Mayor defends Statues of Santos in Public Building in the US and accuses opponents of anti -Catholic bias

A mayor of Massachusetts (United States) has defended the inclusion of statues of Dos Santos Católicos in the new public security building in the city, saying that he chose them for their importance for the police and firefighters, and accused the opponents of house “negative attitudes” towards Catholicism.

But the lawyers of local residents who oppose the planned bronze statues 3 meters high of San Miguel and San Florián say that the mayor is making non -Catholics “feel as second -class citizens” due to the statues, which, according to them, violates the constitution of Massachusetts by favoring a religion over another.

Both parties exchanged strong arguments in judicial documents recently submitted in a state demand filed earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and America United for the separation of church and state.

Thomas Koch, a practicing Catholic and Mayor of Quincy, a city of about 100,000 inhabitants to the south of Boston, wants to install on the facade of an upcoming public security building of 175 million dollars and 11,000 square meters of San Miguel Arcángel (Patron of the Police) and San Florián (Patron of the Firefighters). The statues are expected to cost around $ 850,000.

“I selected the statues of Miguel and Florián for installation in the public security building due to their status as symbols in police and firefighters around the world. The selection had nothing to do with Catholic holiness, but rather with an effort to raise morality and symbolize the values of truth, justice and the prevalence of good over evil,” Koch said in a affidavit presented last month.

“If Miguel and Florián had no importance in police and firefighters, respectively, he would not have selected them for the installation,” added the mayor.

The mayor is asking a judge to dismiss the lawsuit, which was filed on May 27 at the Norfolk County Superior Court in Didham.

But the lawyers of the plaintiffs, who are 15 residents of Quincy who oppose the mayor’s plan, described the statues earlier this week as “icons with unmistakable religious meaning”, pointing out that “the saints in general, and the patron saints in particular, are prominent within certain sects of Christianity, especially Catholicism.”

An “objective observer,” the lawyers of the plaintiffs argued, would see the statues as “permanent facilities that will invoke and transmit, continuously, the city’s preference for the Catholic religious doctrine.”

“The main effect of statues will be to promote religion on non -religion, and Catholicism on other Christian and non -Christian sects and denominations,” says a motion presented on Monday, August 4.

The plaintiffs seek a court order of the State Superior Court that prevents the city from installing the statues when the public security building is inaugurated, whose opening is scheduled for October 2025.

A judicial conference has been scheduled in the case for Tuesday, August 12.

A matter of Massachusetts law

The legal dispute revolves around the constitution of Massachusetts, not the constitution of the United States. Residents who oppose the statues have mainly appealed to state law.

During the colonial era and in the first decades of Independence, the Massachusetts government favored the congregational church on other denominations, forcing owners to keep their local congregational minister with their property taxes, they belonged or not to the Church.

In 1833, the congregational church lost its official status, and declared itself in a amendment to the State Constitution that “the subordination of one sect or denomination to another will never be established by law.”

Sometimes, disputes over that language reach the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, as could happen with the case of Quincy statues.

An example: in 1979, the highest court of the State confirmed the capacity of both the state Senate and the State Representatives Chamber to hire and pay a part -time chaplain for each chamber – both, at that time, Catholic priests – in a case called Colo v. Treasurer & Receiver General.

In that same case, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts adopted the call for the State Lemon testafter a 1971 case in which the United States Supreme Court established three criteria to determine whether a law that affects religious entities exceeds the constitutional examination: if it has “a secular legislative purpose”, if “its main or primary effect … neither promotes or inhibits religion”, and if it encourages “an excessive implication between the government and religion”.

In June 2022, after years of expressing skepticism about the Lemon test, the United States Supreme Court formally rejected it, in a case involved Prayers carried out by an American football coach of a high school In the state of Washington, called Kennedy v. Bremerton School District.

In the case of Quincy’s statues, the city’s legal advisor, James Timmins, argued in judicial documents presented on July 30 that, since the United States Supreme Court has rejected the Lemon test, “that evidence can no longer govern in Massachusetts either.”

But the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, which is the final interpreter of the State Constitution, has not heard a case on that point since then.

The lawyers of the plaintiffs in Quincy argue in judicial documents that, given that the highest court of the State has not departed from the Lemon evidence, the lower state courts must apply it, in addition to a fourth criterion that the Supreme State Judicial Court added in the Colo case of 1979: if a “challenged practice” has “divisive political potential”.

According to these criteria, the lawyers of the plaintiffs argue that the judge of the State Superior Court must deny the motion of the city to dismiss and issue a court order that prevents the installation of the statues.

Whatever the decision of the Judge of the Superior Court, if the case of Quincy reaches the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in appeal, the opportunity will provide the opportunity to review the Lemon evidence, including how the State Constitution applies to disputes that involve religion.

Translated and adapted by the ACI Press team. Originally published in the National Catholic Register.