Sermon for 2017 Red Mass

The annual Red Mass for those in the legal profession was celebrated on Michaelmas, 2017. This is the sermon I gave on that occasion.

"War broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels battled against the dragon."
Words from the Book of the Apocalypse of the Apostle John

I am honored to have been invited by His Excellency to preach to the members Saint Thomas More Lawyers’ Guild. I hope that these thoughts derived from the Canon Law tradition will be of at least some small benefit to you who labor in the field of civil law.

We read in the Book of Revelation that the Archangels whose feast we celebrate today were the victors of the great celestial contest. For the devil and his angels, “there was no longer any place for them in heaven.” Satan was thrown down to earth, and his angels with him.

And so instead of war in Heaven, war has broken out on earth. That war sometimes manifests itself in physical violence, but it is most fundamentally a war fought within the human heart. The ancient serpent, who once whispered temptation into Eve’s ear in the garden of Paradise, is not content to ruin man one by one. Rather, we are told that the Devil has “deceived the whole world,” and with each passing year his great deception becomes manifest more and more in the laws of our society.

In the third century, the great theologian and Church father Origen proposed a Christian resistance to this evil: “Suppose,” he says, “that a man were living among the Scythians, whose laws are contrary to the divine law, and was compelled to live among them ... such a man for the sake of the true law, though illegal among the Scythians, would rightly form associations with like-minded people contrary to the laws of the Scythians.” (Contra Celsum, Book 1, Chapter 1.)

You are such an association: A group of like-minded persons, guided by Catholic principles, who are willing to stand up against the false and degenerate statutes that mock true justice. And it is God who teaches us what is just. For example, the fourteenth century jurist Johannes Monachus pointed out that when the Lord God wished to punish the first man for the first sin, He did so by means of a fair trial. God, who knows all things, asked Adam: “Where are you? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” Genesis demonstrates that the accused must always be given a citation and an opportunity to defend himself. Johannes summarized this lesson by coining the phrase, “innocens nisi probetur nocens,” “innocent until proven guilty.” We who serve the law must always follow the example of God Himself, Who affords man his rights even when he has done nothing to deserve them.

Saint John Paul II, addressing the International Union of Catholic Jurists on November 24th, 2000, articulated our vocation in this way: "The possibility of giving his or her due not only to a relative, a friend, a citizen or fellow believer, but also to every human being, simply because he is a person, simply because justice requires it, [this] is the honor of law and of jurists. If there is an expression of the unity of the human race and of equality between all human beings, this expression is rightly given by the law, which [excludes] no one."

It is our particular duty that we who uphold the law should always insist upon the rights of everyone, without exception: no matter what they may have been accused of, no matter whether they are rich or poor, no matter their country of origin, no matter whether they have already been born or not. If we live out the principles of justice, which we see enacted in Holy Scripture, we trust that one day the Lord will call us home to sing his praises in the sight of the angels.