Supreme Court says Wis. can’t deny Catholic charity’s tax exemption

June 6, 2025

The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that Wisconsin officials cannot deny a religious tax exemption to a Catholic charity even though its services were deemed non-religious.

The Christian Post reports that the Supreme Court released a decision Thursday morning in the case of Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor Review Commission et al.

The case centered on whether or not a Christian charity group can be exempted from an unemployment insurance program even if state officials think the group’s work is too secular.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the unanimous opinion, reversing a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision and sending the case back to a lower court for further deliberation.

In the decision, Sotomayor wrote, “When the government distinguishes among religions based on theological differences in their provision of services, it imposes a denominational preference that must satisfy the highest level of judicial scrutiny.”

Justice Sotomayor added that any, “law that differentiates between religions along theological lines is textbook denominational discrimination” and that “differentiation on theological lines is fundamentally foreign to our constitutional order.”

According to the Christian Post, Sotomayor noted that the initial rejection of the Catholic charity’s exemption request was due to the belief of state officials that the lack of explicit religious activity at their charitable services made them nonreligious in nature.

The Catholic Charities Bureau had asked the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (WDWD) in 2016 for a religious exemption from paying into the state’s unemployment insurance program.

That agency denied the request, saying that Catholic Charities was not primarily religious in nature and the charity appealed to an administrative law judge who reversed the earlier ruling.

The WDWD later petitioned the Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission which also ruled against Catholic Charities, arguing that they did not qualify for a religious exemption.

The case ended up before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which ruled 4-3 in March 2024 that Catholic Charities did not fit the definition of a religious entity and was not eligible for the religious exemption.

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