Full Homily

It's a joy to gather with you this afternoon for this Red Mass to invoke the power of the Holy Spirit upon you, the distinguished judges, attorneys, and lawmakers, law professors and law students, clerks and paralegals, and all others who serve us in the various sectors of the legal profession. The Church holds the work you do in great esteem, we thank you for it, and we ask God's guidance and blessing upon you and your work.

Perhaps by accident, or by very fortuitous planning by the Archbishop, this very day on which we now gather has something to tell us. Today we mark the one year anniversary of a rather remarkable event. One year ago today, on September 23, 2015, our Holy Father Pope Francis, who had arrived in the United States the previous evening, was welcomed by our President to the White House. You remember that the Holy Father arrived at the South Lawn of the White House in his modest Fiat, where he was greeted with a flurry of elaborate pageantry and fanfare. The words he spoke to our President (and to our nation) have everything to do with you who are here and the vitally important work you do on a daily basis.

"Mr. President," he said, "together with their fellow citizens, American Catholics are committed to building a society which is truly tolerant and inclusive, to safeguarding the rights of individuals and communities, and to rejecting every form of unjust discrimination. With countless other people of good will, they are likewise concerned that efforts to build a just and wisely ordered society respect their deepest concerns and their right to religious liberty. That freedom remains one of America’s most precious possessions. And ... all are called to be vigilant, precisely as good citizens, to preserve and defend that freedom from everything that would threaten or compromise it." We should note that the Pope speaks of the commitment of Catholics to work "with other people of good will" and doing it "precisely as good citizens."

And then, you will recall, on the very next day, Pope Francis offered an historic and moving address to a joint session of the United States Congress. There he told our lawmakers: "You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics. A political society endures when it seeks, as a vocation, to satisfy common needs by stimulating the growth of all its members, especially those in situations of greater vulnerability or risk. Legislative activity is always based on care for the people. To this you have been invited, called and convened."

Everything Pope Francis said about the work of politics and creating laws can also be said of your own work of applying those laws in specific situations and the Scripture readings we heard proclaimed do too. In the first reading, through the prophet Ezekiel, God speaks to the Israelites and to us of his closeness to His people. He speaks of planting His very spirit in our hearts, to guide us in understanding and living His statutes and decrees. He writes these not in a rulebook handed down from on high, but on our hearts, enabling us, if you will, to see life from God’s point of view.

That is why we can recognize a profound connection between human law and God's law. It is not that the Church expects secular lawmakers to make laws based on religious doctrine. Rather, the Church believes that there is a common moral sense written on the hearts of all people, and that our secular laws are (and must be) founded upon that. When we talk about concepts like human dignity and all that it entails – the right to be treated equally under the law, to food, to raise and teach one’s own children, to health care, to private property, to believe and worship according to one’s own conscience, and so much more – we are talking about principles that we didn't invent, but rather that we recognize as coming from within the human person. You know very well that the rights you defend and protect don’t emerge from your own good will, and they are not even granted by our nation; our nation and each of us are called upon to recognize what is there, written in our hearts. 

This is not “a Catholic idea.” In fact, it is enshrined in the most American of documents, the Declaration of Independence. In that document, the founders of this nation wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These truths and rights are "self-evident" because they are woven into our very human nature. They transcend differences of religion and culture. It’s true that we sometimes disagree on how they are applied in practice. And sometimes the imperfect cultures that form us give us blinders that keep us from understanding them clearly enough.

Pope Francis did not go to the White House and to Congress to make America more Catholic. He went to remind all of us – Catholic Christians, Protestant Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, members of any of the other great religion traditions that make up our society, and those who have no faith at all – of the goodness, the justice, the peace-making to which America is called, to which each of us is called. Your own important and challenging work reflects this call beautifully.

That's precisely why the Beatitudes that we hear Jesus teach in today's Gospel reading have resonated so profoundly in human hearts for two millennia. Though it is one of the most well-known passages of the Gospels, and Pope Francis has called the Beatitudes a "pillar of the Gospel," you don't have to be Christian to admire and emulate the values it points to. In fact, I have no doubt that many of you were drawn to the legal profession and continue to be driven to pursue it out of your own hunger and thirst for justice and righteousness, your own desire to be peacemakers, your own desire to protect the poor in spirit and support the meek. 

One person who is surely driven in this way is Susan Feeney, whom we honor today. Through her professional work, including her extensive pro-bono work; her extensive volunteer work; her mission work in Tanzania and Lebanon; and her extensive parish-based ministry at Saint Charles Borromeo Church in her home parish in Skillman, we see the values of Jesus’s Beatitudes shine.

Today we want to say thank you to Susan, on behalf of many who do not possess a voice to say it very loudly. We also want to say thank you to each of you here today. By the way you go about your professional work in the field of law with such integrity, compassion, justice, and honor, you are reminders to us all of the kind of people God calls the citizens of our nation, and of all nations, to be. God bless you.