Despite her hope that the country would eventually turn her way, Marjorie Dannenfelser’s America was not the America most of the country wanted. It was a triumph of a largely conservative Christian minority over a more secular and pluralistic majority. And it was a tragedy to much of that majority. Roe was gone and the country was shaken by its loss.
The new legal reality transformed America with shocking speed. Within two months of the decision, about one-third of American women had lost all access to elective abortions in their states.
The country’s politics reeled in response. The first post-Roe vote happened in Kansas, where voters overwhelmingly rejected a referendum removing abortion-rights protections from their state Constitution by eighteen points, running up margins not only in swing suburban areas but in redder rural counties. Even Planned Parenthood was shocked by the scale of its victory in a conservative state. “Kansas is a model for a path to restoring reproductive rights across the country through direct democracy,” said Alexis McGill Johnson. “We know that Kansas will not be our last fight or our last victory.”
Suddenly, it was Republicans who found themselves scrambling to address new levels of opposition, and not just in Kansas. Activists in Michigan, who had been working on a separate pro–abortion rights referendum, saw a similar increase in interest. Seemingly overnight, millions of dollars in donations poured into Democratic campaign coffers and abortion-rights groups.
Though it carried a political cost, Dannenfelser had achieved her goal of becoming like the NRA. And Leonard Leo had created a court that was reversing the legal rulings of the 1960s and 1970s with striking speed. The day before the decision in Dobbs, the court had struck down a New York law limiting gun licenses, offering a selective read of history that found gun control—like abortion rights—not deeply rooted in the text of the Constitution or American history. The two rulings showed how the Federalist Society judges, led by Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, were taking originalism from legal theory to national reality. All signs pointed it to being one of the most transformative eras of the court in American history. The new direction was a result not solely of the court itself but a giant web of outside actors that had locked in power to transform America, a network that was significantly motivated by Roe.
A few weeks after Roe fell, Alito flew to Rome and delivered an address to an audience at a private palace, the Palazzo Colonna, as part of an event sponsored by Notre Dame’s law school. The speech was not heavily publicized and kept private until a week after it happened, when Notre Dame posted the video on its website. In his remarks, Alito gave the impression of a justice unbowed by the public outcry. He took shots at foreign leaders who condemned his opinion in Dobbs, even slamming Britain’s Prince Harry, who had compared the “rolling back of constitutional rights” in America with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “I had the honor this term of writing, I think, the only Supreme Court decision in the history of that institution that has been lambasted by a whole string of foreign leaders,” Alito said defiantly.
But his overarching concern that day was the decline of Christianity in public life. Alito told the audience he saw a “growing hostility to religion, or at least the traditional religious beliefs that are contrary to the new moral code that is ascendant.”
He called the room to action. Defending religious liberty was of utmost importance, he said, because Christians were vulnerable, with their free expression of belief subject to attack. The Declaration of Independence said men were endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, but now not everyone believed there was a Creator, he noted. Protecting nearly unchecked religious freedom would encourage people of faith to speak out more forcefully on social issues. “People with deep religious convictions may be less likely to succumb to dominating ideologies or trends, and more prone to act in accordance with what they see as true and right,” he said. “Civil society can count on them as engines of reform.”
Alito’s version of reform resonated with Leo, whose vision for America was always bigger.
Four months after the ruling, Leo donned a tuxedo and returned to the Mayflower Hotel as he had for so many years for the Federalist Society meetings. This time he came for a private dinner with behind-the-scenes Catholic power brokers, lawyers, donors, and activists, many of whom had prayed and worked for the end of Roe.
The Catholic Information Center, the Opus Dei–run group where Leo had long served on the board, was giving him an award. Opus Dei placed special importance on the work of laypeople, who it believed had a particular role to transform the world. If anyone had accomplished the Opus Dei mission—to use one’s ordinary, daily work to sanctify the world for Christ from the inside out—it was Leo, and through him the entire conservative network he created.
For Leo, like many others in the antiabortion movement, the mission to end Roe came from a desire to shift how America interprets the Constitution. But those legal goals were difficult to untangle from deeply religious, and Catholic, convictions about what it means to be human, to be male or female, and how that understanding should ground society. The fight against abortion rights was a part of a broader battle against the secularization of an America that had turned its back on Christian concepts of morality, including the “holiness” of human suffering. “Human suffering completes Christ’s salvific act,” Leo explained.
That night, a testimonial video flashed photographs of Leo laughing with Clarence Thomas, shaking hands with Neil Gorsuch, posing with Brett Kavanaugh, and dining with Samuel Alito. Antonin Scalia’s wife, Maureen, praised his “wonderful, deep, and comfortable faith.” Carrie Severino, of the Judicial Crisis Network, Leo’s vehicle for funding court nomination campaigns, praised him for a unique ability to identify the problems of society and to solve them with Christ’s message.
