Supreme Commitment Faith and Family

Supreme Commitment to Faith & Family

The remarkable story behind the story of Amy Coney Barrett's appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States

BY CHRISTIAN BAUTISTA ’06

As Blue Jays eagerly streamed into unairconditioned halls for the start of school in the fall of 1962, there was no denying that change was in the air. In the first few weeks of the school year, President John F. Kennedy declared that “we choose to go to the moon,” the Cuban missile crisis threatened to heat up the Cold War, and The Jetsons premiered on ABC.

Amidst the shifting of these sociocultural tectonic plates, a young Michael Coney walked into Homeroom 4B his senior year at Jesuit High School without an inkling that his life would one day be changed by another, less well-remembered political event: the recent appointment of Byron White to the Supreme Court of the United States. Some 58 years later—after White would be replaced by Ruth Bader Ginsberg—Coney’s firstborn daughter, Amy Coney Barrett, would ascend to that very seat in the highest court in the land. This story, to be sure, is one of neither chance nor fate; rather, this is the story of the 58 intervening years during which radical commitments to faith and family made room for Providence to act in the world.

Mike Coney's Senior Photo

DEAR BLUE JAY

Michael Coney began his tenure as a Jesuit student after attending St. Agnes School on Jefferson Highway. “I took the entrance test with one of my cousins,” recalls Coney. “I came home a few weeks later, and my mom told me: here’s the letter! Dear Blue Jay!” Though he recalls being coerced into taking the test by his mother and even unsure as a 13-year-old about the decision to accept his admission offer, he ultimately heeded her advice: “It was the absolute right decision. I didn’t look back after that. It was absolutely wonderful.”

Coney remembers upper-level math classes with Richard Tonry, and he reminisces about reading a different book every week in one of his English classes taught by John Rice. He also looks back on Ernest Jacques, S.J., as a significant influence on him as a student. “I learned how to think. I learned how to judge. I learned how to test my own skills, and I learned to have confidence in myself,” he reflects.

Outside the classroom, a number of home-life circumstances substantially contributed to Coney’s high school experience. “Because my parents were divorced, I didn’t get the chance to do a lot of extracurriculars because I had to work. I worked on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at a hardware store—South Claiborne Hardware right at Claiborne and Napoleon.” He did manage to make time to join the track team and participate in Sodality.

Coney and fellow altar servers in the Chapel of the North American Martyrs

His later years at Jesuit were especially marked by personal crises. “My parents divorced, and my mother died when I was at work one day—all within those five years. Being around the Jesuits helped me to put all those things in perspective. It helped me to consider, ‘What is life really all about? What’s the real meaning of life? What really matters in life?’ It helped me to form my own vision of what I wanted to get out of life.”

This spiritual and intellectual foundation that formed in response to grappling with these questions would become a critical part of Coney’s professional and personal life. Through his high school years, Coney’s Jesuit education had prepared him to search for the Holy Spirit acting in the world, alive even in life’s most profound struggles.

THE NOVITIATE

After graduation, Coney was so inspired by his interaction with the Society of Jesus that he elected to enter the Jesuit novitiate, which, despite his decision to leave a yearand-a-half later—before taking his vows—went on to inform the rest of his life. His discernment process was influenced by his encounters with Jesuits during his high school years, but two pastoral acts by members of the order stuck out in his memory.

The first was the unconditional acceptance that his recently divorced mother received from the Jesuits at Immaculate Conception Church on Baronne Street, where he was an altar server. Coney remembers that though she was estranged from her own parish because of her divorce, “she used to go to Mass on Baronne Street almost every lunchtime. She would go to confession to the priests there who encouraged her to continue receiving the sacraments. It was a tremendous load off her shoulders at the time.” While the Jesuits would have been seen as breaking step with common practice at the time, neither orthodoxy nor dogma has ever indicated that divorced parishioners should be refused access to the sacraments.

In decades past, Jesuit yearbooks were funded, in part, by “sponsorships” from homerooms. Pictured above are Blue Jays from the Class of 1963 in Michael Coney’s senior homeroom, 4B. Coney himself is standing, 4th from the left in the back row.

The Coney Family

The second was a more dramatic act of ministry by the Jesuits upon his mother’s death. Because she was a divorcee, her parish priest was not present at her wake, but the Jesuits showed up in droves: “All of the Jesuits were there. That was like, ‘wow,’” Coney whispers breathlessly, thinking back to the impressive occasion.

The priests and scholastics who showed up for his family that day left an indelible mark on the 17-year-old Blue Jay. Together with his experiences in the novitiate, the compassion shown to him by the Jesuits in his time of need made a lasting impact on his character.

Perhaps at first implicitly but later explicitly, he began to recognize the Spirit as the Paraclete—the Comforter, the Consoler—who animated the choices and actions of the Jesuits who ministered to him and his family. As he left the novitiate for the outside world, he carried with him a growing commitment to living out God’s plan for him in his personal and professional life.

