was appointed chief justice in 1836 by Andrew Jackson. The second, Edward Douglass White, was appointed as an associate justice in 1894, but also went on to become chief justice. Joseph McKenna was appointed in 1898, placing two Catholics on the court until White's death in 1921. This period marked the beginning of an inconsistently observed "tradition" of having a "Catholic seat" on the court. Other Catholic justices included Pierce Butler (appointed 1923) and Frank Murphy (appointed 1940). Sherman Minton, appointed in 1949, was a Protestant during his time on the court. To some, however, his wife's Catholic faith implied a "Catholic seat". Minton joined his wife's church in 1961, five years after he retired from the court. Minton was succeeded by a Catholic, however, when President Eisenhower appointed William J. Brennan to that seat. Eisenhower sought a Catholic to appoint to the court—in part because there had been no Catholic justice since Murphy's death in 1949, and in part because Eisenhower was directly lobbied by Francis Cardinal Spellman of the Archdiocese of New York to make such an appointment. Brennan was then the lone Catholic justice until the appointment of Antonin Scalia in 1986, and Anthony Kennedy in 1988. Like Sherman Minton, Clarence Thomas was not a Catholic at the time he was appointed to the court. Thomas was raised Catholic and briefly attended Conception Seminary College, a Catholic seminary, but had joined the Protestant denomination of his wife after their marriage. At some point in the late 1990s, Thomas returned to Catholicism. In 2005, John Roberts became the third Catholic Chief Justice and the fourth Catholic on the court. Shortly thereafter, Samuel Alito became the fifth on the court, and the eleventh in the history of the court. Alito's appointment gave the court a Catholic majority for the first time in its history. Besides Thomas, at least one other Justice, James F. Byrnes, was raised as a Catholic, but converted to a different branch of Christianity prior to serving on the court. In contrast to historical patterns, the court has gone from having a "Catholic seat" to being what some have characterized as a "Catholic court". The reasons for that are subject to debate. The fact that most recent Catholic appointees were also ideologically conservative has led some partisan critics to derisively refer to the court as "a Catholic boys club". However in May 2009, President Barack Obama