[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 151 (Wednesday, October 21, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2268-E2269]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


CARDINAL GEORGE DELIVERS HOMILY AT RED MASS CELEBRATED AT ST. MATTHEW'S 
                               CATHEDRAL

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. HENRY J. HYDE

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, October 20, 1998

  Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, on October 4th of this year, the new Cardinal 
Archbishop of Chicago delivered the homily at the Red Mass held at St. 
Matthew's Cathedral here in Washington, DC.
  The Red Mass is traditionally celebrated on the Sunday prior to the 
first Monday in October, which marks the beginning of the Supreme 
Court's new term.
  Permit me to share Cardinal George's inspiring homily with my 
colleagues.

                         Homily: 1998 Red Mass


        St. Matthew's Cathedral; Washington, DC, October 4, 1998

                      Francis Cardinal George, OMI

                         Archbishop of Chicago

       Your Eminence, Cardinal Hickey, Your Excellency, Archbishop 
     Cacciavillan, Members of the judiciary and of the bar and of 
     the government and Congress, Members of the John Carroll 
     Society and friends.
       The picture of Jesus given us by the evangelist Luke places 
     him in the synagogue of Nazareth, his home town, ready to 
     begin his public ministry under the inspiration of the Holy 
     Spirit. This was to be his only, his last occasion to preach 
     in Nazareth, for his mission took him elsewhere in Judea and 
     Israel and, finally, to his death outside Jerusalem. In the 
     mission and preaching of his disciples after Jesus' 
     resurrection from the dead, Luke has Jesus taken farther: to 
     Antioch and Corinth and Rome, to the ends of the earth.
       In Luke's Gospel, Jesus does not preach until after 
     listening and proclaiming the word of God. In the text within 
     our Gospel text, the prophet Isaiah proclaims a time of 
     Jubilee, of deliverance from captivity, a time of liberation; 
     only then does Jesus speak and explain the prophet in such a 
     way--``This day, these words are fulfilled in your hearing.'' 
     That Jesus' friends and neighbors, far from being liberated 
     by his words, took him to the edge of the hill on which their 
     city was built and tried to kill him. Jesus listened, he 
     spoke, he escaped to take up elsewhere the mission given him 
     by his Father. That mission makes possible our coming 
     together today at this end of the earth as we and the entire 
     world, with renewed self-consciousness as a globe, look 
     toward the celebration of a new millennium.
       If we today believe that where there is Jesus there is 
     Jubilee, how is it that we are still enslaved? Every five 
     years, as you may know, each bishop of the Catholic Church 
     goes to Rome to pray at the tombs of Peter and Paul; then he 
     goes in to talk with Peter's successor. This year, the 
     bishops of the United States are making their visits ad 
     limina apostolorum, and the bishops of Illinois, Indiana and 
     Wisconsin made theirs together last May. When I went in to 
     talk with the Holy Father, he listened politely as I 
     explained that the report he had received had been drawn up 
     by my staff since I had only recently come to Chicago. He 
     looked at it, put it aside and asked me a single question: 
     ``What are you doing to change the culture?'' I was 
     surprised, but shouldn't have been, for the Pope has spoken 
     often of how culture liberates us, creates the world in which 
     what is best in human experience can be passed on and 
     celebrated and of how, conversely, culture can also blind 
     us, enslave us and must sometimes be changed in the light 
     of God's word.
       Taken by surprise, I spontaneously began to speak to the 
     Holy Father about the Church's relation to the legal 
     profession in Chicago, of the many contacts and gatherings, 
     of the several Chicago priests who are also civil lawyers, of 
     the pro bono work for the poor, of the Catholic law schools 
     and of many initiatives similar to what takes place here 
     through the good offices of the members of the John Carroll 
     society. Then I backed up and began to explain that, in the 
     United States, the law is a primary carrier of culture. In a 
     country continuously being knit together from so many diverse 
     cultural, religious, and linguistic threads, legal language 
     most often creates the terms of our public discourse as 
     Americans. A vocation to make and to serve the law is a 
     calling to shape our culture.
       We live in worded worlds. If there is no common language, 
     very likely there is no common vision and citizens find 
     themselves trapped in separate worlds. Listening to God's 
     liberating word, in this Mass and elsewhere, believers must 
     wonder where the language of civil law and the language of 
     faith might share a common vocabulary. The Catholic Church 
     has tried for some generations to speak here a language of 
     natural law, a language that presupposes God speaks in nature 
     as well as in history, a language, therefore, able to speak 
     of God's ways without explicitly confessional terminology. 
     But our various attempts have not really provided a 
     dictionary shared between American culture and Catholic 
     faith. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops often 
     tries to speak the language of policy, hoping that well 
     argued policy statements will influence legal discussion; but 
     the common understanding generated has clear limitations. 
     There is the language of Holy Scripture itself, common to 
     great extent to all Christians and Jews, but the Bible's 
     phraseology

