The director of the Ottawa-based Cardus Religious Freedom Institute has challenged Catholic judges and attorneys to transform their beliefs and convictions into daily action guided by love, mercy, and an unflagging commitment to truth – even if it harms their careers.

Speaking at a banquet following the Red Mass, celebrated annually at Holy Rosary Cathedral in honour of the legal profession, Father Deacon Andrew Bennett, an ordained deacon in the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, said Catholic lawyers, judges, paralegals, educators and law students have an obligation to follow the example set by St. Thomas More.

It was a theme foreshadowed by Archbishop Michael Miller in his Red Mass homily, delivered earlier in the evening, when he spoke of Catholics’ duty to be “mouthpieces of the truth of the Holy Spirit.”

St. Thomas More, the English lawyer and statesman martyred in 1535, famously refused to acknowledge King Henry VIII as head of the English Church and to agree with the annulment of the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

“Martyrs must be willing to bear witness to human dignity in their public lives,” said Father Deacon Bennett, who holds a PhD in politics from the University of Edinburgh.

“Whether they are doctors, lawyers, academics, clergy, students, or parents, they will willingly sacrifice social status, their employment, and experience public demonizing and shaming for their beliefs and actions.”

Martyrs must be willing to undergo public demonizing and shaming for their beliefs and actions, whether they're doctors, lawyers, or parents, said Father Deacon Andrew Bennett.

But such harsh consequences would not exist in a truly democratic and pluralistic society – one that not only welcomed but also encouraged diversity of opinion advanced in a peaceful manner, he said. Consequently, he again challenged his audience, this time to oppose the increasingly closed public square.

“We must reject an elite-driven totalitarianism that seeks to establish socially-correct and acceptable beliefs treating any peacefully held contrary view as deviant and something to be silenced,” he declared. “There must be no totalitarianism of accepted belief or accepted opinion in our country.”

But even if such repression exists, our Catholic faith “calls us to champion in the public square what we believe to be true,” he said.

Father Deacon Bennett, who served as Canada’s first Ambassador for Religious Freedom from 2013-2016, pointed also to St. John Henry Newman, the 19th-century English theologian and Catholic Cardinal, as an example of a Catholic who courageously lived out his faith in a hostile public square.

St. John Henry Newman, who will be canonized Oct. 13 in Rome, was a highly respected member of the Church of England, but “faced considerable public anger” when he abandoned Anglicanism for Catholicism. “While he did not suffer the red martyrdom of St. Thomas More, [Newman] faced considerable public opprobrium, shaming, and rejection for the belief he confessed,” Father Deacon Bennett said.

“Newman reminds us that we are not citizens of this world. We are sojourners here. We have an earthly country, but our homeland is that to which we owe the greatest allegiance …”

Earlier, Archbishop Miller pointed to the importance of humility in living out one’s life in the service of God. “The opposite of humility,” he said, “is pride, the root of all sin, and it shows itself … in arrogance, in claiming power, and trying to make a good impression on others.

“Pride seeks to please oneself, and likes being accepted and praised by others. It also turns us into cowards … unwilling to stand up for the truth.”

Father Deacon Andrew Bennett with the St. Thomas More Guild organizing committee.

The Red Mass banquet, which attracted more than 100 people, was sponsored by the St. Thomas More Lawyers’ Guild of B.C.

Guild chair Warren Smith said Bennett’s address was particularly timely. 

“Deacon Bennett offered some great insights on the critical importance of religious freedom in the public square,” Smith said, “and the role the legal community can play in helping to protect those rights.”