Most Reverend Joseph C. Bambera, D.D., J.C.L.
Bishop of Scranton
HOMILY
Red Mass
Saint Peter’s Cathedral
November 5, 2010
Members of the judiciary, members of bar associations from throughout the Diocese of Scranton, elected officials, Atty. Karam, president of the Lackawanna Bar Association, Magistrate Gibbons, Chairman of this year’s Red Mass Committee, members of the Lackawanna Bar Association who host this annual Mass, and dear friends: Thank you for the kind invitation to preach at this year’s Red Mass. It is an honor to be a part of this annual gathering in which we invoke the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.
On October 31, 2000, ten years ago this very month, Pope John Paul II issued an apostolic letter in which he proclaimed Saint Thomas More to be the patron saint of lawyers, statesmen and politicians. He proclaimed:
“The life and martyrdom of Saint Thomas More have been the source of a message which spans the centuries and which speaks to people everywhere of the inalienable dignity of the human conscience, which, as the Second Vatican Council reminds us, is the ‘most intimate centre and sanctuary of a person, in which he or she is alone with God, whose voice echoes within them.’ (Gaudium et Spes, 16)
“Whenever men or women heed the call of truth, their conscience then guides their actions reliably towards good. Precisely because of the witness which he bore, even at the price of his life, to the primacy of truth over power, Saint Thomas More is venerated as an imperishable example of moral integrity.”
Thomas More was executed because he refused to place the demands of the state before the requirements of his conscience and had insisted that there were objective truths that governments could not legitimately seek to override. He stands as a towering example to all of us, and particularly to those of us present in this Cathedral today, that we have an obligation to find and serve the truth and to work to protect the lives and fundamental dignity of all human beings.
Every age is faced with the struggle confronted by Thomas More as new social conditions emerge. And every age is forced to confront the question: By appeal to what authority can moral dilemmas be resolved? Our Holy Father, Benedict XVI, during his recent historic visit to Great Britain, offered insight into the question. “If the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident.”
Another question then arises: Where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found? The Holy Father noted further: “The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason. … The role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known to non-believers – still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside of the competence of religion – but rather the role of religion is to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. … Religion, in other words, is not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor” to the conversations that are faced each day.
Yet many of us today, as in every age, fear the truth and hide from it. We side step from the truth in an effort to create a false peace or some ill-founded sense of harmony or worse yet, for mere political expediency. And for the sake of such shallow purposes, we diminish the truth and turn away from the path of life which maintains that every human being has dignity and must be protected from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.
And we can be tempted to hide from the truth in many fundamental dimensions of life. We can hide from the truth that the rights of the laborer must be respected; that it is the duty of more prosperous countries to assist those nations whose citizens are vulnerable to disease and famine; that the unemployed deserve gainful employment; that human trafficking is a grave offense; that refugees and immigrants deserve safety, respect and opportunities; that the poor and hungry must be offered shelter and fed; that the bond of marriage between one man and one woman is the basis of society; that freedom of conscience and religious liberty must be guaranteed in every corner of the world; that we are to be responsible stewards of the environment; we can hide from the truth that domestic violence and prejudice have no place in our families and neighborhoods.
All of us can be tempted to hide from the truth. But God calls us through the Church and through the ordinances of right reason to something more. God calls us not to escape or run from the truth but to approach it humbly so that justice might be administered to all, especially the most vulnerable in our midst.
Cardinal John Henry Newman, who was recently beatified by Pope Benedict XVI, at the end of his life described his life’s work as a struggle against the growing tendency to view religion as a purely private and subjective matter, a question of personal opinion – a struggle that is no different that what so many of us face today. Yet he taught throughout his life that if we have accepted the truth of Christ and committed our lives to him, there can be no separation between what we believe and the way we live our lives. Truth is passed on not merely by formal teaching but also by the witness of lives lived in integrity, fidelity and holiness.
One of Cardinal Newman’s best-loved meditations includes the words: “God has created me to do him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another.” God has committed some work to me … and to you … and to you, which he has not committed to another.
Many of you are familiar with the classic work, Man’s Search for Meaning authored by Dr. Victor Frankl. In it, Dr. Frankl chronicles the years that he spent in death camps in Nazi Germany. In this seminal work, he tells a story of a meager pleasure of camp life that provided a kind of happiness in the midst of intense suffering and more significantly, a profound moral lesson.
The pleasure occurred when, on returning from work, Frankl was admitted to the cook house after a long wait and was assigned to the line filing up to a certain prisoner/cook. This particular cook stood behind one of the huge pans and ladled soup into the bowls which were held out to him by the prisoners, who hurriedly filed past. In ladling out his soup, he was unique. He was the only cook who did not look at the men whose bowls he was filling; he only looked at hands holding empty bowls. He was the only cook who dealt out soup equally, regardless of the recipient. He chose to make no favorites of his personal friends or countrymen, picking out a few potatoes for them, while the others got watery soup skimmed from the top. There was no gain for him in a material way. There would be no extra bits of tobacco or some other pleasure given to him by those whom he treated more favorably. The only gain for him was the satisfaction of treating each burdened soul equally, with the greatest amount of dignity that he could offer.
Such behavior, Dr. Frankl recalled, provides insight into the power of the human person when committed to the truth. “Such individuals,” Dr. Frankl said, “may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
There are always choices to make, aren’t there? People look to me as a bishop to discover the choices that I will make that reflect my commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the leader of a local Church. I can’t go anywhere in the eleven counties of northeastern and north central Pennsylvania that we call the Diocese of Scranton without people looking at the choices I make in dinner selections in restaurants, the choice that I’ve made for the car that I drive, and more profoundly, the choices that I make relative to where I spend my time, what programs receive funding from my annual appeal, how forcefully I preach gospel values and how faithfully I proclaim the dignity of the human person.
There are always choices to make, aren’t there? And my friends, people don’t only look to me. They look to you to discover the choices that you make – for them. They look to you as someone who will uphold the truth that has been revealed to us in our world. They look to you to work for justice and equality. They look to you to uphold the dignity of their lives and the lives of those whom they hold dear. They look to you to interpret laws that build up and don’t tear apart lives and families and communities. … They look to you just like they look to me. And when they look to you – what do they see? A commitment to the truth? Integrity? Or something else?
My friends, the Church is most thankful for your devoted service to the common good. This service often comes at deep personal sacrifice: untold hours of travel away from home and family, the many hours of research, case and document preparation, mediation, communication with clients, as well as the heart wrenching decisions of those in public service.
May your first gift to those whom you serve be your unequivocal commitment to God’s universal law of truth and love. And may you hold in your hearts the words of our Holy Father, Benedict XVI, spoken just weeks ago: “Each of us in accordance with his or her state of life, is called to work for the advancement of God’s Kingdom by imbuing temporal life with the values of the Gospel. Each of us has a mission; each of us is called to change the world, to work for a culture of life, a culture forged by love and respect for the dignity of each human person.”
