The most striking thing about the recent pronouncements of Justice Scalia on capital punishment that you criticized in your recent editorial (Scalia's Dissenting Opinion, Feb. 17-23) is not his support of capital punishment, but his view of the relationship between the law of the United States and the moral law binding upon all men, as that relationship affects a Catholic judge.

Scalia insists that a Catholic judge who believes that capital punishment is morally wrong must resign because he cannot uphold the law of the United States, but he clearly does not believe that he or any other Catholic judge need resign when faced with upholding a law permitting (or funding or even requiring?) abortion — even though such a law is a heinous violation of the law of God.

It would appear, by his reasoning, that he could uphold in good professional conscience even laws authorizing, say, ethnic cleansing if they had been properly enacted, and any constitutional problems dealt with by appropriate amendments.

So here we see Justice Scalia, America's most prominent Catholic jurist, telling us that he can in good conscience go about his professional duties in complete abstraction from God's law. He is reputed to be an admirer of St. Thomas More — but it seems that, unlike St. Thomas, Antonin Scalia is God's own good servant, but the govern-ment's first.

JOHN A. MCFARLAND

Ellicott City, Maryland