1/6/2017 Alabama Attorney General: Speeches and Articles

Commencement Speech by Attorney General Bill Pryor to the 1997 McGill­Toolen Graduating Class Archbishop Lipscomb, Father Shields, Members of the Faculty, Distinguished Graduates, Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends in Christ. Seventeen years ago, when I sat as a graduating senior in this very auditorium, I had one prayer ­­ Lord please guide this speaker to give a short commencement address. Tonight, I have a different perspective, but the same prayer as I am humbled to have the privilege of participating in this commencement ceremony. I will keep in mind my prayer. It's not often one gets the chance to answer his own prayer. A century ago, Felix McGill founded a free school for boys known as McGill Institute. All of us here tonight owe a great debt of gratitude to Felix McGill. As a second generation McGillian, an alumnus of McGill­Toolen, the son of a longtime member of this faculty, and the brother of an alumnus who is a former member of this faculty, I can say unequivocally to the graduates tonight that you are fortunate to have been educated at this distinguished school. And you are to be congratulated for mastering its coursework. Tonight, I challenge you, the Class of 1997, to face the future of our Church, our Nation, our State, and our community by building upon the Catholic tradition that you have learned and inherited here. Pope Paul VI said, If you want peace, work for justice. Those words have been interpreted in more ways than perhaps any words of a pontiff in this century. As we face a new millennium, however, I submit that you, the Class of 1997, will live in a decisive moment or, to use the Greek term, Kairos, a fullness of time. I charge you to give clear meaning to the words of Paul VI with your firm grounding in Catholic tradition. You will have the opportunity to work for peace building on the teachings and traditions of Augustine and Aquinas in the special context of the American experiment at a time of moral and spiritual crisis. In the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote in The City of God, Pax est tranquillitas ordinis, ­­ Peace is the tranquillity of order. That definition of peace can be found today in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. As a Christian, Augustine understood that the peace of earth is the peace of Babylon, not the peace of Heaven. As a Christian, Augustine was humble enough to understand that in this life we cannot eliminate poverty, conflict, crime, pain and suffering because earth remains the world of sin.