[[Page E2269]]

     and stories are no longer common cultural parlance in our 
     country.
       Speaking, in order to be heard today, a language largely 
     shorn of religious nuances, the believer can still ask two 
     questions of the vision behind legal discourse:
       First, can the vision of courts and legislatures expand to 
     see at least dimly God's actions and purposes in history? 
     Abraham Lincoln of Illinois used public language to speak of 
     God's purpose at the end of a bloody American civil war: 
     ``With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the 
     right, let us strive to finish the work we are in.'' Lincoln, 
     who wrestled like a biblical prophet with God's purposes in 
     history and his judgment on this nation, grew, because of his 
     public service, in his ability to bring together, 
     always tentatively, the law he defended finally with his 
     own and God's word which, like a two-edged sword, cuts 
     through the rhetoric of public as well as personal deceit. 
     Lincoln knew that God judges nations as well as persons, 
     and he forged a language which, at the end, placed even 
     the personal liberty to which this nation was dedicated 
     second to the designs of God himself. Are we permitted to 
     speak similarly today or must the language of law, rather 
     than setting use free, blind us and leave us mute in any 
     world not constructed by our private interests and 
     intentions.?
       And a second question, put to use often these days by Pope 
     John Paul II: does the vision of the human person found in 
     public laws and decisions adequately express what it means to 
     be human? Do our laws not only protect contracts but also 
     tend to force all human relations into them? Is the language 
     of contract becoming the only public language of America? 
     Does the model of association which is accorded public rights 
     tend more and more to constrain or even exclude the natural 
     family, the life of faith, cultural and racial groupings, 
     relations which cannot be unchosen without destroying the 
     human persons shaped by them.
       Christian faith gives us a vision of a person we call the 
     Word of God, made flesh. Crucified and risen from the dead, 
     Jesus sends us the Holy Spirit, who speaks every language and 
     gives every good gift. This vision should set us free from 
     any lesser picture of things; the language of faith should 
     keep us from supposing that we adequately understand reality 
     in its depths and heights. This is a vision that should 
     humble and, in humbling us, open us to other worlds. 
     Approaching a third Christian millennium (using what is now a 
     common calendar), we gather to worship the God we believe to 
     be the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ and therefore, in 
     Christ, our Father as well. It is good to do so, for if we do 
     not worship God we will inevitably end up worshipping 
     ourselves. Nations worshiping themselves have plagued this 
     last century of the second millennium, and Gods word prompts 
     us now to examine a new ourselves and our history. Without 
     warrant, we have associated ourselves with the biblical city 
     on a hill, not Nazareth but Jerusalem itself. Without right, 
     we too often judge other peoples and nations by our standards 
     and interests, assuming that our interests must be universal. 
     Without sense, we even seriously consider if this nation is 
     the end of history, as if our present political and economic 
     arrangements were surely the culmination of God's designs for 
     the universe. Lincoln, who had the good grace to speak of us 
     only as an ``almost chosen people'', would surely blush, and 
     so should we.
       Today, as yesterday and tomorrow, the Church speaks a 
     language of respect for public office holders, whose vocation 
     is shaped by the constraints of law; both the Church, today 
     as yesterday and tomorrow, also speaks as best she can to 
     judge the actions and decision of public officials, and 
     the culture shaped by them, when these are inadequate to 
     the vision given us by the truths of faith. ``Faith must 
     become culture,'' Pope John Paul II says. ``What are you 
     doing to change the culture?'' he asks. But how can we 
     speak of change in America today when the law itself 
     blinds us to basic truths? One egregious blind spot is our 
     very sense of liberation construed as personal autonomy. 
     An autonomous person has no need of jubilee, of freedom as 
     gift; he has set himself free. The fault line that runs 
     through our culture, and it is sometimes exacerbated 
     rather than corrected by law, is the sacrificing of the 
     full truth about the human person in the name of freedom 
     construed as personal autonomy. It is a blind spot as deep 
     as that in Marxism's sacrifice of personal freedom in the 
     name of justice construed as absolute economic equality. 
     Such a profound error makes our future uncertain. Will the 
     United States be here when the human race celebrates the 
     end of the third millennium? Not without a very changed, a 
     very converted culture.
       The Church, however, must also listen first to God's word 
     before she speaks, before she translates God's word into the 
     words of our culture or any other. Hence the Church can speak 
     only with deep humility a language which purports to give 
     definitive access to God's designs in history. Even prophetic 
     judgment, while certain in its proclamation, is tentative in 
     its final outcome. The Spirit is always free, but never self-
     contradictory.
       Tentatively, then, let us try the language of prayer and 
     ask that God's judgment fall lightly on us and our nation. 
     Gratefully, I pray that God reward your dedication to public 
     service and your desire to create a common language adequate 
     to the experience of all our people and open to all others. 
     Joyfully, let us hope that the Jubilee introducing the coming 
     millennium may restore to the United States a sense of 
     authentic freedom rooted in an ever-growing generosity of 
     spirit. May God bless us all. Amen

     

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