Massachusetts High Court Puts St. Michael in Storage

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has revived a discredited legal standard to keep two statues honoring police officers and firefighters locked away in storage.

The city of Quincy commissioned 10-foot statues of St. Michael, the patron saint of police officers, and St. Florian, the patron saint of firefighters, for its new public safety headquarters.

The city says the statues honor the courage, service, and sacrifice of first responders. Though both saints have religious significance, they are also widely recognized as professional symbols, with the Florian Cross appearing on fire department badges across Massachusetts.

Nevertheless, the state’s high court affirmed a preliminary injunction preventing the statues’ installation while a lawsuit proceeds. The court held that the plaintiffs are likely to prove that the statues violate Article 3 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights by implicitly favoring Catholicism over other faiths.

To reach that conclusion, the court relied on a state precedent that incorporates factors from the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) test. Lemon asked judges to examine a government action’s purpose and effect to determine if the action impermissibly “advanced” religion.

As Protect The 1st explained in an amicus brief, the U.S. Supreme Court abandoned this test after decades of subjective and contradictory rulings. The Court determined that Lemon had “invited chaos” and replaced it with an approach grounded in history and tradition.

The Massachusetts court acknowledged all this – and then marched backward. It insisted that Lemon’s factors remain useful under the state constitution, finding it significant that the statues are new, large, religiously recognizable, and unaccompanied by secular figures. It even treated local criticisms of the statues as evidence against them. That rewards opponents for generating the very “divisiveness” later cited as a constitutional defect – a heckler’s veto in judicial robes.

The ruling is preliminary, and the case now returns to Superior Court. Quincy has pledged to continue fighting.
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It should. St. Michael and St. Florian are familiar symbols of the bravery and self-sacrifice expected of first responders. Religious liberty is not advanced by scrubbing every religiously resonant symbol from public life – especially through a test the nation’s highest court discarded as unworkable.

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