Washington’s archbishop, Cardinal Robert McElroy, on Sunday urged members of the U.S. Supreme Court—and other lawyers, judges and officers of the court assembled for the annual Red Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle—to act as instruments of hope in a nation divided by factionalism and troubled by political violence.

(Editors’ note: According to the archdiocese, the members of the Supreme Court did not attend today’s Mass because of a possible security threat.)

“We have witnessed the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the assault upon the Capitol,” Cardinal McElroy said, addressing the members of the court during his homily on Oct. 5. “Both mark the progression from civil dialogue to uncivil dialogue to force and fear.”

“It is certainly true that political violence has been a part of our history as a nation and that political dialogue has often been confrontational,” the cardinal said. “But we live at a moment in which politics is tribal, not dialogical, and where party label has become a shorthand for worldview on the most volatile topics in our national life. The result is explosive, within politics, family life and friendships.”

The United States has experienced a historic collapse of trust in civic, political and religious institutions, the cardinal said. “The benign examination of institutional life that is vital for societal health has turned into a corrosive instinct to attack every major institution,” Cardinal McElroy said. “As a consequence, the legitimacy of our very institutional infrastructure is at stake.”

Practitioners of law have an opportunity to restore that lost trust and hope, he added. “As students of the law, as leaders in the law, whether as judges or legislators or public advocates or as counsel, you are by that commitment privileged and obligated to raise the plane of our political and social discussion,” he said. “No group in our society has a greater capacity to remold our political discourse. No group has a deeper calling to bring hope.”

Reminding the congregation of the day’s Gospel reading (Lk 4:18-19), to “bring glad tidings to the poor…to proclaim liberty to captives…recovery of sight to the blind and to proclaim a year of favor to the Lord,” Cardinal McElroy urged his audience “to keep the poor and the powerless at the forefront of our thoughts and actions.”

In “every social and economic system they are disproportionately shut out from the rights and privileges that are vital to their well-being,” he said. “This includes our legal system. Whether they are those accused of crimes or those who are victims of crimes, or those who have been injured and seek civil redress, systemic inequalities in our legal system cry out for reform. Each of you has the capacity to be an architect of hope in this arena.”

A church tradition that dates back centuries, the annual Red Mass invokes God’s guidance and blessing on justices, judges, diplomats, attorneys and government officials. In the United States, the Red Mass has marked the opening of the Supreme Court’s judicial year.

“Our country is bound together not principally by ties of blood or a common history,” the cardinal told the congregation in his brief homily, “but by the aspirations of our Founders, which have been lived out with glory and with failure and revision throughout the past 250 years.”

Law “occupies a uniquely foundational position within American society,” the cardinal said, part of the reason “that women and men of the law have a particular and pivotal role in being signs and creators of hope in our nation.”

Healthy governmental, cultural, religious and economic institutions “are essential for the accomplishment of the common good,” the cardinal said. America’s courts and practitioners of the law can help restore the authenticity and authority of those institutions by reinvigorating “the countervailing forces in our government and society that constrain harmful accretions of power and delimit their proper scope.”

“By engaging constructively, dialogically and charitably” in a cultural conversation about institutions and power, “you can help to identify a pathway forward for us all,” he said.

The cardinal reminded the congregation that hope is the theme of this Jubilee Year and that according to church teaching, “hope orients us to the order of justice, peace and charity, leading us away from selfishness: ‘It keeps the human person from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal [joy]’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1818).

The cardinal began his reflection with a prayer for the men and women of the U.S. judiciary, “that God will constantly raise your eyes to wisdom, compassion and judgment; that you may be consoled when you feel torn or adrift, that in the deepest moments of achievement and satisfaction you might understand that God is at work in you; and that the nobility of your calling will sustain you through every adversity.”