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Clarence Thomas's parents were not very responsible people and probably were not practicing Catholics. He was originally brought up by his drug-addicted mother in a rural shack without plumbing. His father probably scooted before Clarence knew him. It was Clarence's maternal grandparents in Savannah who stepped in when he was quite young, took him to Savannah, and enrolled him in a school for black children run by Franciscan nuns. In later life, Clarence Thomas always invited the surviving nuns to his swearing-in ceremonies even when he was not Catholic and he always attributed every success to those nuns and to his grandparents. His grandfather was an independent businessman selling fuel and ice and influenced Clarence not only as to faith but also as to capitalism and the need not to be dependent on government.

Clarence entered a minor seminary and studied for the priesthood at a high school level. He left the seminary and the Catholic Faith over racism at the seminary directed at Martin Luther King, Jr. For a time he was a student radical at Holy Cross and then at Yale Law School, married a black Muslim woman who bore his only child, worked with Slick Willy and Hildebeast at New Haven Legal Aid as a Yale Law student, then took a job under then Missouri Attorney General John Danforth who mentored him to Executive Director of EEOC, DC Circuit Court of Appeals and then the SCOTUS. In the process, Clarence became quite conservative, was divorced from his Muslim wife, joined Truro Episcopalian Church in the VA suburbs, and met and married his current wife. After a quite bloody confirmation process, he took his seat on SCOTUS. A few years later, he returned to the Roman Catholic Church.

Of interest, when Clarence was a small child, he was brought up by his mother to speak only Gullah, a slave language still used in some rural black communities as their only language and he has said that English is truly his second language, that he asks few questions from the bench because, inter alia, he is still somewhat uncomfortable with English.