898
Souter, J., dissenting
services in question did not "supplant the remedial instruction and guidance counseling already provided in New York City's sectarian schools." 521 U. S., at 229.
Finally, we have recognized what is obvious (however imprecise), in holding "substantial" amounts of aid to be unconstitutional whether or not a plaintiff can show that it supplants a specific item of expense a religious school would have borne.18 In Meek, 421 U. S., at 366, we invalidated the loan of instructional materials to religious schools because "faced with the substantial amounts of direct support authorized by [the program], it would simply ignore reality to attempt to separate secular educational functions from the predominantly religious role performed by many of Pennsylvania's church-related elementary and secondary schools and then characterize [the program] as channeling aid to the secular without providing direct aid to the sectarian." Id., at 365. See id., at 366 ("Substantial aid to the educational function of such schools . . . necessarily results in aid to the sectarian school enterprise as a whole"); see also Nyquist, 413 U. S., at 783; Wolman, 433 U. S., at 250-251. In Witters, 474 U. S., at 488, the Court asked whether the aid in question was a direct subsidy to religious schools and addressed the substantiality of the aid obliquely in noting that "nothing in the record indicates that . . . any significant portion of the
18 I do not read the plurality to question the prohibition on substantial aid. The plurality challenges any rule based on the proportion of aid that a program provides to religious recipients, citing Witters and Agostini. See ante, at 812, n. 6. I reject the plurality's reasoning. The plurality misreads Witters; Justice Marshall, writing for the Court in Witters, emphasized that only a small amount of aid was provided to religious institutions, 474 U. S., at 488, and no controlling majority rejected the importance of this fact. The plurality also overreads Agostini, supra, at 229, which simply declined to adopt a rule based on proportionality. Moreover, regardless of whether the proportion of aid actually provided to religious schools is relevant, we have never questioned our holding in Meek that substantial aid to religious schools is prohibited.
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