interpreting the Constitution. Legislatures should be in charge of writing laws, and justices should simply interpret them.
Roe symbolized the kind of legal thinking the originalists wanted to change, a decision they believed veered from how the Constitution was understood when the founders wrote it. Another related school of legal theory called textualism also raised objections to the decision, arguing that there was no clear text in the Constitution providing a right to privacy, which the judges used to ground abortion rights.
Leo and other conservative lawyers saw those problems of legal interpretation as far more sweeping than just Roe. The left had a choke hold on American legal culture, Leo believed. The result was so-called rights that were not really rooted in the Constitution and cases that were wrongly decided, he once explained to students at Hillsdale, an evangelical college in Michigan. The Griswold decision, which legalized contraception for married women, had wrongly instituted a right to privacy “so general and vague that its application is purely subjective,” he said. That led to Roe “and a long line of cases affirming a right to abortion with ever narrowing exceptions,” and then came Obergefell, which “announced a right to same-sex marriage.” The problem extended to cases that limited a state’s authority to restrict material it found obscene, as was allowed under the Comstock Act, or that protected against religion in the public square, or that permitted affirmative action, he explained. “Such an exercise of power by nine mortals, given lifetime tenure is, in my view, unjust and deeply, dangerously undemocratic,” Leo told the students.
If Leo and the Federalist Society could get originalist judges on the bench, the decisions themselves would be different. While Leo cast his goals in legal terms, arguing that he wanted to restore the original intentions of the Constitution, the impact of his strategy was to push back against the cultural change that had swept the country since the 1960s and 1970s. “Law is something that obviously signals to people what is acceptable or unacceptable in a society,” he said. “The perspective that the right has about Roe is, ‘Well, there isn’t anything in the Constitution on this issue, the Supreme Court made it up.’ And by making it up, the court is trying to put its thumb on the scales of social and cultural decision making.”
Over time, Leo built a large network to advance his conservative mission, an intertwined web of legal activism, Republican politicians, rich donors, and Catholicism that reached from parish churches to the Supreme Court. Groups like the Susan B. Anthony List and Students for Life, where Leo offered advice or served on the board, represented the outer tentacles of his reach.
Leo worked to galvanize Catholic voters for George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign against John Kerry, and to turn ethnic Catholic voters, who often voted as Democrats, into ideological Christian voters who would support Republicans by appealing to their socially conservative views on issues like abortion. Once Bush won, close allies of Leo—Ann and Neil Corkery, along with Republican donor Robin Arkley II—helped found a new nonprofit called the Judicial Confirmation Network (later renamed the Judicial Crisis Network), or JCN, to influence public opinion on Supreme Court hearings and other judicial elections. The group was tax-exempt and could spend unlimited funds without disclosing its donors, and it set up its offices on the same hallway in a downtown Washington building as the Federalist Society.
Leo was soon leading the campaigns to support Bush’s Supreme Court nominees and raising the money from conservative donors to fund them. In 2005, he helped usher Chief Justice John Roberts onto the bench. Less than a month later, Federalist Society members helped sink Bush’s nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers and persuade the administration to replace her with Samuel Alito, who had ties to the organization.
Leo and his justices remained close. After Alito was confirmed to the court, Leo connected him with ideologically aligned businessmen, some of whom had cases before the court, strengthening the pipeline between conservative money and legal ideology. In 2008, Leo organized a fishing trip to Alaska for Alito, where they stayed at Arkley’s luxury lodge. He spent time with Thomas at Camp Topridge, a private lakeside resort owned by a major Republican donor, Harlan Crow. Their visits were memorialized in a painting hanging inside the lodge, depicting Crow, Thomas, Leo, and two other conservative lawyers deep in conversation and smoking cigars.
LEO’S FATHER HAD died when he was young, so he was raised by his mother and looked up to his grandfather, an Italian immigrant who had worked his way up from a tailor at Brooks Brothers to a vice president of the company. His grandfather and parents, he said, were “faithful Catholics.” Leo served as an altar boy and had close relationships with his local priests and parish. From his early days in elementary school, Leo believed abortion was “an abomination,” he said, due to his devout Catholicism.
As Reagan nominated Scalia to the Supreme Court in June 1986—the same summer Marjorie Dannenfelser first came to Washington—Leo was a rising senior at Cornell University and one of thirty-seven students nationwide to get a special government grant to study the Constitution. He chose to focus on religion and what the founding document intended for prayer in public schools and taxation of religious entities.
Leo met Thomas during a clerkship on the DC circuit, where Thomas had recently joined the bench.
They discussed a book by Paul Johnson, a British historian admired by conservatives, about the role of Christianity in Western civilization, Leo recounted. At the time, Thomas was a lapsed Catholic, who had moved away from the faith of his childhood.
