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Nation’s quality ‘can be judged from its laws’
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| 3 February, 2013 |
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| LAW YEAR BEGINS: Cardinal Pell greets Supreme Court justices on the steps of St Mary’s Cathedral after the Red Mass. (Photo: Kerry  Myers) |
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Christianity liberated women with the Judeo-Christian teaching of radical equality for men and women and the demands of exclusive, lifelong marriage between a man and a woman, said the Archbishop of Sydney, George Cardinal Pell.
“For Christians a woman was no longer something like a possession of her father or husband to be disposed of at will,” he said.
Delivering his homily at the annual Red Mass at St Mary’s Cathedral on Tuesday, the cardinal said the quality of life of every nation can be “judged from the quality of its laws, the wisdom of the legislators and the integrity of those who administer the law”.
“On this score we have many reasons for gratitude and in every Red Mass we thank God for this blessing and for those who handed down these good things to us here in Australia,” he said.
“I think someone has explained the function of the law as placing tolerable limits to the intolerable.
“The law is also instructive, almost automatically, for many people who believe that what is legal must be moral.
“This is not necessarily true and Christians certainly acknowledge that sinful or immoral activity need not be illegal.
“However, the law by itself cannot persuade people to be good and just, to have hope and purpose, to go beyond the minimum required and practice self-sacrifice.
“These tasks have traditionally belonged to religion.”
He added: “This is what the Old Testament prophet Isaiah was doing as he exhorted the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah to cease evildoing, to learn to be good, to search for justice, help the oppressed, plead for the widow and care properly for the orphan.”
“The tide is not swimming with religion in Australia, although only one in five are without religion, so it is interesting to wonder what society might be like without Christian values, institutions and communities,” he said.
Those at the Red Mass, which celebrates the commencement of the law term, included the NSW Attorney-General, Greg Smith, Bernard Coles, former president of the NSW Bar Association, John Dobson, president of the NSW Law Society, and Prof Gerard Ryan, Dean of the School of Law at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney.
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