The 2013 regular session of the Florida legislature has come to an end and the impasse between the Congressional Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate continues with no hint of progress on many fronts. It is enough to drive a person of feeling and compassion to despair. Little was done in Tallahassee of benefit to all the residents of the state (lobbyists for big business generally got what they sought) and a number of important matters were left on the table at the end because of the intractability of many members of the legislature.

Among the more egregious actions to my mind or in some cases inactions would be the following:

(1) The failure to come to any agreement about the expansion of Medicaid benefits for the poor under the Affordable Care Act which practically guarantees that over fifty million dollars and benefits which would have come to Floridians from the federal government will now find their way to another state. Shameless!

(2) Not only does the Florida legislature not wish to do away with the death penalty (as last week did the Maryland legislature and two years ago the New Mexico legislature) but they wish to speed up executions in the state. Establishing a strict timeline almost insures that the number of innocent people executed will increase (DNA results applied to Florida death-row inmates alone has resulted in a score of convictions of those planned to be executed in this state to be reversed but it took a lot of time). I hope Governor Scott vetoes this possibly prairie popular law.

In the interest of fairness, I do wish to acknowledge that additional protection for the pre-born has been provided this session and a long overdue increase in salary for public school teachers has been put in place as well.

Now, for the Washington scene, a major disappointment was the defeat of a very modest first effort at very limited gun control. It came close but not enough. Immigration reform now seems caught up in the party partisan debate and at times it seems like President Obama has decided he can not do anything about the Congress he has been dealt so doing nothing is a virtue. How many more Sandy Hooks (Newtown) or Auroras (Colorado) will it take, ladies and gentlemen of the House and Senate? Finally, there will be someday a national debate on drone missiles, but how much discussion on collateral damage and loss of innocent life will precede that?

Some may think that this bishop got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, but I hope a few of you can see the strong stream of Catholic moral theology which courses throughout political debate and decisions. Thirty years ago last Saturday, the bishops of the United States issued their pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response.” It had its critics but it also had its effects, all salutary. Today it would seem that corporately, we bishops, at times, solely tend to focus on abortion, contraception, euthanasia when once all “life and death issues” were a part of a “seamless garment.” No political party I know of is truly and fully pro-life. No legislative body either, at the state or federal level, is truly and fully pro-life. Hence, a pox on all their houses.

+RNL

HOMILY AT THE PRAYER VIGIL TO ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY

Cathedral of St. Jude the Apostle

April 10, 2013

Most Reverend Robert N. Lynch, Bishop of St. Petersburg

Giving the homily at the prayer vigil. Photo kindness of Sabrina Burton Schultz. To see a few more photos from the prayer vigil, please click here.

For the first time in my seventeen years as bishop of this diocese, the consequences of a heinous crime and the application of the death penalty has come to our area and in just a few minutes Larry Mann will himself experience death by lethal injection. My thoughts first go out to the family of Elisa Nelson, the young girl brutally murdered by Mann over three decades ago who are hoping that the death of this man will help bring closure to their long period of grief and suffering. No one, least of all myself, can speak of their experience of the loss of a daughter in an unspeakable way which this family has lived with. It would be tragic not to take this moment to pray for the Nelson’s and to commend again their darling daughter Elisa to eternal rest with God.

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul and all the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace.

We gather this evening also to pray for the abolition of the death penalty in our state. We take as articles of faith that even one who has fully violated the fifth commandment, Thou shalt not kill, should not have their life taken by anyone other than the author of all life, the Lord God. All of the modern popes since the Second Vatican Council have spoken to the issue of capital punishment. While all have allowed it in the narrowest of circumstances, it was Blessed Pope John Paul II who said that it should be extremely rare. It is extremely hard to be pro-life when it comes to its beginning and postulate the arguments against abortion and still be for capital punishment. That same heart and mind which abhors the horror of abortion should logically abhor the state deciding who will live and who will die.

Proponents of the death penalty argue that justice can only be served when one violent act is responded to by another. As a child, my parents always taught us that two wrongs do not make a right. When “right dwells in the desert” and “justice abides in the orchard”, then the great prophet Isaiah promises that “justice will bring about peace; right will produce calm and security.” After over two hundred years of the exercise of the death penalty, there is no valid evidence that it reduces crime, that murders diminish, and that the people live in greater security. It is not and never has been a deterrent.

Florida’s use of the death penalty is one of the most egregious in the nation. It does not take the same unanimous jury which convicted the felon in the first place to initiate the death penalty. In fact, it only takes seven out of twelve members of a jury to recommend death, by lethal injection or the electric chair. Only one state in the union shares this sad statute with ours. Our elected judges can overrule a jury and assign the death penalty if they do not concur with the jury’s recommendation in capital cases. Death comes cheaply in Florida in our statutory law.

In the last two years, the governors and legislatures in two more states have abolished capital punishment: New Mexico and Maryland. Tonight we pray once again that what the rest of the world views as a barbaric response to admittedly heinous crimes becomes rarer and rarer to use our Holy Father’s words. “Forgiving one another as God has forgiven” us is part of our religious DNA. It is why we are here tonight. We use this occasion of yet another moment in Florida’s sad history to pray to God, the author of all life, to enlighten the hearts and minds of our people and elected officials and remove this last statutory remnant of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

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Thomas A. Horkan. Photo courtesy of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Thomas A. Horkan, the first director of the Florida Catholic Conference (now known as the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops (FCCB)), is soon to enter eternal life. According to his children, no one could be more willing and ready than Tom and he knows his situation. Thus, before he leaves us, I wish to add my memories of this grand man. I first became involved with State Catholic Conference in 1969 when I was hired as a layman to staff the Ohio Catholic Conference’s new office of Government Programs in the Education Department. State Catholic Conferences were still relatively new at that time and only about twelve states had genuine state Catholic Conferences fully staffed. In 1970, all of the directors met for their summer meeting in Columbus, hosted by our state director, Ted Staudt. It was that August that I met Tom Horkan of Florida for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful, unfailingly kind and bright as could be, Tom made no effort to impress anyone but did so nonetheless.