William Barr, Donald Trump’s former attorney general and a former Catholic Information Center board member, said he could think of no one else who had lived his faith more powerfully. “It is particularly fitting that the very year in which Dobbs was decided, we are honoring Leo,” he said. “Because no one has done more to advance traditional values, and especially the right to life, than Leonard.”
Another image appeared. It was of Leo and his daughter, Margaret Mary, about fifteen years earlier, before she died. She and her father were together in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House, with President George W. Bush kneeling beside her wheelchair. Leo had a realization in caring for his daughter, Father Paul Scalia said in the clip, “that the faith is the means by which we best help those who are in need.”
This award was about both of them—father and daughter. Earlier that day, Leo and his family gathered at the CIC to unveil the portrait of “Margaret Mary of McLean” on the wall.
Like the saint she was named for—Margaret Mary, a paralyzed girl hundreds of years ago who had visions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus—Margaret Mary of McLean and the miracles her parents and their friends believed followed her death became a sign to Leo of the intervening love of Jesus.
Standing at the podium, his hair gone gray, Leo pushed his distinctive round glasses up on his nose. He rarely spoke publicly of his daughter and would not that night.
The award was to recognize Leo’s part in the New Evangelization, an effort popularized by John Paul II in the early 1980s for Catholics to re-evangelize a secularized and de-Christianized world. That movement in America, along with the modern Christian right wing well beyond the Opus Dei faithful, had just won the victory of a lifetime. They had ended a ruling as deeply entrenched in American life as it was opposed in Catholic doctrine.
But Leo’s speech that night was no victory lap. The battle for American culture, politics, and government continued. The Church was entering its third millennium, he said, and lay Catholics needed to step up their efforts even more. Even though a majority of the Supreme Court and many public officials were “faithful Mass-attending Catholics,” Leo warned, Catholicism and its faithful were under attack, especially after the Dobbs decision. Catholics were being “censored,” “canceled,” and fired from jobs for speaking out about their faith.
“Our culture is more hateful and intolerant of Catholicism than at any other point in our lives,” he said. “It despises who we are, what we profess, and how we act.” Leo rattled off a list of persecutions of Catholics throughout the centuries, and urged his listeners not to despair. The Church had always survived, he said.
The losses in the months after Dobbs couldn’t compare to the bloodshed of earlier eras, when priests and nuns were killed in the French Revolution or American Catholics faced persecution by the Ku Klux Klan. But even that fall, it was already clear that the antiabortion forces were losing politically, facing a massive backlash from liberal and independent voters who strongly disapproved of the ruling. Their Republican allies, including Trump, were running away from the issue, some disavowing earlier promises to restrict abortion. And Democrats were pounding their opponents with accounts of the most catastrophic outcomes, cases of raped children and women facing life-threatening complications.
Their current-day opponents were “just as myopic and ignorant as their counterparts from earlier ages,” who burned and banned and killed, Leo said. They were immoral “barbarians, secularists, and bigots,” who vandalized churches and harassed Catholic public officials at restaurants and their homes—referencing protesters who went to Kavanaugh’s and Thomas’s homes after Alito’s opinion leaked. They were “a progressive Ku Klux Klan” that repeated “the KKK canard that Catholics want this country dominated and controlled by a theocracy, which no well-informed Catholic should ever support.”
He added, “They are conducting a coordinated and large-scale campaign to drive us from the communities they want to dominate.… They control and use many levers of power.”
It was a description that his opponents could easily say applied to Leo, and to the entire antiabortion movement, to the conservative lawyers and lawmakers, activists, and donors.
For years, the antiabortion movement had built a powerful identity on the belief that Christians did not have power. They argued Christians were besieged, crushed by a rising liberal America. The story of the fall of Roe revealed the opposite to be true. Their brand of conservative Christianity built enormous power where it mattered most. They did not have to be the majority to be the ones now crushing liberal America—all they had to be was a powerful, well-positioned minority.
At its core, Roe was a “question of power,” Leo later reflected: Was it state legislatures or the Supreme Court who decided what women did with their bodies and when “life can be terminated”?
“It’s all questions of power, right? Almost anything involving the dignity and worth of the human person is a question of power. I mean, that’s not anything earth shattering,” he said.
Over the past decade, Leo had certainly learned a few things about power. As the country moved into the new, post-Roe era, Leo, like ADF, was only expanding his reach. The fall of Roe was a beginning, not an end. The entire Roe era had created rights that were unmoored from the country’s traditions and Constitution, he had told the Hillsdale College students back in 2018, from legalized contraception to same-sex marriage to affirmative action. The fall of Roe was the start of those liberties being unwound, and the America that the conservative Christian movement believed the founders intended could begin again. It was about legal interpretation. But it was also bound up in a religious quest, aimed at pushing back the growing forces of secularism.
Already Leo was building new institutions for his bigger battle, reaching far beyond abortion rights to grow conservative power and transform broad swaths of American life. He aimed to adapt his successful revolution of American law and apply it to the entire country—to build more networks of conservatives to enact wholesale cultural revolution.
