Lawyers Like the Good Shepherd, CLSC Red Mass, April 23, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Red Mass for Columbia Law School Catholics
Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Easter
April 23, 2024
Acts 11:19-26, Ps 87, Jn 10:22-30

To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• It’s great news that Columbia Law School Catholics have been founded and that we are having the first of one we hope will be hundreds of Red Masses in the decades and centuries ahead.
• Red Mass Tradition. 1243 by Pope Innocent IV for the ecclesiastical court. Grew quickly. Began judicial year. First Red Mass in the US was celebrated in 1928 by Cardinal Hayes at old St. Andrew’s Church, down by the courthouses.
• Holy Spirit. Seven-fold gifts.
• First called Christians in Antioch. Working together like Paul and Barnabas. Spreading faith like Cypriots and Cyrenians.
• Providential this Mass is taking place at the end of a mid-Easter Triduum dedicated to meeting the Risen Lord Jesus as Good Shepherd. Throughout John 10, Jesus shows us how he wishes us first and foremost to relate to him but he also indicates the type of transformation he wishes to see in us as his disciples, as we are transformed more and more into his image and seek to care for his sheep and lambs.
• There are several qualities he lists, meant to help every Catholic lawyer grow as a Catholic lawyer. :
  • He calls himself the Good Shepherd.
    • This is because there were many bad shepherds, whom he compared to thieves and marauders, who took advantage of the sheep, who milked them, sheared them, killed them, ate them. He, in contrast, used the adjective Good. He wanted what was best. He would sacrifice for them. He would love them
  • He knows his sheep and they know him.
  • He calls them by name
  • They sheep hear his voice.
  • They follow him.
  • He leads them to graze in green pastures. He feeds them. Word. Will. Material food. Eucharist.
  • He protects them from thieves and marauders. No one can take them from his hand.
  • He gives his life for them
  • He gives them to eternal life.
• This is what the Lord is meant to do for all of us. But these qualities are similarly meant to describe how good Catholic lawyers are supposed to serve.
  • They are called to be good not just in competence but in character. There are some bad lawyers who have given every lawyer a bad name. They don’t really care for their clients. They essentially use them and take advantage of them.
  • They need to know their clients, take a personal interest in them.
  • They need to call them by name. None is anonymous. None is just one more.
  • They need to be trusted so that they will be listened to.
  • They need to be trusted so that they will be followed.
  • They need to feed their clients, to help them to understand.
  • They need to protect their clients, as much as they can, from injustice, from bandits, from being exploited.
  • They need to sacrifice themselves for their clients.
  • They need to help them keep the big picture, to strive for what matters most, to guide them, we can say, not ephemerally eschatologically.
• It’s good for us to take an example of a lawyer who lived this way.
  • Last July I was in Zamora in northwest Spain. Tour of the Cathedral. Came across a tomb of a lawyer buried there, Venerable Luis de Trelles y Nogerol (1819-91). He has been declared by the Church to have lived the Christian life to an heroic degree.
  • He studied civil law at the University of Santiago de Compostela and, after graduating, taught there as a professor in 1839.
  • A year later he opened his own law firm and, in Vivero, La Coruña and Madrid, for several decades served as a “lawyer of the poor,” without receiving any compensation for that pro-bono work, fighting for justice for the oppressed. He succeeded in freeing 20,000 prisoners from death or captivity during his lifetime.
  • He served in the military, wrote for newspapers and magazines and was a Congressman. He was married to Adelaida and the father of three and adopted father to a fourth.
  • In this Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the US, he lived his life in communion with the Good Shepherd he would receive every day.
  • He also spent a lot of time receiving the counsel of the Eucharistic Lord.
  • He first encountered perpetual adoration in Paris in 1862 and it changed him. In 1868, he started it in Spain. By 1877, it had nocturnal adoration had spread to 50 different Spanish cities. He devoted long hours of prayer to Eucharistic Adoration. He died during nighttime adoration. He founded the Handmaids of the Eucharistic Jesus in 1881 in 30 different cities. He founded a magazine entitled, “Tabernacle Lamp” and wrote more than 10,000 pages.
  • He was a Good Lawyer because he was a Eucharistic Lawyer, capable of giving himself to others like the Good Shepherd laid down his life for him. He is called the 19^th century Apostle of the Eucharist, which is amazing for a layman.
  • He shows us the integration between being a top-notch lawyer and a thoroughly Eucharistic Catholic patterning oneself off the Good Shepherd.
• Work of the Holy Spirit is to form us to be like Jesus. Every Mass is a Perpetual Pentecost. We become witnesses, martyrs, with tongues of fire, with hearts of fire, going out.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Alleluia JN 10:27

R. Alleluia, alleluia.
My sheep hear my voice, says the Lord;
I know them, and they follow me.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.

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