The Red Mass and the Vestiges of Catholic Lawyering

Over the next few weeks, lawyers and judges will descend upon Catholic churches across the United States to celebrate the Solemn Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit—more popularly known as the Red Mass. Though the exact origins of this liturgical tradition are uncertain, it is commonly believed that the first Red Mass was celebrated in the early fourteenth century to “call upon God the Holy Ghost, the Third Person of the Trinity, to grant light and inspiration to the lawyer in pleading and to the judge in adjudicating during the coming term of court.” 

Six hundred years after Catholics began to celebrate the Red Mass in England, this liturgical tradition arrived on American shores. The first American Red Mass was celebrated in New York in 1928, and soon thereafter, Catholic lawyers began organizing Red Masses across the United States. In 1941, for example, the Red Mass tradition was inaugurated in Boston, and by the 1950s, Red Masses were regularly celebrated in more than twenty major American cities. 

During the twentieth century, the Red Mass became an increasingly prominent feature of the American legal calendar for reasons both demographic and philosophical. For one, the first few decades of the century were a period of substantial growth in the American Catholic legal community. Indeed, the first-generation American children of European Catholic emigrants increasingly saw entry into the legal profession as a reliable means of socioeconomic advancement. To serve this burgeoning population, numerous Catholic law schools were established before mid-century, including Creighton (1904), Fordham (1907), Loyola Chicago (1908), Marquette (1908), Santa Clara (1911), Gonzaga (1912), Loyola New Orleans (1914), Loyola Marymount (1920), Boston College (1929), and San Diego (1949). As more Catholics entered the legal profession and obtained positions of influence in domestic law and politics, so too did the Red Mass become increasingly well-recognized. 

These demographic realities aside, the Red Mass also grew in prominence during the twentieth century because of the distinctive philosophical claims that early and mid-twentieth-century Catholic lawyers made about the American legal tradition. In fact, the Red Mass tradition was inaugurated in Boston during the Second World War partly because the Jesuit dean of the Boston College Law School, William J. Kenealy, believed that the legal profession had erroneously abandoned the American legal tradition’s foundation: what the Declaration of Independence termed the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Contrary to the legal pragmatist’s view that “might makes right,” Kenealy argued before an audience of hundreds in his 1941 Red Mass sermon that the “majesty of law” does not consist of force, “[a]t least not physical force.” Rather, he proposed, the law’s majesty is a “moral power . . . arising from a free people’s realization that the law is the means, under Divine Providence, of enjoying in security the inalienable rights founded in their human nature by the natural law.” 

The 1941 Red Mass in Boston—co-sponsored by the Boston College Law School and the Archdiocese of Boston—occurred over a decade after the Archdiocese of New York’s inaugural celebration of the same liturgy. But Catholic leaders in Boston and New York shared a strikingly similar understanding of what wartime Americans should hear from their religious leaders. As the New York Times reported, Archbishop Francis J. Spellman emphasized at the 1941 New York Red Mass that the Declaration of Independence’s “principles” must be put into practice by the American people because “rectitude is the only guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

To be sure, most early and mid-twentieth-century Red Mass homilists did not articulate exceptionally nuanced legal philosophies—not least because the Red Mass is a liturgical celebration, not the occasion for an academic lecture. But these homilists did effectively communicate that American Catholics understood themselves as making a distinctive contribution to the legal profession. It should therefore come as little surprise that early and mid-twentieth-century Catholic lawyers critiqued those in elite legal institutions and those in comfortable political majorities who, in their view, failed to see the teaching and practice of law as more than the mere management of social disagreement. 

For example, interwar and wartime Red Mass homilists frequently took aim at academic theorists—especially legal realists—who rejected the law’s function as a teacher of moral rights and wrongs, and occasionally of moral absolutes. And decades later, some homilists took the occasion presented by the annual Red Mass to call even hostile Southern audiences to account for racial discrimination. These views—typically informed by the natural law tradition—were not always popular, and once even led former U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle to describe several Jesuit legal scholars as approaching the jurisprudence of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. with the “zeal and intolerance of the crusading fanatic.”

Today’s celebrations of the Red Mass are largely a vestige of a distinctive vision of Catholic lawyering—a vision that so animated the Red Mass tradition’s growth decades ago, and a vision that similarly animated much contemporaneous Catholic legal teaching and scholarship. With few exceptions, unfortunately, today’s American Catholic law schools—which often are (and have been) co-sponsors of annual Red Masses—fail to offer students distinctive professional formation, instead resembling in most meaningful respects their secular peers. 

As John Breen and Lee Strang have persuasively argued, the decline of a distinctive vision of Catholic legal education—and, I think, of Catholic lawyering—was not a historical accident, and was certainly not a historical inevitability. And so, perhaps this year’s celebrations of the Red Mass offer an opportunity for Catholic law students, teachers, administrators, and practitioners to reflect on the principles that underlie the vocation of a Catholic lawyer—and the practice of Catholic lawyering. At the least, taking advantage of this opportunity to do so may remind American Catholics of the many ways in which they can enrich today’s most pressing legal debates with the insights of an intellectual tradition that has persisted even longer than the observance of the Red Mass itself. 

Image by Villanova Law Library, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.