It has been a while since an appellate-court nomination generated as much noise as last week’s hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, a law professor at Notre Dame and a nominee to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. During the hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, pressed Ms. Barrett, who is a devout Catholic, on the relationship between faith and judicial duty, which the professor had once addressed in a law review article. In that piece, she argued that there may be occasions, such as in death penalty cases, where a judge might have to recuse herself because of a conflict between her religious beliefs and her responsibilities as a judge.

Senator Feinstein asked Ms. Barrett about her views, and then made the following statement: “Whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country.” Other Democratic senators also expressed similar ideas in their own questions and statements.

The reaction was swift and ruthless. Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School called on the senator to apologize because the “thrust of Feinstein’s questioning was that, as a believing Catholic, Barrett couldn’t be trusted to apply the Constitution and laws objectively.” Other commentators, such as Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton, argued that Ms. Feinstein’s comments amounted to a religious test for office.

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