Later, Leo noticed a small statue on the justice’s desk: Saint Jude, the patron saint of seemingly hopeless causes. His great-grandmother had a similar one, and she would tell Leo to look to Saint Jude as a reminder of how the human spirit can triumph over the struggles in life. “Perhaps it should not have been a surprise then that Justice Thomas would play some of the same inspirational role that my great-grandmother did,” Leo would say, at a talk with Thomas hosted by the Federalist Society. “Justice Thomas demonstrates a tremendous abiding faith in the capacity of the human spirit to rise above adversity.”
When his clerkship ended, Leo accepted a job with the nascent Federalist Society, pushing off his official start date to help Thomas with his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, as Thomas navigated the accusations of sexual harassment by Anita Hill.
Around that time, Leo’s wife, Sally, was pregnant with their first of seven children. The joy turned to anxiety when testing revealed the developing baby’s spine was splaying and the head was taking the shape of a lemon. The diagnosis was myelomeningocele spina bifida, a severe form of the neurological disorder. The doctor encouraged her to undergo further testing. “My next question was, ‘What do I do about it anyway?’” Sally said. “His answer was that many people decide to abort. That was out of the question.” It was a view shared by Leo’s mentor. Scalia, a father of nine, once told his biographer, “Being a devout Catholic means you have children when God gives them to you, and you raise them.” The Leos arranged for a neurosurgeon to be ready to do surgery once their daughter was born—and a priest to baptize her in case she died.
They named her for Margaret Mary Alacoque, a French saint born in 1647, who as a child was paralyzed and grew to have visions of Jesus revealing his Sacred Heart to her. The Sacred Heart was a mystical sign, Catholics came to believe, of the long-suffering and divine love Jesus has for humanity, and was often symbolized with an image of a human heart wrapped in a crown of thorns like the one Jesus wore as he was crucified. Her visions inspired devotion in Europe and eventually an official Catholic holy day, the Feast of the Sacred Heart.
The Leos adored their Margaret and recounted her story once to a Catholic writer in a small book about spiritually strong children, called Littlest Suffering Souls. Her physical life was difficult. She was paralyzed from her midsection down, and had cognitive challenges and shunts to drain spinal fluid from her skull. When doctors put titanium rods in her back to try to keep it straight, her body bent them.
Yet she was a happy child, with a quick smile and an ability to charm everyone around her. Her parents marveled at her ability to love. She shared a room with her younger brother, whom she adored, and she loved stickers and chocolate ice cream. Sally took her to daily Mass, and Margaret delighted in seeing the priests, participating in the Eucharist, and for over a year counted down the days until she would be confirmed. Leo remembered bringing her several times to the March for Life in Washington, the antiabortion movement’s annual protest of the Roe decision. Her parents believed she had a “sensitivity to evil,” they later recounted, and pure and simple love for anyone around her. It was Margaret who urged her father to go to daily Mass, after a brief period when he had stopped. The morning she died, he was on his way there. She was fourteen.
They buried her in a garden cemetery near the cathedral in Arlington, her headstone a simple pink granite. “Always rejoice. Pray without ceasing. In all things give thanks,” the stone read, quoting Saint Paul. Justice Thomas was one of her pallbearers, and Chief Justice Roberts came to the funeral, where Father Paul Scalia, the justice’s son, helped to celebrate the Mass. Thomas kept Margaret’s drawings under the glass on his desk, and, on top, a picture of her in a frame she had made with Popsicle sticks. Leo saved her titanium rods and kept them in his office at the Federalist Society.
After her death, the Leos, and some of their friends, came to see Margaret as a divine intercessor, with an ability to alleviate the suffering of others. They spoke of miracles, small and large, that they saw when they asked Margaret, in prayer, to intercede for them to God.
It started after Margaret’s death, when Sally asked her to ask God to silence some noisy birds while she was trying to pray and, she said, they immediately went quiet. Weeks later, Sally became pregnant with their son, Francis, who was diagnosed with the same myelomeningocele as Margaret. When doctors said he would need an operation, she took the baby to Margaret’s grave and asked for her late daughter’s help, the Leos said; and the need for that procedure disappeared. The Leos also believed Margaret intervened to protect another one of her brothers, Anthony, during a health crisis. Ed Whelan, one of Leo’s lawyer friends and then-president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a group that aims to apply Judeo-Christian values to public policy, asked Margaret to intercede for his father, who he thought was dying. His father suddenly recovered.
