ARCHDIOCESE OF PHILADELPHIA

Esteemed Judges of the Federal, State and Municipal Courts,

Public Officials, and Legal Educators,

Lawyers practicing in firms and corporate law departments,

Paraprofessional and Support Staffs,

Family members and friends who join with the legal profession here today.

 

It is a great joy for me to celebrate with you the 52^nd annual Red Mass for the bench and bar in our local Church, which is the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

Your presence is an honor to this congregation, and I wish to confirm the great esteem in which the Church has always held the various components of your legal profession, which is so committed to the protection and advancement of the fundamental rights that God has made a part of human nature itself. Because these rights come from God, they must be accepted and respected by all.

As we pray this evening for the guidance of the Holy Spirit on your work in this current judicial year, and for His strength that will keep you faithful to your calling, I wish to reflect on how the Lord is asking you, as a skilled and talented part of the universal Church, and of our local church in Philadelphia, to cooperate with the Spirit of God in uplifting humanity to Him and in reinforcing the dignity of every human being.

As the new Archbishop of Philadelphia, I am pleased to have this first opportunity to address you as one of the professional groups that have such an important impact on our Church and our society.

It is through the power of the Holy Spirit that Christ today calls us all to a program of conversion of heart, communion and solidarity. All of this presupposes an encounter with the living Jesus Christ. This is indeed the great strategic vision that Pope John Paul II has offered to everyone in America.

To understand how life-changing an encounter with the living Jesus Christ can be, we might call to mind three moving examples. On the first Easter morning, Mary Magdalen, long a staunch disciple of Jesus, and courageous enough to keep watch at His tomb in the dark, became the first evangelizer, the first one to share the Good News of Christ s resurrection and new life.

Some hours later, two disciples on the road to Emmaus, disheartened and discouraged at the terrible suffering and death of their Master, met Jesus on the road, had supper with Him and heard Him explain the Scriptures to them. At the end of their encounter they recognized Jesus as the risen Lord when He broke bread and gave it to them just as He had done with the Apostles at the last Supper.

And finally Saul, a man totally dedicated to his own conception of God s law, met the Lord on the road to Damascus in an encounter so intense that he was knocked to the ground and blinded. That encounter brought about by the Holy Spirit changed Saul completely, made him an apostle, and gave him strength to withstand rejection and criticism and even to risk and endure prosecution and prison. Today we call him Paul, and recognize him as one of the greatest evangelists of all history.

Where, then today, can you and I encounter Jesus two thousand years after His return to the Father? How is the Holy Spirit whom we evoke this evening leading us to Him?

We find Him in the Scriptures, in the holy Bible, and in prayer.

We find Him in the Liturgy. Where two or three are gathered together in my name, He tells us, there am I in their midst. Jesus is present by His power in all the Sacraments, especially in the Eucharist, where we celebrate His Sacrifice, receive His Body and Blood, and adore Him in the tabernacle.

We find Him, moreover, in all those persons, especially the weak and needy, with whom He identifies Himself in the Gospel. He assures us that whatever we do for the least of His brothers and sisters, we do for Him, and that it will be counted to our credit on the Day of Judgment. In the face of every human being, especially in the face marked by pain and suffering, we can discover the face of Christ. This encounter also is brought about by the Spirit of God, who as Saint Paul tells us in our second reading, has been given to us.

Returning again to Pope John Paul II s message and commission to the Church throughout all America, we see that the life-changing encounter with Christ that we experience through the power of the Holy Spirit can produce a total change of heart in us, a continuing conversion no less radical than the one undergone by Saul on the road to Damascus.

This conversion of heart in its turn leads to a deeper communion with God and with one another in the Church. And the fruit of this communion is solidarity with one another, a solidarity expressed in loving service offered in the name of Jesus.

This evening I wish to propose some ways in which the universal call to conversion, communion and solidarity that is an integral part of our life-changing and continuing encounter with the risen Lord can be answered by the legal profession, of which you here present are such worthy representatives.

The conversion of heart that the Gospel enjoins is a response to God s call to live a life in which our faith is shown in all our works and in which there is no inconsistency between what we believe and how we act.

A first sign of conversion is an awareness of our dependence on God and our need to bring our cares to Him in prayer. How blessed we are in our local Church to have the models of intense and constant prayer that are given to us by contemplative orders of nuns, and by our two saints, my predecessor St. John Neumann, and the model of missionary charity and zeal St. Katharine Drexel.

A great support that enables us to turn continually to the Lord is our reliance on the Sacraments, above of all the Eucharist, and then the Sacrament of Penance or Reconciliation. Through the confession and forgiveness of our sins God s mercy transforms our life.

The more we answer God s call to turn to Him through conversion of heart, the more the Holy Spirit, whom we invoke this evening, awakens in us a desire to be in communion with Him and with one another.

