It is the United States Supreme Court which is the ultimate judge of the way in which the American system balances conflicting rights of its citizens and the government. The court has been a major player in defining the intentions of the founding fathers, expressed through the U.S. Constitution and related writings. In so doing, it has enormous power to shape daily lives in many areas. Religion has long been one of those areas.

In February 1997, the court heard opening arguments in a case called Boerne vs. St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church. The following presentation of the issues involved is taken from a radio report by Nina Totenberg, Legal Affairs Correspondent for National Public Radio.

This is MORNING EDITION. I'm Bob Edwards.

Today, the Supreme Court hears arguments in what may be the most important religious rights case of this century. At issue is the constitutionality of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act known by the acronym RIFRA.

RIFRA makes it illegal for any government anywhere in the country to take action which interferes with religion, unless the government can prove the action is justified.

Nina Totenberg reports:

The case to be argued today is much more than a test of religious rights; it's a test of power. Congressional versus judicial power, federal versus state power, and community rights versus religious rights.

If the Supreme Court strikes down (rules illegal) the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it could cast a constitutional cloud of doubt over almost every piece of civil rights legislation on the books.

Conversely, if the court upholds the act, it could be putting everything that state and local governments do under a religious microscope, and the decision could weaken the power of the court as the ultimate arbiter of what the Constitution means.

The stakes are clear to everyone involved. "This is the most important church-state case ever," says Baptist Minister Oliver Thomas, of the Nation Council of Churches, "because it will affect every single religious individual and organization in the country."

Indeed, it seems that the coalition supporting RIFRA includes just about every religious denomination in the country, from fundamentalist Christians to mainline Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Jews.

RIFRA was adopted (made national law) four years ago in response to a Supreme Court decision widely condemned as restricting religious faith. RIFRA requires government at every level to be more accommodating of religion than the Supreme Court had said was required by the Constitution.

Specifically, RIFRA states that government cannot burden religious practice unless it can show a compelling need, such as health or safety, and can show that it has used the least restrictive means. That may sound simple, but those are high legal standards to meet, and in the years since the law's enactment, hundreds of lawsuits have been filed by individuals and churches seeking exemptions under RIFRA from state and local laws.

Everything from zoning laws (controlling land use in cities), to anti-discrimination laws, to prison regulations have been challenged as a burden on the free exercise of religion.

Now finally, a case has reached the Supreme Court testing whether Congress exceeded its authority in adopting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The case pits the small Texas city of Boerne against one of its fastest growing churches, Saint Peter's Roman Catholic Church.

The church wanted to expand, but because it was located within an area designated for historic preservation, the city council refused to give permission. The church submitted a variety of plans that would have preserved the facade of the building, but the city still said no.

Finally, the church went to court charging that the city's refusal to grant a building permit for the expansion violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Father Tony Cummings is the priest at Saint Peter's: "The problem is that we have just a church that seats 230 people and we have a parish population of a thousand families, and we are unable to accommodate our parishioners for Sunday worship. We are presently using a gym (a local school sports facility) for our Sunday services."

But the city has stuck to its guns. Mayor Patrick Heath contends that the laws of the city must apply equally to everyone. "How can we require owners of other kinds of buildings to submit to the regulations, which are designed to maintain this community's sense of its architectural heritage, if the church does not have to do that?"

A federal district court agreed with the city and struck down RIFRA as unconstitutional, but an appeals court reversed (the district court decision), and the city appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court where the justices will hear arguments today.

The briefs in the case bespeak the powerful interests at stake (briefs are written arguments submitted to the justices -- the court allows other organizations with an interest in the issue to submit their own arguments.). On one side, defending RIFRA, is the religious world, the Clinton Administration, conservative and liberal members of Congress, a host of civil rights organizations and five states; including New York and California.

On the other side are the city of Boerne, sixteen states and historic preservation groups.

To understand the profound issues at stake, you need to go back to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment (to the U.S. Constitution) after the Civil War. The goal of those reconstruction-era constitutional amendments was to force the states, even if they didn't want to, to honor individual and civil rights (guaranteed in the Constitution) by giving the Congress, the national legislature, the power to enforce those rights.

Since then, Congress has often passed laws to provide more protection for individual rights than the Supreme Court said was required by the Constitution. Congress did just that in passing the Voting Rights Act, the Pregnancy Anti-discrimination Act, and a whole raft of other civil rights laws.

And just as Congress required compelling justifications for practices that even incidentally burdened one race or gender, when it passed RIFRA it required compelling justification for practices that even incidentally burdened religious faith.

Today in the Supreme Court, University of Texas Law Professor Douglas Laycock, representing Saint Peter's Church, will tell the justices that if RIFRA is unconstitutional, so too may be the whole framework of our modern civil rights law; a framework that has, heretofore, been repeatedly upheld by the court. "This would be a dramatic change in course," says Professor Laycock, "if the court were to say Congress cannot expand constitutional rights. You know, 130 years of law would be out the window."

But Marci Hamilton, representing the city of Boerne, will counter that RIFRA is no ordinary statute, but a constitutional amendment dressed up to look like a statute so it could be enacted without taking the difficult steps required for a constitutional amendment.

"This statute, so called statute, looks exactly like a constitutional amendment" says Hamilton. "It applies to every law enacted by every government in the United States. If RIFRA is good law, then we might as well put a moving walkway between the front door of the Supreme Court and Congress, and every time someone loses on a constitutional claim in the court, they can simply go to Congress to have it overturned. So we'll have no finality, and in fact, the court will become the most irrelevant branch (of the federal government)."

Hamilton will argue that RIFRA is different than other civil rights laws, because it elevates religion above everything else in society, and inextricably involves government with religion in violation of the Constitution.

"The problem here is the simultaneous elevation of every religious interest in the country. It looks exactly like the problem that the framers were most concerned about, and that is a union of the power between church and state," says Hamilton.

The church's lawyer, Douglas Laycock, responds that the church is entitled at least to be left alone: "The church is not entitled to go out and impose its will on everybody else, but it is entitled to practice its faith."

And then there's the debate over states rights (the constitutionally protected power of the states to make the laws which primarily affect citizens at the state and local levels). The Supreme Court has granted time to the state of Ohio, representing itself and fifteen other states, to argue that RIFRA tramples on the traditional function of state and local governments; and the prime example is prisons.

"What we find" says Betty Montgomery, the Attorney General of Ohio, "is that those prisoners who are not able to get what they want through the normal channels, have begun to rely upon this Religious Restoration Act to claim that they have a right to a certain kind of food, they have a right to a certain kind of clothing, they have a right to certain treatment which is outside the norm, and oftentime risks the security of the institution."

Montgomery cites a litany of horror stories. Prisoners who claim, for example, a religious right to distribute hate literature, or pornographic material, but she concedes that all of these claims have been thrown out by the courts, and RIFRA supporters note that new legislation enacted by Congress punishes prisoners with fines and added time in jail if they file frivolous lawsuits.

In the end, however, there's only one question before the Supreme Court today: Is the Religious Freedom Reformation Act constitutional? If the court says it is, everyone, even the church's Douglas Laycock, knows there will be hard cases to decide under RIFRA down the road. But, he contends, this case is easy. "We're at the very core of the First Amendment, the policy of the city of Boerne is that these people cannot attend Mass on Sunday morning, because it would rearrange the stonework (of the church). That is an absurd policy and it's at the very core of the free exercise of religion."

A decision in the case is expected in the summer (of 1997).