The Saint Before the Statute: Archbishop Lori’s Case for Character Over Politics

At the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious national assembly in Florissant, Missouri, Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore offered a diagnosis of American public life that reaches deeper than policy: the nation’s crisis is not fundamentally political but spiritual. Drawing on his pastoral letter “In Charity and Truth: Toward a Renewed Political Culture,” he suggested the country increasingly asks politics to accomplish what only holiness can achieve.

“Before there can be renewal of institutions, there must be renewal of persons,” Lori told the assembled women religious leaders on Sept. 18. “Before there can be civic friendship, there must be conversion of heart, and before there can be lasting peace, there must be reconciliation with God.”

Yet Lori insisted that consecrated life remains “above politics” without withdrawing from the world. “The evangelical counsels are not an escape from history — they are a way of redeeming history,” he said. “Consecrated women do not flee society; they bless it.”

His claim rests on a quietly radical premise: that every authentic consecrated life “becomes a living argument that another way of being human is possible” — a witness the nation itself may need more than any legislative program.