{"id":2652872,"date":"2026-09-01T08:12:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T12:12:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignmassachusetts-court-says-town-cant-build-statues-of-christian-heroes-because-theyre-christian\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T08:17:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T12:17:08","slug":"utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignmassachusetts-court-says-town-cant-build-statues-of-christian-heroes-because-theyre-christian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignmassachusetts-court-says-town-cant-build-statues-of-christian-heroes-because-theyre-christian\/","title":{"rendered":"Massachusetts Court: Town Can&#8217;t Build Statues Of Christian Heroes"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Futm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignmassachusetts-court-says-town-cant-build-statues-of-christian-heroes-because-theyre-christian%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2652872&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled against quincy in blocking the installation of two large statues of St. Michael the Archangel and St. Florian outside a new public safety building. The court argued that the statues&#8217; religious imagery could imply government endorsement of Catholicism and subordination of other religions, thus violating principles of neutrality. This decision marks a departure from traditional interpretations that treat religious symbols as part of civic life, especially when they celebrate shared virtues like courage. Critics warn that the ruling sets a problematic precedent, suggesting that religious figures and symbols on public property could be seen as government-imposed endorsements of religion, which contradicts the longstanding understanding that acknowledging religious heritage does not equate to establishing a religion. Historically, public monuments of religious figures like Martin Luther King Jr. or Catholic missionaries have been accepted as part of American civic tradition. The ruling and its reasoning threaten to undermine the ability of cities to honor their history and traditions honestly. Experts and legal scholars contend that courts should recognise that such displays are expressions of cultural and religious heritage, not violations of the separation of church and state, and that misunderstanding this distinction risks erasing significant aspects of American history and civic identity.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Massachusetts\u2019 highest court just handed the ACLU a powerful new tool for scrubbing religious references from public life, and it did so by inventing an injury nobody has suffered. <\/p>\n<p>The Supreme Judicial Court <a href=\"https:\/\/protect.checkpoint.com\/v2\/r01\/___https:\/\/becketnewsite.s3.amazonaws.com\/20260820100022\/Massachusetts-Supreme-Judicial-Court-Decision-in-Fitzmaurice-v-Quincy.pdf___.YXAzOmNyY2E6YzpvZmZpY2UzNjVfZW1haWxzX2F0dGFjaG1lbnQ6OGU3YTRmMzMzOTc2ZjBkN2JhYWY2M2ViYjQ0N2FhZTY6NzpjMjU4OjQzZjc4YjRjNjBkMDdjYzdiNTgyOWYyYmJjNjFmNjcwNWYwYWU3NmQ3MTQzYmY5OWQwYjg5YmExNGEwM2VhMTk6cDpUOkY\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">blocked<\/a> Quincy, Massachusetts, from installing two bronze statues of St. Michael the Archangel and St. Florian outside its new public safety building, not because the city coerced anyone into worship, funded a church, or discriminated against a resident, but because the statues are new, large, and \u201cclosely affiliated with a particular religion.\u201d That\u2019s the entire violation: bronze that might make someone think of Catholicism. If that reasoning survives, it won\u2019t stop at two statues in Quincy. <\/p>\n<p>Quincy <a href=\"https:\/\/protect.checkpoint.com\/v2\/r01\/___https:\/\/www.ncregister.com\/news\/massachusetts-high-court-rules-against-saints-statues___.YXAzOmNyY2E6YzpvZmZpY2UzNjVfZW1haWxzX2F0dGFjaG1lbnQ6OGU3YTRmMzMzOTc2ZjBkN2JhYWY2M2ViYjQ0N2FhZTY6NzpkODFjOjc0YTYyNGIxNWFmYjg0NzBiNWMxYmYwN2U3YzM0ZDRjNjliNjk1OGY4YWUwYjgyMTg2YTEyYWJkOTM5NmFlYWE6cDpUOkY\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">spent<\/a> $850,000 building the statues to honor the police officers and firefighters who serve the city. Mayor Thomas Koch chose St. Michael and St. Florian because they capture something ordinary civic plaques cannot: courage that runs toward danger rather than from it, patrons those professions have invoked for centuries. The