Law challenged in many ways: bishop

The
Catholic Weekly
Online

Sydney
8 February 2004

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Law challenged in many ways: bishop

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Law challenged in many ways: bishop

Bishop Anthony Fisher

The law in our country today is challenged in many directions, with not all laws good laws, says Bishop Anthony Fisher OP.

Delivering the homily at the 74th Red Mass celebrated by Cardinal Pell at St Mary’s Cathedral last Monday to mark the commencement of the 2004 law term, he told members of the legal profession that “we need just, merciful, wise, dare I say ‘holy’, lawmakers, judges and lawyers – men and women of conscience who will bring their principles to bear in their professional lives”.

Bishop Fisher said the law was challenged by “those who would compromise its reverence for human life, especially in its beginning and end; those who would equate all sorts of relationships with marriage and family life; those who would respond to perceived threats to security with suspension of rights; those who put the interests of the privileged and powerful before God’s little ones, the orphan and widow, the sick and poor, the stranger and refugee, the ones most in need of the protection of law”.

“There are obviously many viewpoints on what laws are best, as there are of interpretations of law and fact,” he said. “But it is not good enough to say that all views on these matters are equally valid and that therefore, in the end, it is all a matter of who has the power to impose what upon whom.”

Any jurisprudence “worthy of the name” must remain focused on justice and equity, he said.

Bishop Fisher spoke of the impact of terrorism. He said the Gospel and the law itself offer a mindset that is fundamentally counter-terrorist.

He urged the congregation to be “holy lawyers”, taking as their example lawyer saints such as Thomas a’Becket, Thomas More, Charles Borromeo, Francis de Sales and Blessed Frederick Ozanam. “What would a lawyer-saint look like in our age,” he asked. “Like you, I hope, practising your profession with integrity and skill and ordering to the glory of God that special counter-terrorist commonsense which is the law.”