The Catholic Lawyers Guild of Queens County hosted its annual Red Mass and dinner reception Sept. 19 at the Immaculate Conception Center, Douglaston, to open the 2014-2015 judicial season.

Dioceses across the country traditionally celebrate Red Masses to coincide with the convening of the U.S. Supreme Court on the first Monday in October – Oct. 6 this year.

With the summer over, the Red Mass gave the Catholic Lawyers Guild, with its 350 members, a chance to reflect on the start of another judicial year.

“The court system gets back into high gear after Labor Day, so we are in for a busy season not only this fall but also the winter into the spring,” said Judge Peter J. O’Donoghue, a Queens Supreme Court justice and parishioner at Sacred Heart, Bayside. “We have a lot of various different legal issues to address, and this (Red Mass) gives us a little boost.”

 

The Catholic Lawyers Guild of Queens was founded in 1972, and the Red Mass began that same year. Initially, it was held in different locations each year but settled into the Immaculate Conception Center in 2006.

“The Catholic Lawyers Guild is an organization of attorneys and judges in Queens County that are all Catholic, and we try to do good works,” said Donna Furey, the guild’s president and a parishioner at St. Francis of Assisi, Astoria.

The organization’s main focus, Furey said, is giving out scholarships to law students – active in a Catholic parish – who go to school in Queens or are residents of the borough. Donations serve as the primary means to fund these scholarships.

Auxiliary Bishop Octavio Cisneros celebrated the Mass and preached the homily in which he spoke about how important it is “to know, to love and to serve God” in the context of the legal system.

“In your profession, you bring together your Catholic faith – the lens through which we see the world around us and discover God,” Bishop Cisneros said. “And you also bring the gift of reason and judgment.

“How difficult [it is], especially in your profession, to judge actions, evil and every conceivable wrongdoing without judging the individual in the very deep reality of his or her soul.”

Msgr. Gregory Wielunski, pastor of St. Pancras, Glendale, and former diocesan judicial vicar, serves as the religious moderator to the Queens Catholic Lawyers Guild and is responsible for coordinating the Red Mass – which gets its name from the bishop invoking the Holy Spirit upon the attorneys and judges. The readings for the Mass were the same as those used on Pentecost Sunday, in which the celebrating priests or bishops wear red vestments.