Massachusetts’ highest court upholds injunction banning statue of St. Michael

Controversy continues in Massachusetts, led by the American Civil Liberties Union. On behalf of “[f]ifteen residents and taxpayers,” ACLU sued the City of Quincy and its mayor, Thomas P. Koch, to prevent the placement of statues of Saint Florian and Michael the Archangel on a new public safety headquarters building. The two saints are widely recognized as symbols of divine protection for first responders.

As I wrote previously in the Catholic World Report, a trial court in Massachusetts initially granted a temporary injunction banning the statutes. Subsequently, its highest court upheld the injunction because it thought that the placement of the statues would have violated the neutrality provision in Massachusetts’ constitution insofar as they “may convey to observing members of the public implicit government support for that religion and, as a result, subordination of other religions.”

Given the questions Fitzmaurice v. City of Quincy raises about freedom of religion in the public “marketplace of ideas,” this column reviews its background and the high court’s order before offering analysis and commentary on its significance.

Background to Fitzmaurice v. City of Quincy

City of Quincy began after Mayor Koch ordered two ten-foot bronze statues of Saints Florian and Michael the Archangel from Italy in February 2025. They were to be installed on the city’s new public safety headquarters at an anticipated cost of $850,000. Koch testified that “their ‘selection’ ‘had nothing to do with Catholic sainthood.’”

The statue of Florian, a fourth-century Roman soldier and Christian martyr who pioneered firefighting brigades, depicts him pouring water on a burning building. The Archangel Michael statue displays angel wings while holding a shield and vanquishing a demon. As Massachusetts’ highest court recognized, “Saint Michael and Saint Florian have both religious and secular significance,…in [various] faith traditions, including Judaism and Islam…[representing] “a special significance to police officers and firefighters as symbols of virtue, bravery, and valor.” Both figures are identified worldwide with firefighters and police, reflected in their depictions in Western art for centuries.

On May 5, 2025, the ACLU sued the city and the mayor in his official capacity on behalf of the plaintiffs, objecting to the statues as violating prohibitions against religion found in Article 3 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights as modified by Article 11 of its Amendments. The plaintiffs argued that seeing the statues by driving past them or if they had to enter the building, “go[es] against [their] beliefs” while “send[ing] an exclusionary message to non-Catholics…mak[ing them] feel excluded.”

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a highly successful “non-profit, public-interest legal and educational institute with a mission to protect the free expression of all faiths,” along with a coalition of legal scholars who submitted briefs in their support, represented Koch and the city.

Judicial history

In the interest of brevity, suffice it to say that the trial court granted the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction banning the statues. Massachusetts’ seven-member Supreme Court, on direct appeal, meaning it bypassed review at an intermediate panel, then unanimously affirmed the earlier order.

After reviewing the background and history of City of Quincy, writing for the court, Justice Scott L. Kafker began his analysis by deciding that because the twelve plaintiffs he identified were taxpayers, they had standing, the legal ability to bring their claim.

Turning to the preliminary injunction, Kafker rooted the court’s rationale in its 1979 case, Colo v. Treasurer & Receiver General, which relied on the now repudiated Lemon v. Kurtzman. The Colo court rejected a challenge to the use of public monies to pay the salaries of the chaplains of its House of Representatives and Senate. Kafker pointed to the fourth element Colo added to Lemon’s tripartite test of requiring governmental actions involving religion to have a secular legislative purpose, a principal or primary effect neither advancing nor inhibiting religion, and avoiding excessive entanglement between the two. Colo asks “whether the challenged practice has a ‘divisive political potential.’”

Kafker next conceded that the court “repeatedly emphasized that these criteria were not to be considered as ‘mechanistic tests’ or ‘precise limits to the necessary constitutional inquiry,’ but rather helpful ‘guidelines to analysis,’” Yet, Kafker applied these tests mechanistically even in “recogniz[ing] that the Supreme Court has since abandoned Lemon…,” declaring that “Colo remains good law and the proper framework for evaluation of [the] contested practices” at issue.”

In the final part of his opinion, Kafker reviewed the necessary elements for granting preliminary injunction, namely likelihood of success on the merits and whether public interest weighted in favor of the plaintiffs. Convinced that the plaintiffs met both conditions, he affirmed the grant of the preliminary injunction in their favor.