court didn\u2019t dispute that. It ruled the statues could still convey \u201cimplicit government support\u201d for Catholicism and, as a result, \u201csubordination of other religions,\u201d reviving in substance the very faulty inquiry the U.S. Supreme Court has spent the last several years dismantling under the federal establishment clause. <\/p>\n<p>Neutrality means treating religious and secular expression evenhandedly, not treating religious expression as inherently suspect the moment it appears on public property. A test that singles out statues for scrutiny because they are \u201cclosely affiliated with a particular religion,\u201d while a mural of secular civic virtues would draw no such review, is not neutral toward religion. It is hostile to it. Courts are not supposed to treat the mere visibility of a particular faith\u2019s iconography as a harm. When they do, they have crossed from neutrality into disapproval. <\/p>\n<p>The court\u2019s reasoning has implications well past two statues in Quincy. Martin Luther King Jr., an ordained Baptist minister and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, preached that America\u2019s civil rights struggle was, at its core, a theological one grounded in the <em>imago Dei<\/em>. Cities across the country have erected statues of him in the decades since his assassination. Under the court\u2019s reasoning, how long before someone argues that an MLK statue, freshly installed and unmistakably tied to his identity as \u201creverend,\u201d conveys government endorsement of Christianity or of his particular reading of Scripture? <\/p>\n<p>This impulse is not confined to East Coast elites. Secularists on the opposite coast have been pushing the same campaign against California\u2019s own great missionary. Protesters tore down Los Angeles\u2019 statue of Junipero Serra, the great Catholic missionary, in 2020. Other protesters in San Francisco toppled the Serra statue in Golden Gate Park, and another statue was removed by vote of the Ventura City Council that same summer. Come to think of it, Los Angeles and San Francisco join Saint Paul, Corpus Christi, Sacramento, and a host of other American municipalities that have names with religious pedigrees. The Quincy ruling supplies fresh legal architecture for that same argument, dressed up as constitutional caution rather than blatant religious discrimination. <\/p>\n<p>Quincy tried to make exactly this point to the Supreme Judicial Court. America has never treated the religious identity of a historical or civic figure as disqualifying from public commemoration. Statues of Junipero Serra, stained glass windows in old courthouses, the National Cathedral hosting state funerals, Ten Commandments friezes on the Supreme Court\u2019s own courtroom walls \u2014 all of it exists because the founding generation understood that acknowledging religion\u2019s role in shaping civic virtue is not the same as establishing a church. The Massachusetts high court brushed past that tradition. It preferred a test that asks whether a statue \u201cmight convey\u201d the wrong message to the wrong observer, a test with no limiting principle and no patience for the possibility that a first responder might take comfort in a patron saint watching over the job. <\/p>\n<p>What makes the ruling particularly tone deaf is its timing. Recent surveys show Gen Z, having grown up in the most secular environment American children have ever known, <a href=\"https:\/\/protect.checkpoint.com\/v2\/r01\/___https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/media\/catholic-conversions-rise-young-adults-hungry-truth-turn-faith-reject-secularism-bishop-says___.YXAzOmNyY2E6YzpvZmZpY2UzNjVfZW1haWxzX2F0dGFjaG1lbnQ6OGU3YTRmMzMzOTc2ZjBkN2JhYWY2M2ViYjQ0N2FhZTY6Nzo5MzNkOjBmODE4NWFmNGJhMWU1MmZjYTVkNmM4YzE5ZmQzZjI4NzRhMzMwMjJiM2Q0MGM4MGI0OTEzZGEzMDAzZjZjZjM6cDpUOkY\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">embracing<\/a> Catholic identity in numbers their parents\u2019 generation did not expect. Historians and legal scholars across the ideological spectrum increasingly acknowledge that religious conviction was not incidental to the republic\u2019s creation but constitutive of it. <\/p>\n<p>Courts applying the establishment clause at the federal level have begun to catch up to that reality and are replacing the reflexive suspicion of the <em>Lemon v. Kurtzman<\/em> era with a history-and-tradition inquiry that takes the nation\u2019s religious inheritance seriously rather than treating it as a problem to be managed. For over half a century, courts applying <em>Lemon<\/em> asked three questions of any law touching religion: Did it have a secular purpose? Did its primary effect advance or inhibit religion? Did it foster excessive government entanglement with religion? The three-part test sounded neutral in theory. In practice, it produced inconsistent rulings and frequently treated even minor public acknowledgments of religion as constitutional threats.