Dennis J. Wieboldt III, a visiting assistant professor at Notre Dame Law School and a two-time Boston College graduate, spoke to BC Law students on October 16 about Fitzmaurice v. City of Quincy. In August, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) affirmed a preliminary injunction blocking Quincy from installing statues of Catholic saints outside its new public safety building. The St. Thomas More Society hosted the event.
The controversy arose after Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch commissioned two 10-foot bronze statues of St. Michael and St. Florian—patron saints of police officers and firefighters—for nearly $850,000. Fifteen local taxpayers represented by the ACLU of Massachusetts sued, arguing the city’s plan violates Article 3 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, which prohibits government preference for one religion over others. While litigation continues, the statues remain stored in Randolph.
Tracing Establishment Clause jurisprudence from Everson (1947) and the long-dominant Lemon three-pronged test to the US Supreme Court’s 2022 turn toward “history and tradition” in Kennedy v. Bremerton, Wieboldt highlighted how Massachusetts has navigated its own legal landscape. Rather than adopting the federal history-and-tradition framework, the SJC adhered to its landmark precedent in Colo v. Treasurer (1979). Contrasting the long-standing practice of legislative chaplaincies upheld in Colo with Massachusetts’s lack of a history of public Catholic monuments, the SJC concluded the new statues likely signal an unconstitutional preference for one faith.
However, Wieboldt sharply criticized what he called the court’s “reasoning by omission.” The historical absence of Catholic monuments in Massachusetts, he explained, reflects the Commonwealth’s deeply rooted history of anti-Catholic discrimination, rather than a neutral, long-settled tradition of secularism. By relying on that historical absence without asking why such monuments were missing, Wieboldt argued, the court risks letting past prejudice dictate present constitutional outcomes—a pitfall analogous to using Reconstruction-era Black Codes to justify modern firearm restrictions.
As Fitzmaurice returns to Superior Court on the merits, Wieboldt urged courts to confront bad historical traditions directly and make explicit normative choices. “There’s a judgment being made about whether we should describe the tradition at a broad level of generality or a more specific one,” Wieboldt noted, stressing that evaluating history inevitably requires judicial value judgments. Ultimately, his perspective indicated that Quincy’s two bronze saints raise questions that extend far beyond a single public building, touching the core of how courts interpret history today.
Photograph by Caroline Kramer ’29