A NEW FAMILY BEGINS

Coney subsequently moved on to the University of New Orleans, where he studied History and met his wife, Linda Vath, a Dominican High School graduate who majored in French and English at UNO. They were married as Michael began law school at Loyola University of New Orleans, and Linda began teaching in a local high school including then all-male East Jefferson High School.

“I had no idea it was a bad idea to get married a week before your final exams in the first year of law school,” Michael muses, laughing. “In fact, I think I cut the last week of classes before exams for our honeymoon.”

Linda remembers being told by a doctor that he expected the couple would be unable to conceive a child, and that they should, “Go home and pray.” Pray they did, and soon thereafter, their first daughter, Amy, was born in January of Michael’s last year at Loyola. Until that point, Linda’s teaching career had supported the couple, but they would then resort to Michael’s part-time job and any hours of work Linda could manage to make ends meet for the last semester of Michael’s law degree.

“I started work the day after law school graduation, but from January to May we lived hand to mouth,” Michael says severely. This period during which the Coneys were a young couple exiting graduate school with a new child might seem daunting, but both Michael and Linda recall no hesitations.

“We just put our faith in each other and in the Lord,” Michael remembers confidently, emboldened after his previous experiences with God acting in his life as a young man. “We were completely open to having children from the time we were married. I figured, ‘If I have to, I’ll just go to night school.’”

Linda adds, “We both wanted children. We just agreed. We didn’t even need to talk about it that much: we simply thought the same way.” Linda’s conviction masked a complicated reality. As was common social propriety in the area in the 1960s, she was virtually forced out of her teaching career when she became pregnant with Amy. Even as she endured this regressive norm, she remained open to God working in her life, and it is now undeniable that her role as a mother is built, in large part, upon her training and experience as an educator. Their growing family would soon benefit immensely from the clarity and equanimity Linda brought to the table as an experienced classroom teacher.

GROWING IN NUMBER & IN FAITH

As the Coneys turned to faith in each other and faith in God to get them through their early months as parents, Michael began clerking for Judge James Comiskey of the Jesuit Class of 1945. He would go on to complete a master's degree in law at Louisiana State University, where he and Linda became connected to the charismatic Catholic community.

Within a couple of years, Amy would no longer be an only-child—and, soon thereafter, far from it. She would, in fact, become the oldest of seven children.

Though Michael is one of three siblings, Linda, as one of six children and the 25th grandchild on her father’s side, was more than prepared to have a large family. “It’s fantastic—” Michael comments as Linda follows up with, “It’s fun. You have to work at relationships with them, but when they get old enough to keep up their own relationships with each other, it’s really nice.” As their children grew up, the Coneys emphasized structure, discipline, responsibility, but, above all, unconditional love and a commitment to God.

Linda relates the experience of balancing nine personalities under a single roof: “It starts when they’re little. We always worked on their relationships with each other. We had six girls—jealousy was sometimes a big thing. Their relationships were sometimes strained like any kids’, but whenever they were at odds about something, we made them tell the story, apologize, and ask for forgiveness. Always. It just had to happen, every time. It was an established pattern, not necessarily something they understood or agreed with, but it became a habit.”

Family dinners were sacrosanct, and throughout the year, family events such as vacations took precedence over everything else. Michael remembers a time when his son, Michael Coney ’04, earned a coveted spot on a playground baseball all-star team with mandatory games and practices that interfered with one such vacation. The Coneys didn’t think twice about offering to forfeit the spot on the team’s roster, but the understanding coach relented in recognition of the importance of their family time.

The Coneys talk about their children as individuals, each of whom needed and need an authentic, special relationship with them as parents. As Linda describes it, “We would always tell them, ‘We’ll never treat you all the same.’ We would do the best we could according to what each one needed.”

“If you’re not intentional about it, kids can just kind of grow up without being formed,” says Linda. Michael adds, “We would talk about our children and set specific formational goals for each of them.”

The Coneys grew in faith not only through their experiences of coming to know God through their children but through an unexpected sacrament: Holy Orders. Michael and Linda discerned a vocation to the diaconate—the Coneys describe it as a shared calling—that came after he was baptized in the spirit in the charismatic renewal. After this retreat, Michael gained an unquenchable desire to consume spiritual texts and content. At the time, they had two children, but during and after the discernment process, they had five more. Today, parishioners at St. Catherine of Siena Parish know him affectionately as Deacon Mike.