True communion, the communion that God offers us in Himself, is a source of peace, strength and joy for us, a peace and strength and joy that we can diffuse to so many others.

Dear friends: In our local community there are so many areas that call for you talents, your skills, and your good will in the service of others, even outside the sphere of your professional activities. I ask you to support and encourage the work of our priests and religious. Priestly ministry and consecrated religious life are indispensable to this local Church and to the universal Church. Vocations to the priesthood and to religious life are necessary for the Church to fulfill her service to the world.

I ask you also to lend your talents for the benefit of your parishes. Parish identification has always been one of the ways in which Philadelphians recognize and relate to one another. Your participation and support help our parishes to continue to be communities of hope where families are supported and strengthened, and individuals find welcome and fellowship in Christian love.

I ask you also to continue to love and attend to your families, amidst the staggering demands which the practice of law places on your time. It is in the family your family and every other family that life is created and nurtured. Through the family the whole of society is kept on its proper course. It is family-by-family that our communities are strengthened or destroyed. And since you are the guardians and clarifiers of societal relationships under the rule of law, you can do no better than ensure that your own families manifest that mutual love and respect that, under God, is the foundation of every just society.

In your right relationship with God, you know you are also called to be faithful to your spouse. In your profession, absence from home is often unavoidable, and temptations are not infrequent. Prayer and grace however will always assist you to value and preserve the treasure of your family life.

Continue to be attentive to the needs of your children. Your own vigilance means so much to the success of their efforts to remain unscathed amidst the pressures of drugs, alcohol and sex, by which they are constantly bombarded.

In your relations with those of other faiths, your love and respect are a great witness to Jesus commandment of love.

Those who do not yet share with us faith in God are also respected persons for whom we pray and with whom we loyally collaborate to build an ever more just and peaceful society.

With regard to other Christian Churches and Ecclesial Communities, we are called by our common Baptism to work toward complete communion. Through prayer together, through sharing the Scriptures and through fruitful Christian service we must continue to hope for the day of full Christian unity.

And in all these areas let us remember to invoke the Spirit of God s love poured out in our hearts: Come Holy Spirit!

The third result of our encounter with Christ, after conversion of heart and communion, is a solidarity that generates action inspired by love. It is in this third result that your participation in the legal profession as Catholic Christians becomes specific and focused.

You have heard many times that you are called to shape the secular world according to God s will by bringing the Gospel to the structures of the world. While respecting the informed freedom of conscience of every participant in public life, you are called to work tirelessly to strengthen that democracy, which guided by the rule of law, has made our country a beacon of freedom and a servant of peace.

I ask you today to recommit yourselves and your professional activities to the principle that there is no real freedom without truth. Real freedom demands an acceptance by society of the fact that there exist fundamental human rights that, because they are part of human nature itself, no human authority can infringe upon, not even by appealing to a majority opinion or a political consensus on the pretext of respect for pluralism and democracy.

As members of the legal profession, it is your specific task to help ensure that legislation, government administration, the judicial process and legal training always respect and reflect this concept of true freedom, which is so consonant with our own human self-understanding and with the common good of society.

In order for you to be truly effective in this task, however, you will need, in addition to all your other expertise, to understand and internalize the social teaching of the Church. It is of immense value and relevance for you.

It is obvious that you are in a position to contribute greatly to the promotion of justice and the protection of peace. As we look at the full range of law-related questions that our community faces today, we see that the ones which directly affect the greatest number of people center on protection of the weak and helpless.

Three areas in particular need your skills and commitment. The first is the culture of death that victimizes the unborn and the elderly, and brutalizes all those whom it touches. The second is the drug trade that targets the flower of our youth and robs from the most marginalized members of society both their often-meager economic resources and their human dignity itself, so often otherwise threatened by poverty or discrimination. The third is the concerted attack, whether direct or indirect, on the family and marriage as the basic institutions of society. Sometimes that attack pretends to be justified in the name of a new and more efficient ordering of society. Whatever the source of those attacks, history teaches us that whenever the family is strong, all of society is strong. Whenever the family has been weakened or destroyed, there follows alienation, chaos, and despair.

Whatever your role in the legal profession may be, I ask you to realize the immense power that is yours, a power of service and solidarity made possible in your lives by the Spirit of God. This power is to be exercised for the good of humanity and in the name of God. And for all of you who are Christians, this power is exercised moreover in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the chief Servant of humanity, who sends into our hearts the Spirit of God s truth. It is this Spirit of truth, God Himself, whom the Church this evening invokes upon you, dear friends, to give you hope and confidence and perseverance in your great task of witnessing effectively to that supreme dignity embodied in every human person, created in God s image and likeness, redeemed by the Blood of Jesus Christ and destined for eternal life.

         

Come, Holy Spirit! Amen.