Editor's Note: This story was corrected on Oct. 21. An earlier version incorrectly stated that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas faulted Catholic bishops in his home state of Georgia for not doing enough to confront bigotry. In his remarks at The Catholic University of America, Thomas, speaking more broadly, said Church leaders had not done enough. In addition, a reference to bigotry he witnessed while in the seminary was removed from the second paragraph of the story because that was not what prompted him to leave the Church.

WASHINGTON — Had Catholic leaders taken a stronger stand against racism when 19-year-old Clarence Thomas attended seminary in the late ’60s, he says he might be a priest today, not a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

As it happened, he was so disheartened to see bigotry go unchecked that he dropped out of the seminary and left the Catholic Church altogether — for 25 years. It wasn’t until shortly after he joined the nation’s highest court as its second Black justice, following an infamously difficult confirmation hearing, that Thomas returned to the faith of his formative years, inspired by memories of the religious sisters at his all-Black Catholic grammar school who taught him that every child of God, no matter their race or background, is made in his image and likeness.

“They were called the ‘n-word sisters,’” Thomas recalled Thursday during an appearance at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law. “This is the Savannah of the 1950s and ’60s, when things were totally segregated. And yet those nuns never, ever once backed away from us.”

“They were always on our side. They always believed in us,” he said. “They always made us believe in ourselves.”

Thomas, 77, spoke at length about his Catholic upbringing during an hourlong conversation with one of his former law clerks, Catholic University law professor Jennifer Mascott. About 200 students, administrators and faculty members attended the Sept. 25 event, hosted by the university’s Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.

Mascott, who is currently on leave to work in the Trump administration’s general counsel office and was recently nominated to become a federal appeals court judge, covered a range of legal theories in her questions, including originalism, textualism, and the concept of stare decisis. 

On the latter topic, which concerns the weight that ought to be given to prior cases when judging new ones before the court, Thomas said that deciding cases based solely on past judgments that were inherently flawed stands against reason — a view that undergirded the Supreme Court’s 2022 reversal of the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in which Thomas joined a 6-3 conservative majority.

“I do give respect to precedent,” he said. “But the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition in our country and our laws and be based on something,” he added, rather than on a framework that someone devised on their own “and others went along with.” 

The importance Thomas places on basing opinions on what he called “solid ground” also informs his approach to teaching law students. For several years he co-taught a course on constitutional history at George Washington University’s law school, until the course was discontinued amid the backlash of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe. He now co-teaches a similar course at Catholic University.

“When I was in law school, one of the things that I did not appreciate, did not like, was it seemed like most of the professors were too important to actually care about students,” Thomas recalled of his law studies at Yale.

“Also, there were things that made no sense to me in law school. It was as though you were told what to think, and you regurgitated it on exams, and you were not encouraged to do the work and take it through and arrive at your own views about that,” he said. In contrast, he said, his course aims to make his students equal partners in digging into the facts of whatever the dispute was that triggered the case in the first place.

In the course of these law-focused discussions, however, Thomas, who has sat on the court for nearly 34 years, repeatedly harkened to the lessons he learned from “my nuns” at St. Benedict the Moor Grammar School in Savannah and the maternal grandparents who raised him and his brother beginning in 1955, sharing memories he has recounted previously in his best-selling memoir and in the 2020 PBS documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.

The religious sisters who educated him could be harsh and demanding, but that was because, as he later came to appreciate, they believed that high academic achievement was the only sure path out of the poverty and racism that threatened to choke off their futures, he said. 

At the same time, however, “The nuns were the backbone of our religious world,” Thomas emphasized. “They were the ones who just shielded us, who made sure we did not ingest the nonsense that we were somehow inferior.” 

Thomas, who converted to Catholicism in his youth, went on to spend a year at Conception Abbey Seminary in Missouri, but left after witnessing a fellow seminarian make disparaging comments about Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated in 1968 while Thomas was studying for the priesthood.

Thomas went on to enroll in the Jesuit-run College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he embraced the Black Power movement. As he recounts in the PBS documentary: “And for the first time in my life racism and race explained everything. It became, sort of, the substitute religion; I shoved aside Catholicism, and now it was this; it was all about race."

Thomas told his Catholic University audience that his path back to the Catholic Church began with daily stops at a parish in Hyattsville, Maryland, where he developed the routine of saying a simple prayer to start his day.

Thomas said one of the chief lessons he learned from his grandparents (his grandfather was Catholic; his grandmother was Baptist) was gratitude. Even when they were sitting down to a dinner of “chicken feed,” he recalled, they made a point to thank God for what they had.

“People love to sort of talk about the way some of us grew up as though we’re like victims of something, that we’re debilitated,” Thomas said. “What I get from it is the gratitude for all the people, all the good things that allow you to start [in] a certain place and to go through it and come out on the other side.”

It was these insights into Thomas’ upbringing and personal struggles that resonated most with event attendees Cecily Hudson and Chloe Cabrera, both first-year law students.

“Coming into this, I don’t want to say I didn’t have a positive impression of him, but we certainly have views that don’t align. And I feel like I do have a different view on him as a person, knowing what he went through and how he grew up, and especially the impact religion had on him personally,” observed Hudson, 21, of Silver Springs, Maryland.

“When you’re a law student, you only see the name at the start of the opinion. You don’t get to see how their opinions are formed by their own life experiences,” she added. “And I feel like that was so interesting: to hear him talk about the reasons he does certain things.”

Cabrera, 29, of San Diego, said one of her chief takeaways from the talk was hearing about Thomas’ “attitude of gratitude.”

“It’s a testament to how he got to where he’s at, along with his faith,” she said, adding that she hopes those same principles will guide her own legal career.