Red Mass

St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney
Gen 1: 26-31; 1 Jn 4: 11-16; Jn 14: 23-29

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
2 Feb 2009

A just system of law, administered by just and competent men and now women of the law, is one of the characteristics of societies which endure and which deserve to endure.

We all believe that Australia generally, and New South Wales in particular, truly belong in this category of society as we gather for the annual Red Mass here in St Mary's Cathedral as has happened every year, I believe, since 1931.

We thank God for the traditions we have inherited, and pray that the Spirit of Truth, which has been promised, will continue to be active in our courts.

The origins of the Red Mass are found in the Middle Ages in both France and England with some linking it with the presence of the Papacy in Avignon from 1309-1377. The practice was introduced into the United States in 1928 where the Red Mass has been attended by almost every President since Truman. It will be interesting to learn whether President Obama comes along.

We are grateful to the St. Thomas More Society for the continuing sponsorship of this Mass and appreciate the ancient prayers and hymns set to the sixteenth century music and sung by the Capella Sublima, which they have chosen.

By way of a change I want to reflect on the role of law in society by focusing on the first reading from the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Jewish scriptures which we know as the Old Testament.

There we read of the creation.

"God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them."

God instructs them to increase and multiply and makes them, "masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that creep along the ground."

In the first chapter of Genesis man is like God because of his capacity for speech and reason, his freedom in doing and making and his powers of contemplation, judgement and care. A second layer of likeness comes from the human capacity to distinguish good and evil. Animals instinctively seek what is good and avoid what is bad, but have no notions of either. Man is superior to animals.

Both these layers of capacity provide a foundation for the god-like human capacity to set out rules of conduct, generalized and intelligible with punishments for infractions.

Genesis tells us that the early generations became so wicked and insolent that God regretted having made them. The earth was corrupt and God decided to destroy them (Gen ch. 6) in the Great Flood, except for Noah, his wife and descendants and two of every kind of living creature.

It was only after the flood subsided that the Scriptures narrate that the new covenant and the law were established by God himself. After Noah's sacrifice God promised never to curse the earth again or strike down every living thing (Gen. ch. 8), a promise which Christians believe still endures today without guaranteeing us against awful regional or local catastrophes.

God's covenant with Noah and his descendants, with the rainbow as the sign of this covenant, is essentially connected with the prohibition of murder and its punishment ("he who sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed." Gen 9:6); both prerequisites to the command to humans to increase and multiply and subdue the earth. Communities are created by hope and security.

Here we see an account of civilization emerging from the law of the jungle, where might is right. Now might is to be subject to justice, still primitive by our standards, but a decisive development. This universal prototypical law, instituted ten generations before the election of Abraham, and what many have seen as the basis for our concept of natural law is the founding document of the new world order, because it provides the conditions for hope in a durable human future.

The law is a reaction against general lawlessness, against the pre-legal instinct for excessive unlimited vengeance, to a system where we find an impersonal retribution, limited in extent and universal in scope because all humans bear the image of God.

Genesis has a realistic understanding of human nature, which has been justified by the human folly of centuries. It implicitly rejects any notion of a pure and non violent humanity and sets out to contain the inevitable human violence through the law. It recognizes that executing justice is necessarily harsh and ugly, because human life cannot be defended without getting one's hands dirty; even today, I might add, when our society generally and properly rejects capital punishment.

God also plays an important part in this ancient Jewish account of the first human legal system. According to this text it was Noah who turned to God after the liberation from the Ark, built an altar and presented burnt offerings (Gen 8:20-1), an acknowledgment of Transcendence, of the mysterious Power beyond and behind the cosmos. But it was God who responded with a law and a special pact or covenant for Noah.

An old pagan saying claimed "no gods, no city" and many ancient Greek cities traced their mythic origins to a god. More recently and more than any other century in history the twentieth century provided evidence for the view of many political philosophers that a belief in interested and judgmental gods (or God) is necessary for every decent human society.The Nazis and the Communists laboured mightily to validate Dostoevsky's prophetic claim that if belief in immortality was destroyed "nothing would be immoral, everything would be permissible" (Brothers Karamazov 1.1.6).

At a minimum, beliefs in the justice of law, the necessity for punishment and a secure future for mankind are reinforced by a belief in divine guarantees. We dispense with the one true God at our peril, no matter where we might be working, but especially when we are developing or administering the law.

The origins of the book of Genesis and their dates are lost in the mists of antiquity. Traditionally ascribed to the authorship of Moses the final forms we now have would all be later, but some of the basic traditions could be much earlier. However these texts can still give us food for thought today as we consider the nature of God, man's place in the cosmos, his capacity to be infinitely greater and lower than the animals, the continuing mysteries of evil and human cruelty and the vital role of the law, not in perfecting humans, but in protecting us from our worst selves.

Note: My thoughts on Genesis draw heavily in Leon R. Kass, "The Beginning of Wisdom" (2003), chapter 6, pp. 168-96.