Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney says Magna Carta, 800 years old this year, is "a very religious document".
Preaching in St Mary's Cathedral on 2 February at the Red Mass marking the start of the legal year, Archbishop Fisher, a former lawyer, said: "The first right recognised in the Magna Carta was religious liberty; the ecclesia Anglicana was to be free to order her affairs and enjoy her liberties 'unimpaired'.
"We are heirs to the idea that people should be free to believe what they will religiously, and given a wide latitude to worship and live according to their conscientious beliefs; this is not a case of making exceptions for benighted eccentrics, but a recognition of something essential to the flourishing of individuals and enriching for the community.
"At a time when even children are being beheaded for their beliefs in Syria and Iraq, when churches (sometimes with their entire congregations inside) are daily burned in Niger or Pakistan, when totalitarian secularists in some countries would exclude religious voices from public life and religious providers from community service, we cannot presume everyone respects religious liberty.
"Good laws, systems and practices don't happen in a vacuum: they depend upon a complex of ideals and practices, traditions and institutions. In this jurisdiction it is largely the Judeo-Christian inheritance upon which we draw, however under-appreciated that often is. In the face of international and domestic tensions, we must renew that social and spiritual capital, and that is a task for both Church and state, for high-minded jurists and down-to-earth citizens."
Archbishop Fisher referred to the siege in December in a cafe near the cathedral and Sydney's legal precinct, in which three people – including barrister Katrina Dawson – died, as raising important questions for law-makers and practitioners about the right balance between liberty and security, about responsibility for and responses to acts of terror, "about the very purpose and sources of law, and about the sometimes rival claims of justice, mercy and popular opinion".
The congregation at the Mass, organised by the St Thomas More Society, included Justice Tom Bathurst, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales (NSW); Justice Margaret Beazley, President of the NSW Court of Appeal; and Mr Brad Hazzard, the NSW Attorney-General and Minister for Justice.
Above: Magna Carta. Photo: courtesy of British Library
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