Then there were the Sacred Heart medals—the medallions they would find in unexpected places, like the house on a California ranch where they were staying shortly after Margaret’s death that belonged to Robin Arkley, the megadonor who would fund the Judicial Crisis Network. No one knew how they appeared. For Leo, the hearts were a sign of God’s “playfulness,” and a “reminder to have hope that all of that human suffering is permitted because there’s good that comes of it.” Watching his daughter struggle strengthened Leo’s faith, pushing him to embrace a view of suffering as a sacred part of the human experience. Catholics like Leo seek to embrace suffering like Jesus embraced his crucifixion, as a means to achieve salvation. Catholicism teaches that life on Earth and the pain it brings is a small part of an eternal journey that continues after death with Jesus in heaven. That attitude infused Leo’s beliefs about abortion, guiding his view that women should not end pregnancies as a way to avoid what he saw as temporal suffering.
“I saw firsthand the dignity and worth of a human person, even in a broken state, and I understand better than I ever otherwise could have the way in which human suffering can provide redemption not only for the individual who’s suffering it but for mankind, humanity at large,” he said. “That has enormous impact on my view of why our society, our culture, and our political and legislative arenas ought to embrace human life and reject abortion.”
Leo’s beliefs on the value of suffering were also reflected in the ideas of a Catholic community he was close to called Opus Dei, Latin for “work of God,” a small international network of believers whose mission was to use their daily lives—the work of their days—to sanctify the world for Christ. Leo said he had no formal role in the group but was an admirer of “the work.” He had served on the board of the Opus Dei–run Catholic Information Center, a spiritual and professional networking group near the White House, along with other prominent conservative lawyers like William Barr and Pat Cipollone. The official rolls of Opus Dei were a closely guarded secret, and the network, a relatively new devotional practice in Catholicism, had only about three thousand members in the United States and ninety thousand globally.
Years after Margaret’s death, a famous oil-on-canvas artist, who had painted portraits of popes, presidents, and Justice Samuel Alito, painted Margaret, smiling with a broad grin as Jesus blessed her from above. The portrait of Margaret Leo of McLean—a nomenclature used for saints—hangs in a gold frame in the Catholic Information Center. She was, in a way, Leo’s own saint. She was a baby they did not abort, who, they believed, interceded with God to bring miracles on Earth, leaving Sacred Hearts behind as a divine sign. She led her father down a professional path with a spiritual goal.
IT WASN’T DISCUSSED at Scalia’s funeral Mass, of course, but Scalia did not like the idea that his legal opposition to abortion might somehow be connected to his Catholicism. As a judge, he opposed Roe on legal grounds, not moral ones. After the Supreme Court upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Act in 2007, a University of Chicago professor pointed out that every justice in the majority was Catholic. Scalia was furious and refused to speak at the school until the professor was gone.
Catholics in the United States were divided on abortion, with polling showing them nearly evenly split between supporting and opposing abortion rights. But the views of the Catholic Church were clear: abortion was a grave sin, punishable by excommunication. That theology was not always static—for centuries, the church taught that the soul entered the fetus only later in pregnancy, but in 1869, as the scientific revolution took hold, the church decreed that a human life begins at conception and expressly forbade abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
Leo stood firmly with Catholic orthodoxy. “I believe that abortion is an affront to the dignity and worth of a human person, and I think we have a moral and ethical obligation to preserve and defend human life from conception to natural death,” he said.
He also looked to the church as a model for his conservative legal goals. Leo pointed approvingly to Thomas and compared his actions on the court to the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, building a philosophy slowly and over time. The church then was “laying the foundations for future Catholic thinking and Catholic thought to sort of grow the church and preserve its traditions,” Leo told The New York Times. The idea was “tilling the ground,” Leo said, something he saw Thomas do by staking out strong if lone positions on issues like abortion restrictions and gun rights, to prepare the field to one day be ready for “things to blossom or flourish.”
At Scalia’s funeral, Leo listened as Father Paul Scalia preached the homily in remembrance of his father. The priest had helped return Clarence Thomas to the Catholicism of his childhood in 1997. Leo was used to seeing him at his home parish, St. John the Beloved in McLean, Virginia, where he was a priest and where the Leos sat two rows in front of Eugene Scalia, the second-oldest of Scalia’s children, and his family.
This day, they were all gathered to honor one man, Father Scalia told those in the pews, and it was not his father. It was Jesus of Nazareth. His father “knew well what a close-run thing the founding of our nation was,” he said. “And he saw in that founding, as did the founders themselves, a blessing, a blessing quickly lost when faith is banned from the public square, or when we refuse to bring it there. So he understood that there is no conflict between loving God and loving one’s country, between one’s faith and one’s public service.”
Also in the basilica was the man who threatened to tip the court away from Leo’s grasp—Merrick Garland, the man Obama would nominate as Scalia’s successor.