Even when it’s not Halloween, a certain breed of religious traditionalist longs for the days when men donned capes and cloaks decorated with symbolic sashes and ribbons, got knighted, laid holy swords in caskets lined with red velvet, and pledged oaths to monarchs and popes. Conservative lobbyist and court-packer Leonard Leo belongs to the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta, a Catholic lay order that dates to the Crusades. The Opus Dei organization, best known for its super-kinky corporal-mortification rules, sent a priest wearing a spiked garter under his cassock to convert a swath of Republicans in Washington — a project that has proved quite successful.
It turns out the last time Donald Trump was president, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, author of the Dobbs decision setting women’s health care back a few centuries, added a knighthood to his own résumé, pledging an oath to the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George. The knighthood, bestowed in 2017, wasn’t widely reported at the time, but the order’s website was updated in July with Alito’s investiture on the front page.
Alito has long had vaguely medieval-cosplay tendencies. The New York Times reported recently on how, last month, he listed Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis in his delayed financial disclosure for giving him concert tickets worth $900. (According to the Times, the princess wants to get to know Justice Thomas better, too.) Princess Gloria was a wild child, dubbed “Princess TNT” by Vanity Fair back in her hard-partying days with Mick Jagger. In her 60s now, she has morphed to the right and become a Catholic crusader. When she’s not appearing at transatlantic anti-abortion events and other venues frequented by hard-right crusaders and their aristocratic admirers, she lives in a 500-room 12th-century palace that her pal Steve Bannon reportedly wanted to use for his gladiator school.
The Constantinian Order was founded in the 16th century but claims its origins to the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine and the beginning of the Christianization of pagan Rome. It is recognized by the Vatican, but the knighthoods are administered privately by the Bourbon–Two Sicilies family, descendants of the kings who ruled Southern Italy in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Princess TNT’s son, Albert, is a knight in another branch of the order.)
Alito, who referenced a 17th-century witch-hunter’s legal reasoning in his Dobbs decision, accepted the Knight Grand Cross of Merit, the highest rank available to non-nobles in the order, at a mass in St. Matthews Cathedral in Washington, D.C., in 2017. He pledged the........