Notre Dame awards religious liberty prize to Becket Fund for Supreme Court wins

Notre Dame Law School awarded its 2026 Prize for Religious Liberty to the Becket Fund — a nonprofit law firm that has secured 13 Supreme Court victories in the past 15 years defending the First Amendment’s religious liberty protections.

“We’re deeply honored to be recognized with the religious liberty prize,” Becket President and CEO Mark Rienzi told EWTN News.

“We’re honored to be able to be part of fighting to protect something that is very important for our country and the Church,” said Reinzi, who accepted the award at the July 8 conclusion of Notre Dame’s sixth annual Religious Liberty Summit in Chicago.

Becket — established in 1994 to provide cost-free legal counsel to those whose religious liberties were violated — has an undefeated record at the Supreme Court.

Its lawyers represented the Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby against contraception mandates, defended the rights of Maryland parents to opt their children out of gender-related coursework that conflicted with their religious beliefs, and backed a Catholic foster care agency that only placed children with opposite-sex married couples.

G. Marcus Cole, a dean and professor of law at Notre Dame, said during the award ceremony that when the university started giving out the award, “we always imagined that it would go to one person.”

“But when we think about the Becket Fund, it is an entire team of lawyers, led by Mark Rienzi, who have made a difference in our world, who have made our lives better,” he said. “And for that reason, we thought it only appropriate to give the award to the Becket Fund as an entity.”

Ongoing fights for religious liberty

The most recent victory secured by Becket came in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which ensured parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, had a right to opt their children out of coursework that included material related to gender that conflicted with their religious faith.

Rienzi told EWTN News that “parents don’t give up the right to [raise] their children when they drop their kids off at the schoolhouse gates.” He added: “Your children don’t belong to the state just because you use a public school.”

Becket represented Catholic, Ethiopian Orthodox, and Muslim parents in the lawsuit. Rienzi said religious parents have a right to “operate equally as a full citizen and full member of the public” by utilizing the public school system while maintaining the right to instill religious values in their children.

“[This was] the most important case in at least 50 or 100 years in establishing that principle,” he said.

Becket also secured the 2020 victory for the Little Sisters of the Poor in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of federal regulations that exempted the religious sisters from mandatory contraception coverage in insurance plans.

The sisters, however, are back in court after the governments of Pennsylvania and New Jersey challenged those exemptions on separate grounds than those on which the court previously ruled. This case is now in an appellate court, which heard oral arguments on July 7. Becket is representing them again and Rienzi is the lead attorney on the case.

“It’s outrageous that governments keep volunteering for the beating they get when they keep [going after] the Little Sisters of the Poor,” Rienzi said.

He said “the law is really, really clear” that Pennsylvania cannot remove their exemptions from the mandate.

Becket is also representing a coalition of Catholic preschools in Colorado that is suing the state because they were excluded from a “universal” tuition program. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.

Notre Dame awarded Becket the prize less than one week after Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which culminated in the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which secured religious freedom.

“God created everybody equal and equally free and gave them rights,” Rienzi said, adding that religious freedom is “essential to the declaration’s idea of who we are as a country and … [it] is crucial for maintaining it.”

“It’s a shame that you still have to fight about it,” Rienzi said. “But on the other hand, it’s worth fighting for.”

Source: https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/notre-dame-awards-becket-religious-liberty-prize