Their adult children now reside in Indiana, South Carolina, Washington State, and New Orleans, but, as a family, they are as close as ever. Mike explains, “We decided it was worth investing our time and our money to help our children to maintain their relationships with one another. For instance, we’ve been doing a family vacation for many years for which we’ve said, ‘We’ll pay for the place, you get yourself there.’” His children have followed in his footsteps, learning to create a robust familysupport structure. “We’ve set up a sort of family fund. For those of our children who have become more established in their lives, we let them know they can contribute to that to help each other out to make things like family vacations happen. It’s the family taking care of the family.”

Michael’s trying high school family circumstances, his formational experiences with the Jesuits, and his experiences with God leading him through challenging times as a young man would come to fruition in Michael’s roles as a deacon, a father, and a lawyer. He could clearly see the Holy Spirit moving in every aspect of his life. When offered a major promotion to move to Houston for Shell, his employer at the time, his diaconate commitments and seven children led him to resign his position after extended prayer. Shell, however, responded by rehiring him and keeping him assigned to New Orleans. This series of events meant that Michael’s youngest child and only son, Michael, would one day go on to attend Jesuit himself, learning not only many of the same lessons as his father but also lessons alongside his father:

Both Linda and I were always very active outside of our home, and, when I look back at it, it’s kind of stunning how the Lord provided for us. Our children weren’t any worse for it, and, in fact, I know that they were better for it. At Michael’s rehearsal dinner, he spoke about how moved he was by going with me to do pro bono work with kids at juvenile court: bringing them Christmas presents, seeing the conditions that some of them lived in, going with me to bring communion to someone, or being with the sick. He was really moved. I didn’t even realize at the time, but I wanted him to see that there was another aspect to life, and he really did see it.

The same events also meant that the Coneys’ six girls would be able to attend Linda’s alma mater, Dominican High School, where Amy would receive an education that would—as Michael’s own Jesuit education once did—serve as a foundation of something great.

THE SUPREME COURT

“Amy was a voracious reader since the time she was little,” Linda says, smiling. “She would read like 60 books in the summer.”

Michael jumps in, “She had glimmers of her current sharpness as a kid”—Linda interjects endearingly with, “she gets that from Mike”— “and she has honed all of that in her law practice and her teaching. She really is a crackerjack thinker.”

Mary Favalora, a longtime counsellor at Jesuit High School and Amy’s classmate at Dominican, recalls, “Amy was an excellent student, and she was full of school spirit.” Favalora continues, “Our class benefitted greatly from her leadership, creativity and hard work. She was someone who was very approachable and kind to everyone. To see her reach such incredible heights—not only as a loving wife and mother, successful attorney, and law professor, but now as a Supreme Court Justice—is amazing.”

While there have been countless words written about Honorable Amy Coney Barrett’s ascent to the Supreme Court of the United States, few of them have highlighted the Providential connection from her father as an eager Jesuit senior in 1962 to her lifetime appointment as the newest Supreme Court justice. Fewer of them still have pointed out that the Coneys are perhaps just as proud of their children for coming together to support Amy over the past six months as they are for her lofty achievement itself.

Linda describes their perspective, saying, “I was just very proud of her siblings for supporting her in the way that they did. I was proud of her and all of her family. I felt very loved by the Lord.” Michael picks up, “I’m glad that Amy’s getting to use her talents. We’re really very proud of her, but I was even more moved by them supporting each other. It shows that they have their heads on straight. Thinking of our life raising seven children all of whom we’re so proud of, I see how wonderfully blessed we’ve been by the Lord.”

He anchors her accomplishments in faith and family, emphasizing, “I was moved because even though there’s a lot of prestige in her job, all of it is, in some sense, a passing thing. It’s another job. But it’s really more important to understand what your life is all about. It’s more important to understand where you’re going and what you want to do with your life and your family.”

Linda adds, “She didn’t take the job for any glamor that might come with it. That was even a deterrent. She took it because she and her husband prayed about it separately and then together and that it was what God wanted them to do.”

“It’s strange to realize that she’ll soon have opinions that will be the law of the land,” laughs Michael knowingly. “It has helped me to realize that all of our political leaders put their pants on one leg at a time like I do. They’re people like you and me, and that’s just a job they’re doing or a service they’re performing.”

The young Blue Jay who hesitantly put on his khaki uniform—one leg at a time—in 1959 could have never known that his experiences in those halls would have made this story possible, but as a grandfather of 32 grandchildren, Michael looks back and says, “I think about it now and see how good the Lord has been to me and my family.”

Confident that God will continue to provide through the best and worst of times, he is just as excited about the next chapter in the story: his grandson, Jesuit freshman Joseph Edwards, now walks the very same halls.

“I’ve always looked up to him, and he’s always been a role model for me—he’s a big reason that I decided to come to Jesuit,” Joseph says of his grandfather. Recognizing Jesuit as a thread that connects his own story to his grandfather’s, he reflects, “I know that I still have so much to learn about my faith and about myself, and I know that my experiences at Jesuit are leading me down that path of becoming a man of faith like him.”