892
Souter, J., dissenting
McNair, 413 U. S. 734, 745, n. 7 (1973) (noting approved aid is "no expenditure of public funds, either by grant or loan"); Wolman, 433 U. S., at 239, and n. 7 (noting that "statute does not authorize any payment to nonpublic school personnel for the costs of administering the tests"); Agostini, 521 U. S., at 228-229 (emphasizing that approved services are not "distributed 'directly to the religious schools.' . . . No Title I funds ever reach the coffers of religious schools, and Title I services may not be provided to religious schools on a school-wide basis" (citations omitted)); Bowen, 487 U. S., at 614-615; Rosenberger, 515 U. S., at 842 (noting that "we have recognized special Establishment Clause dangers where the government makes direct money payments to sectarian institutions"); cf. Lemon, 403 U. S., at 619-620 (noting that safeguards and accounting inspections required to prevent government funds from supporting religious education will cause impermissible entanglement); Roemer, 426 U. S., at 753-757 (approving segregated funds after finding recipients not pervasively religious); Ball, 473 U. S., at 392-393 (noting that "[w]ith but one exception, our subsequent cases have struck down attempts by States to make payments out of
contrary view would insist on drawing a constitutional distinction between paying the nonpublic school to do the grading and paying state employees or some independent service to perform that task, even though the grading function is the same regardless of who performs it and would not have the primary effect of aiding religion whether or not performed by nonpublic school personnel." Id., at 658. Aside from this isolated circumstance, where we found ironclad guarantees of nondiversion, we have never relaxed our prohibition on direct cash aid to pervasively religious schools, and have in fact continued to acknowledge the concern. See Agostini, 521 U. S., at 228-229; cf. Rosenberger, 515 U. S., at 842.
The plurality concedes this basic point. See ante, at 818-819. Given this, I find any suggestion that this prohibition has been undermined by Mueller or Witters without foundation. See ante, at 819-820, n. 8. Those cases involved entirely different types of aid, namely, tax deductions and individual scholarship aid for university education, see also n. 16, infra, and were followed by Rosenberger and Agostini, which continued to support this absolute restriction.
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