The 376th Lion Sermon: Faith, Justice and Hope

A full transcript of the sermon is available below.

Professor Vincent Rougeau

On Thursday 16 October, more than a hundred people gathered at St Katharine Cree for the 376th Lion Sermon, preached this year by Professor Vincent Rougeau, President of the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. The Choral Evensong was led by Revd Josh Harris and Lloyd’s Choir.

Our congregation was international and richly ecumenical, with many Catholic friends joining to share in this centuries-old tradition that celebrates faith in the City of London and its power to illuminate public life.

Professor Rougeau spoke about faith, democracy and belonging, drawing on his own family’s involvement in the civil rights movement and connecting it to the struggles of migrants and refugees today. Reflecting on the legacy of those who stood for justice, he reminded us that “acknowledging the ugliness that at times surrounds us isn’t an act of despair. Rather, it’s a pathway to hope.”

Calling Christians to accompany one another as Christ did, he urged us to “transcend fear, avoid hate and move toward love,” and to use whatever privilege we have “to care for others.” His words resonated deeply across traditions, reminding all present that faith can still renew the civic and moral life of our societies.

The Lion Sermon continues to be a living witness to courage, compassion and conviction in the heart of the City. The 2026 Sermon will be on Wednesday 14th October at 6pm and you can pre-register to attend now.

You can read the 2025 sermon below or download a copy.

The 376th Lion Sermon full text - Prof Vincent Rougeau.pdf

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The 376^th Lion Sermon

Given by Professor Vincent Rougeau

at the Guild Church of St Katharine Cree on Thursday 16^th October 2025

Good evening. It’s an honor and a true privilege to be here with you tonight. To stand in a church whose history stretches back to the 13th century is both humbling and deeply moving. I’m filled with gratitude for the invitation to join you for this historic occasion.

Last month, I reflected and debated about what to share with you this evening. Then one day, a New York Times push notification popped into my phone. It read, “A Lion of Civil Rights.” As the president of a Jesuit, Catholic institution, I believe God routinely appears to us in our everyday life. It was easy to connect the two.

The notification linked to the obituary of Joseph McNeil. While a young college student, McNeil organized one of the most prominent early sit-in demonstrations during the 1960s American civil rights movement. His actions inspired thousands of others to pursue acts of civil disobedience in cities and towns across the U.S. One of those inspired youths was my father who, after leading a similar protest, was expelled from university and jailed for two months in solitary confinement.

McNeil’s protest, and my father’s, were cries for an acknowledgement of their dignity as human beings. Their actions issued a challenge to the social and legal structures at the time, structures that, in words, enshrined the equality of all citizens, yet in reality, encouraged something very different. Sadly, their protests arose from conditions not unlike those endured by many immigrants and migrants in the United States today.

Every day in the US men, women, and children are rounded up by masked, armed agents, who show no identification and act without warrants. These are people who live amongst us and work alongside us. They are often approached based on their physical features, most often the color of their skin, or because they are not speaking English. Many are forcibly dragged from cars after these agents shatter the windows. Agents corner the unsuspecting in their workplaces or arrest them outside courtrooms after they appear for immigration hearings. It is not at all unusual that the irregularities in their immigration status–should they exist at all–are minor. Some are ultimately able to prove that they are US citizens, perhaps after spending days or weeks in detention. Many more disappear, deported to countries they have never known or returned to a place of poverty, fear, and maybe certain death.

As my father and Joseph McNeil knew back in the 1960s, when you have been targeted as an outsider or a sub-human other, your individuality is effaced and your rights are limited to the ones those in power choose to recognize.

When government power presents itself as armed, masked and unaccountable, it is not difficult to understand why many are afraid. It seems prudent to remain silent. Despite having abundant resources and political influence, major American law firms, universities, and corporations have moved to appease those in power. They hope to avoid becoming the targets of lawsuits, investigations, funding suspensions, or worse. The vast power of the state has always been an effective weapon for silencing critics, dividing populations and eliminating protest. Not every person has the desire or strength to be a Joseph McNeil.

Our democratic traditions have been stretched to the breaking point by deep economic insecurity and socially atomizing technologies. These have fueled the rise of right-wing populism rooted in tribal identities and shared grievances. These movements legitimize a moral nihilism and selfishness in which those outside of the tribe–however defined–are not fully human and expendable. We as a society have reverted increasingly to a politics of victim-blaming and scapegoating, or put more simply, a politics of anger and hate. Showing empathy for the targets or raising the alarm about the tactics risks dismissal from one’s job, risks offending friends and family, and in the worst case, risks becoming a target of hatred yourself.

But does this not remind us of Christ? What we learned from Christ’s ministry is that he spread the Good News accompanied by his friends. He ministered in community, surrounded by his disciples, and he built a diverse body of men and women, Gentiles and Jews, slaves and free persons that broke with the accepted social mores of the time. His ministry to the marginalized also earned him the opprobrium of his own oppressed Jewish community, many of whom ultimately called upon their Roman rulers to eliminate the threat they believed He posed to their stability and safety.

We are together today modeling Christ’s ministry, accompanying one another. It is this kind of journeying together in the face of indifference and intolerance that propels our work in community organizing. It gives life to the bonds we create through our alliances. It also represents a life giving response to right wing nativism that can reinvigorate the concept of pluralism in our democratic societies. When we walk in unison with a common purpose, we experience our collective humanity. Together, our individual dignity is elevated as we accompany others. We create something far more powerful than anything we might have accomplished alone or siloed amongst those with whom we are most familiar. Organizing has something very important to teach us about belonging.