Analysis and Commentary

It comes as no surprise that in deep blue Massachusetts, where its putative Catholic governor, Democrat Maura Healey, signed a bill into law allowing abortion up to the moment of birth amid calls for her excommunication to which Archbishop Richard Henning of Boston has yet to respond, that its judiciary would demonstrate such outright hostility to religious freedom and Christian values as reflected in its upholding the removal of the statutes of Saints Michael and Florian. What the court missed, or more likely ignored, in essentially demonizing Christianity, is that Saints Michael and Florian have long been acknowledged as symbols of protection for first responders rather than as imposing religious beliefs on those who happen to observe their presence.

Thus, it is important to reiterate that Mayor Koch insisted he did not choose the statues for a religious reason. Rather, he did so to “honor, inspire and encourage our First Responders” as well as “boost morale [and] “ensure [their] lifesaving work would remain maximally effective.”

The first of three troublesome aspects of the City of Quincy is its continued reliance on Colo, a case based on the now repudiated Lemon. Kafker’s judgment is problematic because under the Supremacy Clause to the Federal Constitution, Supreme Court cases take precedence over other litigation, even as he apparently, but unconvincingly, tried to distinguish between the two cases. It is one thing if the court sought to base its judgment in the fourth element it drew from Lemon, a case that (despite its claims to the contrary) it still applied mechanistically. Moreover, it is uncertain how much division would have occurred in allowing a symbol with both secular and faith-based elements to be displayed in public in light of the widespread use of religious statues throughout the Commonwealth.

As examples of religious symbols in Massachusetts, Moses is displayed in Boston’s John Adams Courthouse, David is in the Massachusetts State House, and Saint Pope John Paul II is on Boston Common. Further, many displays of religious figures—including Muhammad, King Solomon, and Moses—are in the United States Supreme Court, while the Capitol’s Statuary Hall exhibits such diverse faith-based figures as Brigham Young, Billy Graham, and two Catholic saints, Fathers Junipero Serra and Damien of Molokai. Regardless of what one thinks of the figures represented in these statues, they have largely assumed secular, rather than religious-devotional, roles as artwork worldwide.

A related point is that one of the plaintiffs claimed to have been “frightened by the existence and planned installation of these statues,” worrying that minority faiths are ignored. It is difficult to understand how such a plaintiff can function in daily life if she is so unwilling to respect the diversity of religious freedom rights of Americans with whom she disagrees or differs.

The Supreme Court’s 2022 Shurtleff v. City of Boston highlights a second concerning aspect of City of Quincy. It is troubling that Kafker conveniently ignored Shurtleff, wherein the Justices reasoned that public religious symbols cannot be treated less favorably than those that are nonreligious. In Shurtleff, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that officials violated the free speech rights of a religious group when they refused to allow it to hang a Christian flag outside of Boston’s city hall. The Court pointed out that because officials allowed approximately fifty unique flags to be raised at 284 ceremonies and never rejected such a request, the denial violated the group’s free speech rights insofar as the flag’s content did not express governmental speech. As such, banning the disputed statues reveals a disregard for the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion amidst in the diverse marketplace of ideas.

The third, and final substantive problematic issue in City of Quincy is that the judge ignored the Supreme Court’s 2020 Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. Espinoza is crucial because, although it concerned the denial of a neutral, generally available tax credit program for those wishing to contribute to student scholarship organizations under the state constitutional prohibition of public aid to “sectarian” schools, it enunciated a principle directly applicable in City of Quincy. In other words, Kafker overlooked that just as Espinoza emphasized that Montana could not separate religion and the government more strictly than the Federal Constitution in invalidating the tax credit program, neither could the plaintiffs here rely on Massachusetts’ law to limit the defendants’ Federal Free Exercise rights by banning the statues.

The Becket Fund emphasized that this legal battle is not over. Joe Davis, senior counsel at Becket, said “[t]his ruling is disappointing but is only preliminary;” “Quincy chose these statues to honor the courage and sacrifice of its firefighters and police.” Davis added that “[t]he city should not have to hide public art simply because some people may think of religion when they see it. As the court noted today, this is not the final word for these statues, and we will continue defending Quincy’s right to honor its heroes.”

Stay tuned, because I am watching for further developments and will provide updates as they occur.