Justice Antonin Scalia was prayerfully offered up by his son Paul and Washington’s political and legal elite Saturday in a formal but simple funeral Mass in the American Catholic Church’s grandest venue.
Vice President Biden, all of the living Supreme Court justices with whom Scalia served save one, congressional leaders and the city’s legal establishment were among the thousands who attended the ceremony in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
Washington Archbishop Cardinal Donald Wuerl welcomed the crowd to the largest Catholic church in North America, and he drew laughter when he said it was a proper setting for the Scalia family’s request for a “simple family parish Mass.” An angelic-sounding choir and scores of white-robed priests filled the massive chamber.
But despite the setting, the ceremony was free of the encomiums that mark the send-offs of Washington’s political class. Instead, it followed the dictates of religion and placed the emphasis on the Christian promise of resurrection.
Paul Scalia said his father was a “practicing Catholic” in the sense that he was not yet perfect.
“We are gathered here because of one man,” Paul Scalia said. “A man known personally to many of us, known only by reputation to even more. A man loved by many, scorned by others. A man known for great controversy and great compassion.”
He paused. “That man of course is Jesus of Nazareth. It is he who we proclaim.”
It was a fitting service for Scalia, who died Feb. 13 at 79. He was a devout Catholic and was the member of the Supreme Court most vocal about his religion. He urged fellow intellectuals to be “fools for Christ” and once used an interview to underscore his belief in the existence of the Devil, whose latest maneuver, he said, “is getting people not to believe in him or in God.”
Scalia had made known his view that weddings and funerals “but especially funerals, are the principal occasions left in modern American when you can preach the Good News not just to the faithful, but to those who have never really heard it.”
Thomas ended his reading with the verses: “If while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, once reconciled, will we be saved by his life? Not only that, but we also boast of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”
“The Mass is a celebration of Christ’s sacrificial death for our sins,” said Chad C. Pecknold, a theology professor at the Catholic University of America, adjacent to the basilica. Long eulogies about the deceased distract from that central point.
Scalia said he did not approve of flowery eulogies. “Even when the deceased was an admirable person–indeed, especially when the deceased was an admirable person–praise for his virtues can cause us to forget that we are praying for, and giving thanks for, God’s inexplicable mercy to a sinner.”
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