At the invitation of Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix, Arizona, Archbishop Raymond Burke, Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, celebrated Tuesday's Red Mass for legal professionals in St. Mary's Cathedral. He also preached the homily.
In our culture, “the law more and more dares to force those with the sacred trust of caring for the health of their brothers and sisters to violate the most sacred tenets of their consciences, and to force individuals and institutions to cooperate in egregious violations of the natural moral law,” he said. “In such a society, the administration of justice is no longer a participation in the justice of God, an obedient response to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, but a façade cloaking our own selfishness and refusal to give our lives for the sake of the good of all our brothers and sisters.”
“It is a society which is abandoning its Judeo-Christian foundations, the fundamental obedience to God’s law which safeguards the common good, and is embracing a totalitarianism which masks itself as the 'hope,' the 'future,' of our nation. Reason and faith teaches us that such a society can only produce violence and death and in the end destroy itself,” Archbishop Burke warned.
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Archbishop Burke is an excellent archbishop, and has been a considerable amount of help to "Summorum Pontificum" communities, especially for canonical questions.
His thought is clear, and reveals the very quintessence of the notion of law – both ecclesiastical and civil: without law, you only have the totalitarianism of the arbitrary, the famous "dictatorship of relativism". Law guarantees rights that are proportional with duties.