Homilies > 55th Annual Red Mass

55th Annual Red MassCardinal John P. Foley,
Grand Master, Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem

10/05/2008| St. Matthew's Cathedral, Washington, DC

Distinguished guests, my brothers and sisters in Christ:

We're a long way from the Fourth of July, but on that day and on some other public holidays, the following prayer is read in many Catholic churches as the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer:

"(Jesus Christ) spoke to all a message of peace and taught us to live as brothers.

"His message took form in the vision of our Fathers as they fashioned a nation where all might live as one.

"This message lives on in our midst as a task for us today and a promise for tomorrow."

How close these words are to the words of Scripture we heard just a few moments ago:

From Ezekiel: "I will take you away from among the nations, gather you from all the foreign lands...,

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 will be your God."

St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

"For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons...."

Finally, Jesus Himself read the words of Isaiah and said they applied to himself:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord."

So many of these citations from Scripture sound very much like American ideals.  In fact, many if not most of our values come not just from our God-given human nature but from our Judaeo-Christian heritage.  The Supreme Court has gone so far as to say, "We are a religious people".

Let me tell you a story.

When I went to college more than fifty years ago in Philadelphia, I was debating about whether to apply for law school or the seminary.

I love the law, and I even did my doctoral dissertation in philosophy in jurisprudence -- but that was after I was ordained a priest.  So you are immediately able to discern what my decision was.

One of the reasons for that decision was that, as a college student, I did volunteer work as a member of a religious organization, and one of my tasks was teaching religion to a group of six children in a local special education facility.

When the Sister superior visited my classroom one day, she asked the children, "Do you like Mr. Foley?"

One of the boys blurted out, "No!"

He immediately followed up: "We love Mr. Foley."

The Sister asked: "Why do you love Mr. Foley?"

He responded, "We love Mr. Foley because he teaches us about Jesus."

So I thought to myself, "What is more important than teaching people about Jesus?" -- and I applied for the seminary.

It is a decision I have never regretted, and I have never had an unhappy day as a priest -- but I still love the law, and it seems to me that we are in related vocations.

We both seek to challenge people to recognize their dignity and to live according to it.  We both consider law as a guide to a well ordered society.  We both see law as a means in which people can be educated to perceive what is good and to strive for it.  As the Psalmist says, we both see law as a lamp for our feet and a light for our path.  We both see law as a liberation from chaos and disordered passions and as establishing an environment of mutual respect and even of love.

In the prayer you will hear later in the Mass, I will be saying that this message of our forefathers lives on as a task for us today and as a promise for tomorrow.

May we all see the law as a reflection of God's loving care for us and as a way -- with His guidance -- of our building a society of justice, of peace and of love.

May God continue to bless you all in your extremely important work of formulating and applying the law as a type of vestibule  to a structure of respect and of love!