It is useful to recall this teaching as we enter the next millennium, because we should not forget the lessons that abound at the end of this millennium. The great utopian experiments of our century, namely Marxism and Fascism, have, in the main, been discarded by their surviving victims. Those experiments were not Christian in nature, for Christians are realists, not utopians. We know that the peace of Heaven, the City of God, awaits and cannot be constructed by man. In medieval Christendom, St. Thomas Aquinas developed and refined the Augustinian understanding of tranquillitas ordinis to explain that it is found in a rightly ordered political community ­ a community that is founded on the principle of the consent of the governed. In this century, but before the members of the Class of 1997 were born, John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit priest and the preeminent American Catholic theologian, explained to this Nation why the promise of America is rooted in the Catholic understanding of tranquillitas ordinis. Murray explained: The first truth to which the American Proposition makes appeal is stated in that landmark of Western political theory, the Declaration of Independence. It is a truth that lies beyond politics; it imparts to politics a fundamental human meaning. I mean the sovereignty of God over nations as well as over individual men. . . . [T]he first principle of the American political faith is that the political community, as a form of free and ordered human life, looks to the sovereignty of God as to the first principal of its organization . . . The affirmation in Lincoln’s famous phase, this nation under God, sets the American proposition in fundamental continuity with the central political tradition of the West. Father Murray further declared, The epistemology of the American Proposition was made clear by the Declaration of Independence in the famous phrase: "We hold these truths to be self­evident . . .. " The sense of the famous phrase is simply this: There are truths, and we hold them, and we here lay them down as the basis and inspiration of the American project, this constitutional commonwealth. The American experiment is not a theocracy and does not establish an official religion, but the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are rooted in a Christian perspective of the nature of government and the nature of man. The challenge of the next millennium will be to preserve the American experiment by restoring its Christian perspective. Catholic writer George Weigel explains the nature of the crisis in this way: Two decades into the third century of that experiment, it is no longer clear that the tricentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence will take place in a country living in continuity with its moral­cultural roots. Should the historic American attempt to achieve a vital democratic pluralism in which self­governance is possible (because the people have formed and sustained the moral habits ­ the virtues ­ necessary for self­governance) collapse; should the American experiment decay into a republic of established and governmentally enforced secularism; then the American experiment as understood by George Washington, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, and Dean Acheson will have failed. The external forms of democracy ­ elections, legislatures, governors and presidents, courts ­ may remain, but they will be hollow. And their endurance over time will be dubious, at best. For the American people, required to divest themselves of their deepest convictions in order to enter public life, will no longer be able to give a persuasive public account of their commitment to democratic republicanism. This crisis has two faces. The first is the increasing secularization of our Country. The second is the erosion of self­government. The primary catalyst for both of these disturbing trends is, in my judgment, the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1962, with its decision prohibiting prayer in public schools, the Supreme Court began building a wall that has increasingly excluded God and religion from our public life. The Supreme Court has excluded Nativity scenes from public buildings during Advent and prohibited prayers at public school graduation ceremonies. Our government, succumbing to the courts unsound mandates, has become hostile to religion.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031003170732/http://www.ago.state.al.us/speeches.cfm?Item=Single&Case=31 1/2 1/6/2017 Alabama Attorney General: Speeches and Articles Today in this State we debate and litigate whether a display of the Ten Commandments, the cornerstone of law for Western Civilization, can be kept in a courtroom in Gadsden. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is often uncivil and tramples upon liberty, wants to remove that display and end the practice of beginning jury assembly sessions with a Christian prayer led by an unpaid, volunteer, local clergyman, sometimes Catholic and other times Protestant. No taxpayer funds are involved and no one is required to participate. If these acknowledgments of God must be excluded from our state courtrooms, will the Supreme Court of the United States then remove the multiple references to the Ten Commandments in its courtroom? Will federal courts end their practice of beginning sessions with the prayer, God save the United States and this Honorable Court? Will our national motto In God we trust be removed from our currency? How far will we allow the proponents of secularism to go in excluding religion from public life? Or, will these practices survive merely because the Supreme Court determines that the practices no longer mean anything? In the years following the school prayer decision, it seems our government has lost God. This reminds me of a story about two children, Caroline and Victoria. The parents of these rambunctious little girls were having difficulty imposing discipline, as were the teachers at their school. Exasperated, the parents sought the assistance of their parish priest, who offered to speak with each girl separately. When Victoria, the youngest, met with the priest, sitting in a large chair that swallowed her, the priest sat behind a large desk and stared down at the shaken child. In a firm voice the priest asked Victoria, where is God? Victoria sat in silence and did not move a muscle. Again, a little louder, the priest asked, Victoria, where is God? Victoria's eyes grew larger, but she said nothing. Finally the priest leaned over the desk and thundered, WHERE IS GOD? At that, Victoria darted from the room, dashed down the hall and burst into the room where Caroline waited. What's wrong Victoria? Caroline asked. Victoria looked her sister in the eye, shed a tear, and whispered, The adults have lost God, and they are trying to blame us. While our government may have lost God, I assure you our people have not.

The second and closely related crisis created by our Supreme Court involves the erosion of self­government. On January 22, 1973, seven members of that court swept aside the laws of the fifty states and created ­­ out of thin air ­­ a constitutional right to murder an unborn child. Last year, the Court swept aside the vote of a majority of the people of Colorado to end any preferences or special privileges for homosexuals in their state. Recently, lower federal courts struck down laws that prohibit assisted suicide. The most important decisions of our time and our country are not being made by the people or their elected representatives. The Supreme Court has restructured our political community without the consent of our people, in my judgment, and has violated the Christian understanding of tranquillitas ordinis. I submit that a government that does not allow its people, by a majority vote, to restrict the murder of innocent life or the assisted suicide of some of our most vulnerable citizens is not a rightly ordered political community, and that the same government should restructure itself first by restoring its perspective of the nature of government and the nature of man. Our challenge, and especially your challenge, in this next millennium will be to end this trend and restore the American experiment. To meet the challenge, we must have, among others, the leadership of the graduates of Catholic schools, who follow in the footsteps of Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court Justices who do understand, and the great graduate of McGill Institute, Admiral Jeremiah Denton. The two greatest moral problems in American history ­ slavery and segregation ­ were resolved when Christians demanded justice. You must enter the public square and share your Christian heritage with your community and your government. You must live the Gospel and teach it to your children. But I urge you not to be deceived by the false promise of utopians that we can somehow create the peace of Heaven here on earth. Our challenge is to build better structures for securing justice, whether in our economy, our culture, or our government. That is the heritage of our Catholic Church and our Nation. Thank you and God Bless You.

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