State Conferences of bishops were an early outgrowth of the Second Vatican Council and its invitation to the Church to invite competent lay people to represent the case of moral values to the political arena. Prior to that, bishops were the only trusted spokespersons before governmental officials. Almost every nascent state Catholic Conference in existence in 1970 had a lay man as Executive Director (soon a religious sister and a religious brother would accede to that role in Michigan and Texas). It was an exciting time. Ohio and Pennsylvania had tuition tax credits for parents of private school children, it was before Roe v. Wade, and the era of abortion simply on request was unthinkable. I learned at that first summer meeting in Columbus that the true wisdom of church-state relations rested with a few of its directors, like Tom Horkan. He told me how he had been practicing law in Miami when its first Bishop/Archbishop, Coleman Francis Carroll asked him to move to Tallahassee and begin to represent the Church before the government of the state of Florida. He told me that he and his wife were full of misgivings, not about representing the Church but about picking up, leaving the practice of law in Miami and moving to faraway Tallahassee. I asked him how he got along with Archbishop Carroll who had something of a national reputation for being irascible and he told me that the Archbishop trusted him and they got along swimmingly, and indeed they did.

After Roe, the pro-life effort within the Church began to grow significantly and Florida, under Horkan’s leadership, began to expand staff to meet the growing needs and expectations of a growing Church. Soon the state Catholic Conferences began to do more than simply represent the Catholic Church before the three branches of government in state capitals. They started serving as coordinating offices for schools, religious education, health care, etc. Tom Horkan had an expert eye for choosing great staff, one of whom, Dr. Michael McCarron, remains as Horkan’s only successor to this day. But a great measure of the success of our state Catholic Conferences was not how they satisfied the Church they served, but the respect and esteem they gained from legislators and members of the Executive branch. To this day, we continue a practice begun by Tom Horkan of meeting with the governor once a year and we often are the recipients of gratitude for the integrity and assistance which our women and men in the FCCB in Tallahassee have and share. Tom Horkan got it all started well and he served with honor and distinction, a true Catholic layman as envisioned by the fathers of the Second Vatican Council and a cherished person in the history of the Church in Florida for over fifty years. With failing eyesight but unfailing mental acuity behind the scenes and never interfering since his retirement, he remains a fountain of wisdom to many. There are many priests, religious sisters and brothers who stand out as bright lights of the Church on the Florida peninsula, but Thomas Horkan in the modern era stands alone for his love of and service to the Church of his baptism.

Tom, I hope Mike McCarron or your daughter can read this to you today and I regret that I am unable to be at your bedside, but I will do everything I can to be present at your funeral as you have been present to me during my fifty years of service to the Church we love. May the angels lead you into paradise, dear friend. You have earned a place in eternal life with your wife so keep working for us that have not yet earned fully our entrance “ticket.”

+RNL

This Thursday the Catholic Church in the United States will begin to observe what has been entitled a “Fortnight for Freedom.” I will not retrace the steps which have led the Church in this country to this point, as I have addressed them several times here and anyone reading even the secular press knows that we and other religious leaders feel that religion is witnessing a major reduction in the liberties and freedoms which it has long enjoyed in recent years. The Fortnight, therefore, is an attempt to move the growing conscious awareness of what is happening into as many Catholic homes and minds as possible for reflection and prayer. I will celebrate a special diocesan Mass at St. Paul’s Catholic Church on Dale Mabry North in Tampa (map and directions) on Friday, June 29, 2012 at 7:30pm and I hope as many people as can will come and pray with me for a restoration of those liberties which we have lost and an end to future incursions into classic American freedom of religion. Your parish should be doing some other things to support the effort of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB), especially through special prayers at Mass during the Intercessions, bulletin announcements and as some parishes have done already, evening reflections and presentations on the issues involved. The Fortnight will be brought to a conclusion on Independence Day, the Fourth of July, with the ringing of Church bells at noon.

While I am appreciative and supportive of this national effort, I am also extremely concerned about the passage this Fall of two amendments to the Florida State Constitution: Amendment Six which would guarantee that no federal or state monies would be spent on abortions, and Amendment Eight which would eradicate the long-standing Blaine Amendment in our present constitution which precludes the use of any state monies for the support of any religious enterprise. Why do our children not get rides on school buses in this state? The Blaine Amendment. Why do our children not get access to textbooks for secular non-religion courses in our schools? The Blaine Amendment. Worried that one cannot go to the political well too often, I hope our parishes and institutions will work hard this fall in passing both of these important amendments to our state constitution. The history of the Blaine Amendment in the US is deeply rooted in anti-Catholic bigotry and should be an embarrassment to all fair and open-minded citizens. So, while we will cooperate and participate in the Fortnight for Freedom, I have these two other matters in my mind and know we will have to work hard to pass them. Florida statute requires a 60% “yes” vote on amendments to the Constitution for passage and that is a sizeable challenge.

There is a lot on the civic stove cooking at this moment and I hope you will walk these various paths with me and with the Church to achieve important changes in attitudes and law.

+RNL