<\/p>\n<p>The ACLU, pointing to a state constitution, hopes to resurrect <em>Lemon<\/em> under a different name. In an <a href=\"https:\/\/protect.checkpoint.com\/v2\/r01\/___https:\/\/becketnewsite.s3.amazonaws.com\/20260506100429\/Professors-Michael-McConnell-and-John-Witte-Jr-Amicus-Brief-in-Fitzmaurice-v.-Quincy.pdf___.YXAzOmNyY2E6YzpvZmZpY2UzNjVfZW1haWxzX2F0dGFjaG1lbnQ6OGU3YTRmMzMzOTc2ZjBkN2JhYWY2M2ViYjQ0N2FhZTY6Nzo4ZDNjOjBmNDYzN2QxM2EyMDViOGJjM2MwNGZhMDEzYmU3ZTU1ZWI5YWM0ZTY1ZTc4Njk2M2EwMjY4YTY3MTQ5ZjEzYzg6cDpUOkY\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">amicus brief<\/a> in support of Quincy, Stanford Law\u2019s Michael McConnell and Emory\u2019s John Witte Jr. warned the court exactly of this outcome. They also explained in <a href=\"https:\/\/protect.checkpoint.com\/v2\/r01\/___https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/opinion\/will-massachusetts-sour-on-religious-freedom-a6934d37___.YXAzOmNyY2E6YzpvZmZpY2UzNjVfZW1haWxzX2F0dGFjaG1lbnQ6OGU3YTRmMzMzOTc2ZjBkN2JhYWY2M2ViYjQ0N2FhZTY6NzplMGE5OjVjNjlkMWI4OTU0ZGU3NjFhNzA3ZTZmN2I4OTBmODBiYzgyNDQyYWM2NzNlNmU5ZTNhNWViZDUzNzk1Y2U3OWI6cDpUOkY\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">commentary<\/a> this past spring that nothing in the text of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights supports grafting onto it a test the U.S. Supreme Court itself has abandoned as unworkable. <\/p>\n<p>Neither the United States Constitution nor the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights requires government to scrub religious references from the public square. Neutrality was never meant to mean sterility. A city honoring its police officers and firefighters with the patron saints those men and women have invoked for generations is not establishing a religion. It is telling the truth about where a tradition of protection comes from. <\/p>\n<p>If courts cannot tell the difference between commemoration and establishment, the real casualty will not be the ACLU\u2019s preferred vision of a religion-free civic landscape. It will be every city\u2019s ability to honor its history honestly \u2014 saints, ministers, missionaries, and all. <\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is director of the Conscience Project. She is a mother of 10, a Stanford-educated lawyer, and appears frequently in Catholic and secular media to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/yes-its-constitutional-for-the-government-to-promote-christianity\/\" title=\"Yes, It&#039;s Con...itutional For The Government To Promote Chri...ianity\">discuss religious freedom controversies<\/a> and to lend her legal expertise when discussing judicial matters.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Massachusetts court blocks religious statues, invents injury<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1859,"featured_media":2652873,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Archangel-Saint-Michael.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33651],"tags":[84955,4733,37198,5610,84954],"class_list":["post-2652872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-western-journal","tag-christian-heroes","tag-court","tag-local-government","tag-massachusetts","tag-public-statues"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Archangel-Saint-Michael.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2652872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1859"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2652872"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2652872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2652881,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2652872\/revisions\/2652881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2652873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2652872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2652872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2652872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}