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The city of Quincy, Massachusetts wanted to honor its police officers and firefighters, so Mayor Thomas Koch [COKE] commissioned two ten-foot bronze statues to stand outside the city’s new public safety building. One of Saint Michael the Archangel, patron saint of police, and one of Saint Florian, patron saint of firefighters, both crafted by a sculptor in Italy at the cost of $850,000. They have been sitting in a storage facility in a neighboring town because Massachusetts’ highest court said they cannot be displayed.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the statues are so closely affiliated with Catholicism that placing them on a public building would amount to government preferential treatment of a particular religion — a violation of the state constitution. The ACLU backed the plaintiffs. No one presented evidence that the city had coerced anyone into worship, had funded a church, or had discriminated against a single resident. No one suffered any injury, but the court invented one anyway — the mere possibility that a passerby might perceive implicit government support for Catholicism.
Saint Michael and Saint Florian have been invoked by firefighters and police officers of every faith — Catholic, Protestant, and non-religious alike — for generations. The National Fraternal Order of Police acknowledged this in a brief before the court, saying that first responders of all stripes and religious creeds cherish both saints for their symbolic importance to the profession. The statues were chosen to honor courage and sacrifice.
There’s no honest conclusion to draw from the state court’s ruling other than the statues are simply too Christian. This is ironic, considering the stained glass in old courthouses, the Ten Commandments frieze on the Supreme Court’s own walls, the National Cathedral hosting state funerals. All of these reminders exist because our founding generation understood that acknowledging religion’s role in shaping civic virtue is not the same as establishing a church. The framers’ intent was clear, but atheists continue to try to litigate it out of existence.
This ruling hands the ACLU a powerful new tool to scrub religious references from public life by inventing injuries nobody suffered. If it stands, the damage will spread far beyond Quincy, Massachusetts. The defendants in this case have vowed to keep fighting, and it may well end up before the United States Supreme Court.
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