The Red Mass Went Up My Ass

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The John Carroll Society is an organization for Catholic “professionals” in Washington, D.C., including doctors and judges who wear suits underneath their long white medical coats or flowing black robes, meting out a person's fate with the authority of the God they worship at Sunday Mass. As self-described laypeople in service to the Archbishop of Washington, I imagine their interpretation of faith unduly influences their day jobs.

Emboldened or terrified by the fall of Roe v. Wade, doctors and judges make ever more restrictive rulings about whether a pregnant patient, often a mother with living, breathing, clamoring children at home, is septic enough to provide the legal standard of care: a life-saving abortion. Providing anyone an abortion as a legitimate form of health care is—I’ve learned in nearly a decade as an abortion journalist—an oxymoron to a megalomaniac. 

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a member of the society before he also became the answer to its prayers, the closest thing to a SCOTUS swing vote on abortion. Every first Sunday in October, the John Carroll Society convenes an annual "Red Mass" to pray for the Supreme Court justices before the start of the judicial session the following day.

The Red Mass reduces the rest of us—you, me, and anyone who isn’t a conservative Catholic doctor or judge praying, delaying, and ruling away routine medical interventions—to a Hail Mary. I mean the idiom, not the prayer. I am sure we are not on their list of petitions to God the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. The only way to find out would be to stream the Red Mass on YouTube. 

I have never been inside the Red Mass, but the Red Mass has been inside me.

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