The annual Red Mass to mark the beginning of the new legal year in Scotland took place yesterday (Sunday 22 September) at St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh.
Members of the legal fraternity took part in the traditional procession before Mass was celebrated by Archbishop Leo Cushley.
His homily is published below. (Pics: @jamiejkerr).
Homily
My dear friends,
A renewed word of welcome to the Senators of the College of Justice, the Right Honourable Lord Pentland and his fellow judges Lord Doherty, Lord Matthews, Lady Carmichael and Lord Scott.
We are also joined by Sheriffs who sit in courts across the country, as well as solicitors, advocates, King’s Counsel and a range of others involved in the legal profession, along with their families.
We welcome representatives of the Law Society of Scotland, the Faculty of Advocates, the Society of Writers to His Majesty’s Signet, as well as representatives from local bar associations and law schools.
We also extend a special Scottish welcome to a delegation of judges and lawyers from the Terry Carey American Inns of Court in Delaware in the USA who have been in Edinburgh this week and able to join us on this very special occasion.
And now a few remarks on law and Christianity.
We will all of us be aware that the legal systems in Europe and America draw a great deal of their shape and purpose from the laws first crafted for the Roman Republic, over 2,000 years ago.
We are also indebted to others who came along later, and codified and tidied up the centuries of legislation and judgements and accumulated wisdom.
New impetus was breathed into non-Christian Republican Roman law and its application by great figures like the Christian Emperor Justinian, resident in Constantinople and a ruler with an immense impact on the Christian east and west alike.
For Europe, perhaps Charlemagne is the next great legislator who deserves our attention as he builds the holy Roman Empire in the west.
Charlemagne is notable to us as Catholics too, because not only did he want to unify the various peoples in his empire into one state, he was also a consciously Catholic Christian emperor.
Just in one example, he had himself crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome on Christmas Day 800 AD.
Charlemagne wished to bring order to the heart of Western Europe, and he wanted to enlist a healthy, vigorous Catholic Church in his enterprise.
And the Church appears to have been willing to help him.
Famously, he asked for a copy of the Roman Missal, the book we still use for Mass to this very day, and a supposedly “definitive” copy of the Missal was sent from Rome to him in his capital in Aachen, at what is today the crossroads between Germany, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, France and Belgium, very much the heart of Western Europe.
Charlemagne wished to bring clarity, order, and stability to the life of his empire.
He also wished to bring the Catholic faith, already widespread, into an ever more central role in the life of his people.
The alliance he created between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy was one of convenience, to be sure, but in a good way too.
By doing so, Charlemagne also became a model of governance which other rulers wanted to imitate for centuries to come, including in these islands.
In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that Charlemagne became the gold standard for what it meant to be a king in Europe from then until the Reformation.
Now, you must be wondering where I’m going with all this… Well, all that I’ve touched upon so far continues to touch our lives to this day.
First, we still have the Roman Missal, the basis of which was presented to Charlemagne, and it continues to be heard and used for Mass throughout the entire Western world, from here to the Solomons and all the way round again.
It has become the means by which we offer the Sunday Eucharist in almost every country on the face of the earth.
But we also have a body of law that is used to this day in different ways by both Anglo-Saxon and Roman-based systems of law, which covers just about every state in the world.
And, interestingly, that body of Christian-Roman law foresees the head of state having a unique role in legislation and its application in the land.
This is because, in the hands of Justinian and Charlemagne, and those who followed their model, the head of state took on a very different role to previous, non-Christian rulers.
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that, until Christian times, the law was often made by the ruler himself, and the law changed according to the whim of that leader. The word of the leader was law. The morality of the law, the rightness of the law, was neither here nor there.
The ruler had the power to make the law, and the freedom to apply it as he or she saw fit. There was no appeal to a higher ideal.
Duty
With Christianity however, the ruler, the Christian king or queen has not only the right to make laws and apply them, he or she has the duty to make laws that are right, laws that are just, and to apply them without fear or favour.
We’ve heard of the post-Reformation idea of the “divine right of kings”. We need only think of James VI or Charles I.
But before there was the divine right of kings, there was the divine duty of kings: Kings were accountable to God and to a higher moral law, above any human justice.
By embracing this ideal, Christian kings and their Christian laws were to seek and to treasure a humility and objectivity that were unknown among rulers prior to the Christian era. They didn’t value or apply the criteria of political correctness or expedience or fashionable social theories.
They valued and applied facts in an endeavour to get at the truth of things as they truly are, and make their judgments accordingly. That humility, that recognition that our law-making is imperfect, gave Christian legislation strength and durability in Europe.
It pointed legislators towards an application that didn’t favour the wealthy and the powerful or the people with the biggest sticks. Instead, Christian-inspired legislation favoured reality, truth, honesty and integrity.
And the king or queen or president became not an arbitrary legislator or judge, but the guarantor of the law, in so far as human beings can create and apply laws.
The head of state had not only the right but – far more importantly – they had the duty to see that justice be fair and that mercy be equitable. In this country, we still have a king, and he is officially a Christian king at that.
This should make us think again and notice titles like “King’s counsel”, and “His Majesty’s signet”, as they are a quiet reminder of a tradition that wishes to serve the common good, for the sake of all peoples, of all religions and none.
It is one of the greatest political legacies of Christianity to the concert of nations of today.
Lords and Ladies, dear friends of the legal profession, as you go about your tasks in this new legal year, continue to reflect upon this high calling that you have on our behalf.
Be proud of your Christian heritage in law, and continue to strive for justice and mercy informed by our sense of duty towards our fellows.
May the Holy Spirit guide you and keep you all in the coming year. Thank you for listening, and God bless you!
