The employee retirement plans of religious-affiliatednonprofits are exempt from the protections and requirements ofthe federal pension law, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday.

The decision was a blow to multimillion-dollar class actions that seek tohold those plans liable for violating the federal law.

The high court, led by Justice Elena Kagan, rejected argumentsfrom plaintiffs firms that the Employee Retirement Income SecurityAct, known as ERISA, required a church to have originallyestablished a “church plan” in order to qualify for anexemption from the employee-retirement law.

“This is the kind of case where you have to stare at thestatutory language to understand why,” said Kagan, who read heropinion from the bench. In the end, however, it was “elementarylogic” that certain plans of church-affiliated nonprofits count as“church plans” even though not actually administered by a church,she said.

Related: Church Plan Clarification Act nowlaw

The ruling was a significant victory for threereligious-affiliated nonprofits that were represented in the highcourt by Lisa Blatt of Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer.

Blatt’s clients are the target of class actions from firms thatinclude Washington’s Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll andSeattle’s Keller Rohrback.

Blatt had told the court that the two law firms sought "billionsof dollars in retroactive liability and a wholesale upheaval in theadministration of pension plans affecting religious employers andemployees across the country." Blatt argued in the high court in March.

In the trio of high court cases—Advocate Health Care Network v.Stapleton, Dignity Healthv. Rollins and SaintPeter’s Healthcare System v. Kaplan—the justices reversedcontrary rulings by the Third, Seventh and Ninth circuit courts ofappeals.

Kagan focused on two provisions in ERISA: the definition of a“church plan”—which, she wrote, initially meant only a plan“established and maintained” by a church; and a later amendment providing thatthe definition includes a plan maintained by a principal-purposeorganization.

“In effect, Congress provided that the new phrase can stand infor the old one as follows: ‘The term ‘church plan’ means a planestablished and maintained by a church [a plan maintained by aprincipal-purpose organization].’ The church-establishmentcondition thus drops out of the picture,” Kagan concluded.

Kagan also noted that the three federal agencies responsible foradministering ERISA have “long read” those provisions to exemptplans like the hospitals in the case.

The employees’ lawyers had argued that "hundreds ofchurch-associated hospital conglomerates, often at the urging of'gotcha' benefit consultants, have in recent decades exploited amisreading of ERISA to lower their costs by claiming church-planstatus for plans that had been operated—correctly—as ERISA plans.”They said those plans now are often substandard and underfunded,and no church stands behind them.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who agreed with the resolution of thedispute, wrote separately to express that she was “nonethelesstroubled by the outcome of these cases.” Nothing in the legislativehistory, she wrote, endorses the court’s ruling.

“That silence gives me pause: The decision to exempt plansneither established nor maintained by a church could have the kindof broad effect that is usually thoroughly debated during thelegislative process and thus recorded in the legislative record,”Sotomayor wrote.

Sotomayor noted that the hospitals involved in the cases “earnbillions of dollars in revenue” and “compete in the secular marketwith companies that must bear the cost of complying withERISA.”

Sotomayor wrote: “These organizations thus bear littleresemblance to those Congress considered when enacting the 1980amendment to the church plan definition. This current reality mightprompt Congress to take a different path.”