ARCHDIOCESE OF PHILADELPHIA

Distinguished Judges, Lawyers and other Members of the Legal Community,
Public Officials and Legal Educators,
Members of the Saint Thomas More Society,
Brothers and Sisters in Jesus Christ,
Friends who serve the people and who have come together today to pray,

It is indeed a great joy for me to join you in celebrating the tradition of the Red Mass—a tradition that had its origin in thirteenth-century France, in the famed Sainte Chapelle of Paris during the reign of King Saint Louis IX. At this 55th annual Red Mass the Archdiocese of Philadelphia continues its own long local tradition of sponsoring an annual Mass to invoke God’s blessings upon our Courts and the legal community. We are particularly grateful to the members of the Saint Thomas More Society for supporting and helping to sustain this tradition that continues today to invoke the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, to assist people of the law in their important service to our society.

The Church offers encouragement to all of you who prayerfully participate in this Mass. And on this occasion she wishes to express deep gratitude to you for your commitment to the law, conceived as founded on truth and linked to true freedom.

Our liturgy today speaks to us about truth and the very fundamental structure of truth with its many exigencies. We are reminded in our First Reading from the book of the prophet Ezekiel about the fact that we are God’s people, He is our God. Life comes from Him and terminates in Him. He spells out its meaning and its duration. He rewards its efforts. In fact, Ezekiel reminds us that in the search for truth and in the effort to embody that truth in the law, the Lord himself is an essential guide and partner when he says: "...it is God who will give you a new heart and who will put his Spirit within you and make you live by his statutes, careful to observe his decrees."

In the responsorial psalm of today’s Mass we implored the Lord to send out His Spirit to renew the face of the earth. Implicit in this prayer is the recognition that it is precisely in our relationship with God that we begin to discover the beauty of the truth —the truth that God is one, that God is love, that He is a God of reason, and that He calls us to use our gifts and talents for His glory and the good of our brothers and sisters without distinction.

Recently, in his now famous address to university professors at the University of Regensburg in Germany (September 12, 2006) on the interaction between faith and reason Pope Benedict XVI spoke of the will to be obedient to the truth as the underlying principle of the modern scientific ethos. For this search for truth to be complete, he noted, human reason, unaided by divine help, is insufficient, in and of itself, to enter into the necessary dialogue between cultures with respect to the great issues of our day. Highlighting this problem he stated:

"In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.... The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the program with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.

In an earlier interview (August 5, 2006) with German journalists the Holy Father also spoke of the intrinsic relationship between ethics and technology in the search for truth, stating:

"Progress becomes true progress only if it serves the human person and if the human person grows: not only in terms of his or her technical power, but also in his or her moral awareness. I believe that the real problem of our historical moment lies in the imbalance between the incredibly fast growth of our technical power and that of our moral capacity, which has not grown in proportion. That is why the formation of the human person is the true recipe, the key to it all, I would say, and that is what the Church proposes."

To cite the truth of the primacy of God and the right role of government is also to raise the issue of moral truth in general—truth that exists independently of time-conditioned preferences or cultural options. I share the conviction, dear Friends, that you who are passionate servants of just law are in a position—a powerful position, a spiritually powerful position—to proclaim in word and action that there is indeed moral truth that was such before we came to be, and will still be when our life on earth is over. What is not in accord with this truth is and always will be evil, even if it should be legal. And I submit today that God’s holy word confirms that this position is derived from God’s word: God has willed and in fact proclaimed that we shall be His people and He shall be our God.

In our second scriptural reading of the Mass today from the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus promises his first disciples the gift of the Holy Spirit who will empower them to be His witnesses even to the ends of the earth. They are to be His witnesses to truth, justice and love in a world that often opposes these values. Jesus says: "You will receive power." It is power that is linked with a gift - the gift of the Spirit of Truth. This power is not given for domination or manipulation. It is power given to you for the service of truth and freedom. It is power to bear witness to Jesus.

It is precisely through this gift of the Holy Spirit that the Lord inspires his disciples in all ages to be courageous witnesses in the world. Was not this the case with Saint Thomas More, a man immersed in the great issues of his day? The patron of your professional society is a shining example to us all of an individual motivated by a personal integrity which was inspired and shaped by deeply held religious and moral convictions. As we know, he never hesitated to express those convictions, even when they were not popular or welcome, and even when it became necessary to pay the ultimate price of his life for expressing them. Surely, guided by the Holy Spirit, he took his Master’s request seriously, to be His faithful witness and to give testimony to Him in the world.

Are we too not called to be credible witnesses of truth, justice and love in our world today as we engage the issues of our own time and culture? In a particular way, the Church reminds us of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council regarding the vocation of the laity in the world. Namely, that the lay vocation is primarily meant to be lived in the family, the workplace, and in the business, professional and political spheres. It is precisely in these spheres of human activity that the Church urges you to participate by contributing the best of her religiously inspired truths to the public policy discussions and debates of our day.

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. In his weekly general audience of last Wednesday (October 11, 2006) Pope Benedict spoke of the importance of this necessary dialogue in society in order to arrive at ethically principled solutions for the common good with respect to the cultural questions and issues of our day. He noted the importance of recognizing and contributing the unique heritage we bring as Christians to these cultural debates, in stating:

"In the midst of all the temptations that exist, with all the currents of modern life, we must preserve the identity of our faith. Certainly the path of ... dialogue, which the Second Vatican Council has felicitously undertaken, must surely be pursued with firm constancy. But this path of dialogue, which is so necessary, must not let us forget the duty to meditate anew and to witness always, with the same degree of energy, those guiding principles of our Christian identity that cannot be renounced. On the other hand it is important to realize that this our identity requires strength, clarity and courage before the contraditions of the world in which we live."

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 Pope John Paul II reminded us all many times, freedom is not the ability to do whatever we want, rather it is the ability to do what we ought to do.

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 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 expertise, to understand and internalize the social teaching of the Church. It is of immense value and relevance to 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 the ones which directly affect the greatest number of people center on protection of the weak and helpless.

Among these are the culture of death that victimizes the unborn and the elderly, and brutalizes all whom it touches. There is ample reason, also, to believe that the magnanimity inculcated by the Gospel requires for our times a clear re-examination of the death penalty, concerning not only its "effectiveness" but also whether it can ever truly be considered "necessary." Another area of concern is the drug trade and human trafficking that target the flower of our youth and rob the most marginalized members of society of both their often-meager economic resources and their human dignity itself, so often otherwise threatened by poverty or discrimination. A major area of concern 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.

Consequently, I note with appreciation the clear witness given by the Saint Thomas More Society in its October 5, 2006 press release announcing the society’s support for enshrining in the positive law of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania "the understanding that only marriages between one man and one woman shall be valid and recognized marriages in the Commonwealth."

How relevant today—in the United States of America as well as in the other countries whose citizens may be present at this Mass—are those words God spoke centuries ago to the people of Israel: "I will put my spirit within you and make you live by my statutes, careful to observe my decrees. You shall live in the land I gave your fathers; you shall be my people and I shall be your God." The sector of human behavior and human law—now as then—cannot prescind from the truth of the primacy of God.

The Spirit of Truth whom we invoke today is the same Spirit promised by Jesus. He is the one who completes the work of Jesus in us and leads us to liberating truth. The message of Jesus that we receive today in the Gospel is strong, forceful and encouraging: "...you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free."

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 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.