We noted last week that if she is confirmed by the Senate, Judge Sonia Sotomayor will become the sixth Catholic on the Supreme Court. Martin E. Marty, the great historian of religion at the University of Chicago, has seized the opportunity presented by her nomination to search for evidence of a lingering anti-Catholic bias among mainline Protestants and Evangelicals – and come away mostly empty-handed.

“Mainline Protestants turned ‘ecumenical’ two-score years ago, as they and most Catholics became buddies,” Marty writes in Sightings, the regular e-mail dispatch produced by the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago. “Evangelical Protestants, who decades ago called the Pope the Antichrist foretold in the Book of Revelation, now link with his successors on selected social issues which are in contention.”

He does allow as how he’s seen some anti-Catholic invective in the comments sections that follow blog posts about Sotomayor’s nomination – but he is unimpressed.

“What strikes me is how unrepresentative the self-named angry Christians in the string of commentators are, if measured against the wider church bodies and leadership,” he writes. “Some simple, raw, old-fashioned anti-Catholicism is present, but it has to share space with Catholics who argue how Catholic someone has to be to be Catholic, and all the rest.

“At the end, such blogs give us a license to yawn when the Catholic defense people rise to complain and rage about anti-Catholicism. We have instead important things to discuss. One hopes they can be argued amid the noisy and predictable debate this season.”