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Justice Alito’s Royalist Cosplay

Photo: Fred Schilling/Supreme Court of the United States/Reuters

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 requisite oath: “We declare and promise to Almighty God, to Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, the maternal protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the powerful intercession of Saint George the Martyr, to observe as true soldiers of Christ everything that is asked and recommended of us.” He then added a Savoy-blue wool cape (made by the pope’s tailor and retailing for a starting price of 940 euros) and a large blingy jeweled cross insignia (retail 322 euros) to his wardrobe of black vestments.

The order’s grand prefect, Her Royal Highness Princess Béatrice of Bourbon–Two Sicilies, attended the ceremony. Béatrice is divorced from a Napoléon, and their son happens to be pretender to the imperial throne of France.

Members of the Constantinian Order’s American delegation were also at the investiture. They are Trumpy. The U.S. delegate is John Viola, then-president of the National Italian American Foundation. Viola is the son of billionaire Vincent (“Vinnie”) Viola, a Constantinian knight and the owner of the 2024 Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers. The elder Viola was Trump’s initial nominee for secretary of the Army, but he withdrew rather than submit to Pentagon rules about his business practices (he also was discovered to have punched a concessions worker in the face at a horse auction).

Other American members of the order include Michael La Civita, vice-president of the Catholic Media Association and brother of Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita, and Anita McBride, Laura Bush’s former chief of staff, who was invested as a dame of the Constantinian Order at the same ceremony where Alito got his cape.

Prince Carlo of Bourbon–Two Sicilies, grand master of the Constantinian Order, is a founding patron of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, a Vatican-connected think tank that Bannon tried to turn into an “Academy for the Judeo-Christian West” in a former Carthusian monastery outside Rome.

Bourbon–Two Sicilies followers in Southern Italy have formed a “neo-Bourbon” movement, advocating for the family to regain power over its ancestral kingdom. These modern-day monarchists advocate the return of Naples and Sicily to the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, the monarchy overthrown when Italy was unified in the 1800s.

On this side of the Atlantic, American neo-Bourbonists advocate for this cause on a badly edited blog, Il Regno (“the kingdom”). “For those of us who are traditionally minded, the Bourbons of Naples are anything but a footnote in history, they are a symbol of authority, sovereignty and justice,” one of them wrote on Il Regno in 2019. “They represent a possible future in the face of the present crises that threatens [sic] the remnants of our moribund civilization. A return to traditional religious and aristocratic principles, embodied by There [sic] Sicilian Majesties, will be our foundation to confront globalism and the unholy secular worldview currently plaguing our society with wanton materialism and widespread apathy.”

The Bourbon–Two Sicilies are not exactly leaders in the fight against wanton materialism. They hobnob with celebrities and hereditary aristocrats at all the fleshpots of Europe and flash their lifestyle on Instagram posts from Monaco, Paris, Rome, and St. Tropez.

The family has also been embroiled in a variety of tabloid-attracting scandals involving cash, art, and weapons. They have been photographed with Trump and with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. They have been defending themselves in court in the Bailiwick of Jersey, a British tax-shelter island, over moneys and art allegedly stashed offshore. Prince Carlo knighted the president of the island of Mauritius around the time the Jersey court publicly accused the family of trying to transfer the trust dispute to the Mauritius courts. Another tropical recipient of Bourbon–Two Sicilies knighthood is Roosevelt Skerrit, the longtime prime minister of Dominica, who has denied accusations of corruption involving passport selling and slush funds.

The list of Constantinian knights and dames includes cardinals and bishops, rightist politicians like Brexiteer Ann Widdecombe and Italian Alberto Lembo, and dozens of obscure European aristocrats such as Princess Philomena, Countess of Paris; Jean-Christophe, Prince Napoléon; Jean, Count of Paris (head of the House of Orléans); Princess Marie-Therese von Hohenberg, great-granddaughter of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary; and Prince Laurent of Belgium.

Prince Carlo’s wife, Camilla, president of Influencer Awards Monaco, among other philanthropic and society positions, was embroiled in a long-running inheritance feud with her family. Her father, Camillo Crociani, was president of the Italian weapons-manufacturing giant Finmeccanica but fled an arrest warrant to Mexico in the 1970s under investigation in a Lockheed bribery case. He managed to maintain control of a different weapons company, which Camilla and her mother inherited and recently sold for $200 million to the now-renamed weapons company her father once ran.

During this family feud, Camilla of Bourbon–Two Sicilies and her mother were accused of moving seven pieces from the family’s art collection to a storage facility in Miami. The artwork was shipped in November 2017 — a few weeks after Alito was knighted. A Jersey court later held them in contempt for concealing assets. While in Miami, the Bourbon–Two Sicilies family paid a visit to then-President Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

In 2020, Camilla “narrowly avoided” jail in Jersey after a court ruled she had hidden a $66 million Gauguin and fined her $2 million euros. In September, she put a Van Gogh up for auction in Hong Kong at a price that shattered previous records for western art in Asia.

Bourbon–Two Sicilies supporters are monarchists with a history of links to the American right going back to the Confederacy. Some of their supporters even fought for the South in the Civil War, finding common cause with the slavers whose way of life the North was destroying. The alliance is so strong that some neo-Bourbons fly the Confederate flag, sharing with the American South the grievance of having lost to the northern powers. One of the movement leaders wears a Confederate-flag pin on his lapel alongside the Bourbon–Two Sicilies flag.

The Constantinian Order and its knights are tied politically to this neo-Bourbon monarchist movement in Southern Italy, according to historian Enrico Dal Lago, because it is headed by the current heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies. “The Bourbonist movement is doing some extreme revisionism about what happened at the time of Italian unification,” Dal Lago said. “It claims Italy was unified against not just the will of the Naples kings but of the Catholic Church, and that unification robbed the pope and the southern kings.”

The Constantinian order and its religio-politics have an “enormous influence” on people of Southern Italian ancestry living in the United States, Dal Lago said. Alito’s father was from Calabria, and his grandparents were from Basilicata, two regions with a strong legacy of pro-Bourbonism. Dal Lago speculated that the familial connection “was probably an unofficial reason for him being selected” for the knighthood.

Some legal experts think the knighthood may violate the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause, which forbids federal officeholders from accepting foreign gifts, money, or titles without congressional approval. “A Supreme Court justice should not accept a knighthood, let alone from a far-right, monarchical, foreign religious-military order,” said Alex Aronson, executive director of Court Accountability. “The fact that Samuel Alito accepted such a knighthood, which very well might violate the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, is further evidence of his contempt for the American people and our Constitution.”

Justice Alito did not respond to emails or calls for comment.

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