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| 'TRUTH OF THE CROSS': The Chief Justice of NSW, Justice James Spigelman, smiles as he leaves St Mary’s Cathedral after the Red Mass. At left is Archbishop Mark Coleridge.
Photo: Kerry Myers |
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The challenge for those charged with the administration of the law is to find the point where law, justice and mercy meet in a way that respects both the needs of society and the dignity of the human being, says Archbishop Mark Coleridge.
Delivering his homily at the annual Red Mass at St Mary’s Cathedral on Monday, Archbishop Coleridge, Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn, said the mercy of God knows of crime and punishment, but “looks beyond to see more”.
"Within the logic of crime and punishment, the penalty must fit the offence," he said. “Often enough, this is a culture which identifies the offender wholly with the offence.
“There is, it seems, nothing more to the offender than the offence, and the punishment must match that perception.
“Mercy, however, looks at the offender, sees the offence as it really is, but sees more. It sees that there is more to the offender than the offence. This is to see as God sees.”
Archbishop Coleridge said the God of mercy sees the truth of each of us in ways beyond imagining.
“He sees our sin, but he sees more,” he said.
“He knows that we are more than our offence, and he loves the more that he sees. In looking at the human being, what God sees in the end is the face of his Son.
“However disfigured it may be on Calvary, it is still the face of the beloved Son that God sees; and here at this altar we too look on the One whom we have pierced (cf. Zech 12:10; John 19:37), and we glimpse the full truth of the human being.”
The archbishop said without the Holy Spirit, the law becomes an “earth-bound exercise of power” where we may have “prescriptions and penalties but little justice and no mercy”.
“Therefore: may the Spirit of God come upon you, so that the law-courts will be places not only of justice but also of grace, places where the crucifix may not be found but where the truth of the Cross is inscribed on the hearts of those, like you, to whom the work of the courts is entrusted,” he said.
The Red Mass celebrates the commencement of the Law Term.
Archbishop Coleridge was the principal celebrant, with concelebrants Fr Peter Joseph, spiritual director, St Thomas More Society, and Fr Paul Stenhouse MSC. [The patron of the St Thomas More Society, George Cardinal Pell, who normally says the Mass, is in Rome.]
Those in attendance at the Mass included NSW Chief Justice James Spigelman; Court of Appeal president Justice James Allsop; Chief Judge at Common Law, Justice P Mcclellan; Justices of the NSW Supreme Court; Mary Macken, president of the NSW Law Society; Bernard Coles, senior vice-president of the NSW Bar Association; NSW Attorney-General John Hatzistergos; shadow Attorney-General Greg Smith; Prof Gerard Ryan, dean of the University of Notre Dame Law School, Sydney; and Richard Perrignon, president of the St Thomas More Society.
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