Unfortunately, these values are being challenged from within, as many critics of democracy long predicted they would be. Increasingly, we are told that membership and belonging in a democratic society are privileges for the few, not based on a commitment to shared values, respect for the rule of law and the inalienable dignity of human beings. Instead, our nations are forged on blood and soil, lineage and legacy, hatred and expulsion of outsiders. Hence the current effort in the US to end birthright citizenship, despite very clear words in the 14th Amendment of US Constitution:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Instead of this, are we to return to a more transactional understanding of belonging? One that offers a small group of people full membership and citizenship in ways that are exclusive and difficult to expand? Are others to become, at best, permanent residents or denizens with definable rights that fail to rise to full citizenship and places them on descending rungs in the social hierarchy? And those would be the fortunate ones. The rest would be migrant laborers, asylum seekers, undocumented and irregular aliens, and the stateless, people living on sufferance among those with rights and status.

Birthright citizenship in the US has been an extraordinarily powerful tool for creating a sense of belonging in a nation populated by waves of settlers and immigrants, both voluntary and forced. But, no matter where your parents came from, being born in the United States made you an American. This has created a nation unlike any other in history, a nation built and strengthened by forging a sense of identity and belonging across difference. By moving beyond simply tolerating inclusion, American society has THRIVED as a result of it. That is until recently.

The Christian idea of each human being bearing God’s image–the sacred mystery of Christ’s incarnation–inspires the collective power of organizing for many of us. 1 Peter 5:5-10, tells us:

“All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.”

The US became the envy of other nations by showing favor to the humble … by welcoming the tired and poor, and those longing to be free. Often, those asking for their dignity to be recognized are people living on the margins, not unlike the ancestors of many of the people who seek to deny them entry today. Ancestors who fled political persecution. Who fled to safety due to war. Who fled hunger due to famine. But more and more we see a recoiling from those in need. Many of those already here believe we have no more to give, no room to spare, no freedom to offer.

Psalm 34:19-20 states simply but clearly:

"The Lord is close to the brokenhearted, saves those whose spirit is crushed. Many are the troubles of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him from them all.”

Community organizing one-to-one meetings may offer a key practice to help us escape this politics rooted in deep fear of the other; this demonization of the weak and the powerless as agents of chaos and crime. The human engagement of the one-to-one meeting can provide the gift of solidarity that comes to us when we are willing to listen actively and recognize the many aspects of human experience we all share. It allows us to transcend fear, avoid hate and move toward love.

This brings me back to the lions of civil rights, particularly my father. After he was placed in solitary confinement, his sole contact with other people came at mealtimes, when the young sheriff’s deputies staffing the jail would bring him his food. They all were around the same age –19 or 20 years old. Like most young men in the American South at that time, they all were fiercely loyal to their state university American football team, in this case, the Louisiana State University Tigers. My dad and his jailers talked about football. They talked about their hometowns in other parts of the state and how they missed their mother’s cooking. They didn’t talk about being frightened, but I think all of them were. They weren’t completely sure why one of them was inside the cell and the rest of them weren’t. But small green shoots of understanding grew from the commonalities they shared. They had all been taught that people had to know their place in the world–that was just how things were. But maybe that was no longer the way things had to be.

A decade later, my father was in the middle of his studies at Harvard Law School. The world that had sent him to jail was being taken apart and completely remade. In some ways, my father was very lucky. People appreciated his intelligence, they admired his courage, they engaged his humanity. Fortunately, he came of age at a time when many people of power and privilege recognized their obligation to respond to those who cried out for justice and they decided that the way things were was NOT the way things had to be.

Late last month, the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, DC, Robert McElroy, gave a powerful homily challenging the Trump administration's current policy toward immigrants and migrants:

“We are witnessing a comprehensive governmental assault designed to produce fear and terror among millions of men and women, who have through their presence in our nation been nurturing precisely the religious, cultural, communitarian and familial bonds that are most frayed and most valuable at this moment in our country’s history. . . . As citizens, we must not be silent as this profound injustice is carried out in our name.”

In recent days, Pope Leo has engaged these ideas with renewed force in his apostolic exhortation on the poor, Dilexi te.

Our democracies find themselves at a crossroads unlike any we have faced in a very long time. As Christians, our faith demands that we use any privilege we may have to care for others. While this certainly could mean an active protest like Joseph McNeil’s, it also comes in other forms: Extending a helping hand to someone in need, donating your time to help others, or simply speaking to one another with the intention of actually listening.

Sharing in uncomfortable dialogue and overcoming our reflex to flee from the discomfort is something we practice daily at Holy Cross as it is central to our Jesuit mission. The concept of the presupposition that springs from Jesuit spirituality encourages us to give others the benefit of the doubt about their intentions and statements. These ideals are easily lost in a political culture that is fueled by anger and hate. It is hardly surprising that we want to avoid confrontations that trigger these feelings.

But we must confront them. Part of the strategy of right-wing populism is to normalize negative feelings that instinctually make us uncomfortable. Rather than assuming immigrants are criminals because of how they look, sadness, shock and fear should consume us when we see our neighbors being kidnapped in the streets by masked agents of the state. We need to question why this dehumanizing practice is necessary.

Acknowledging the ugliness that at times surrounds us isn’t an act of despair. Rather, it's a pathway to hope. Through our faith, despite what we see, we believe, no, we know, that it is love that made us and it is love that sustains us. Like my father and Joseph McNeil, we have a choice when confronted with cruelty, anger and hate. We can respond with more hate and escalate to violence or, we can embrace a faith that seeks justice. We can work to change hearts and minds and, ultimately, break down the sinful structures that afflict our world.