A new organization was in place to do just that. The Teneo Network, with Leo as a new board member, aimed to replicate the success of the Federalist Society to a broader swath of American culture—from corporations to media to higher education. They could “crush liberal dominance” across American life, Leo would say, by connecting the forces of conservative elected officials, political aides, activists, federal judges, state attorneys general, media figures—even pro athletes and business leaders. They had members already—people like Senator Josh Hawley, former Trump administration aides, Republican Attorneys General Association leaders, staff for 2024 presidential contenders—all expanding their reach.
The story of the fall of Roe pressed forward. But for Leo and the movement he represented, the fall of Roe was part of another story far greater than the future of America. It was a story that reached back beyond the past decade or the fifty years of the sexual revolution or the founding of the nation. It was a story that rippled back beyond even the five-hundred-year story of the Protestant Reformation, and beyond the millennia-long story of Christian empire. It was a story that began with a young girl named Mary, who faced an unplanned pregnancy and gave birth to a baby who saved the world. It was a story of the fate of Christendom.
At the Mayflower that night, the forces of secularism that opposed them could not win, Leo assured the Catholic activists, politicians, and priests. Their movement was growing, and the “renewal of our culture” would come from their continued work, he said. God, after all, was loyal to his people. “I have faith that together we will carry it forward and once again lift the eyes of America upward toward Christ,” he promised. The audience leaped to its feet.
Leo’s zeal was unwavering. But he also saw something about the fall of Roe that few others did.
THE DAY ROE was overturned, Leo woke up at his estate home on Mount Desert Island, an old-money enclave on the craggy coast of Maine. He had hosted a grand party the night before, where the former food-and-beverage director at Trump’s defunct hotel in Washington picked the wines. The champagne, Pol Roger Reserve, was a Winston Churchill favorite. Two dozen federal and state judges mingled at his house with other conservative legal luminaries. The dinner coincided with a conference—a week in Maine, all expenses paid—put on by the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University near Washington, which had become a growing nexus of conservative legal thought. The school bore Scalia’s name thanks to Leo, who had coordinated $30 million in donations to honor his late friend. Security details stood guard around the perimeter of Leo’s estate as the group feted their host and their victories.
The morning after the party ended, at 10:10 a.m., came the ultimate victory. The day was a triumph, a zenith of Leo’s life’s work, as it was for so many in the antiabortion movement. But unlike so many others, Leo stayed quiet.
Leo and his wife, Sally, went to Mass, lunch, and one of their late daughter Margaret’s favorite places. The day was indeed an enormous celebration—but not just about Roe, he said. It was a celebration for Margaret Mary, their girl who shaped her father’s view of how ending abortion and embracing suffering could redeem humanity. A girl whose casket Thomas carried and whose funeral Mass Roberts attended. A girl who, just maybe, their closest circle thought, inspired miracles and left divine signs of the Sacred Heart of Jesus behind.
The date of the decision—June 24, 2022—had not made sense to most people. But that particular Friday was not just a random Friday in June. The timing had a special significance.
On the Catholic calendar, it was a holy day, a feast day where Catholic believers across the world practiced a certain spiritual devotion. Of all the Catholic practices, this one began with a girl from France who, hundreds of years ago, was paralyzed as a child. A girl who had mystical visions of Jesus revealing his flaming heart to save humanity. A girl who followed what she, and then the church, saw as a divine call to propagate worship of that heart. A heart they believed beat for every human, from the moment of conception to the last breath.
Roe fell on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
One of the biggest legal decisions in American history fell not only on this specific sacred Catholic date but also on a holy day tied to the beloved daughter of Leo, the man who did more than perhaps anyone in America to help create a conservative Christian legal network that ended Roe and changed the nation.
Leo said he never spoke about the case—or timing of when it was released—with his friends on the court. The Supreme Court did not respond to requests for comment on the timing. The court probably didn’t pick the day it was announced to coincide with his daughter’s holy day, or the Catholic day at all, Leo said. The timing was most likely related to security concerns. Though he couldn’t be totally certain. “It wouldn’t have been Sam’s, Clarence’s decision anyway,” he said, referencing Justices Alito and Thomas. “The chief would have decided the order of decisions that would come out that day. And I don’t think he … well, I don’t know. Maybe he knew it was the Feast of the Sacred Heart.”
To many in the broader antiabortion movement who knew the Catholic significance of the date, if not the intimate meaning it had for Leo, the timing was more proof that the fall of Roe was, in fact, a miracle. The importance of that day, commemorating Jesus’s love for the world, was to them a sort of divine code, yet another sign their God acted to save America and sounded the victory.
But in the pattern of the fall of Roe, the date they saw as providential might look to another part of America like a more earthly kind of coded message: a raw expression of political, legal, and Christian might.