‘Just be easy on yourself and go with the flow’

By Marlene Quaroni - Florida Catholic

MIAMI | Francis X. Sexton Jr. said he has always been a skeptic, especially about religion. So, when he was asked to become the president of the Miami Catholic Lawyers Guild six years ago, he wondered if he was the right person for the job.

“I always struggled with my faith,” said Sexton, 75, a Miami attorney, after the annual Red Mass for members of the legal profession, celebrated Dec. 11, 2024, at Gesu Church in downtown Miami, where Sexton received the 2024 Lex Christi, Lex Amoris (Law of Christ, Law of Love) award.

“After a CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) class that I took when I was 7 years old at my family’s church, St. John the Evangelist Church in White Plains, New York, I asked my father, ‘Did Jesus really come back to life? Did that really happen?’ I was always searching and trying to figure things out.”

So, when Sexton, who was included in the 2019 U.S. News and Best Lawyers in America for International Arbitration, was asked to become the president of the Miami Catholic Lawyers Guild, he thought, “This doesn’t make any sense. This is contrary to my persona. I am a man who has always struggled with my faith. It seems to be just the way my mind works.”

“We are in an age of secularism, and law is a very worldly, mercenary business,” he said.

Six years ago, the Guild was not in a good shape but “something pushed me, pulled me not to let something so precious and valuable to lawyers die. The Guild could be a place to go where it’s okay for us tough men and women to talk about faith and our beliefs and our struggles and to call one another brothers and sisters,” Sexton said.

He told the legal professionals, including several judges wearing their black robes, that his years as president of the Guild have been both excruciating and wonderful for him. Excruciating because he worried a lot about the Guild, and wonderful because it changed him.

“As I stood up here year after year praying that you would receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord, I got those gifts myself. They didn’t flow around me and just go to you,” he said. “I think this has made me a different and better man.”

Sexton said that he was humbled by the award he received from his colleagues and that he doesn’t compare himself to the towering past recipients, district and state court judges and giant figures of the Bar. “I am a humble litigator. I have come to know them all quite well and they are genuinely devout and saintly people. I look up to them not because they wore the black robes, but because of the type of faith people that they are.”

He turned to the writings of philosophers to figure out the mysteries of life, then realized those mysteries can’t be figured out, he said.

“Just be easy on yourself and go with the flow,” he said. “If you act like you believe, maybe belief will be given to you.” He also said it hasn’t been easy to spend half a century in a profession that is governed by this one question: What are the facts?

His advice to his grandchildren in the face of doubt is to go with the flow, embrace it and live life.

Sexton has two sons, Francis III and Brandana, and four grandchildren, one of whom traveled from New York to attend the award ceremony and sat in the front row with his grandfather.

Archbishop Thomas Wenski, who celebrated the Mass, told the legal professionals they should follow the example of Sir Thomas More, a 15th-16th century English lawyer, judge and social philosopher who served King Henry VIII as Lord high chancellor of England. More opposed the king’s separation from the Catholic Church, was accused of treason and was executed. The Church later venerated him as a saint.

“As More said, should you work for the greater glory and honor of God and in pursuit of His justice, able in argument, accurate in analysis, strict in study, correct in conclusion, candid with clients, honest with adversaries, and faithful in all details of the faith,” the archbishop said. “The example of this martyr and confessor of the faith should inspire your imitation, even as you seek his intercession before God, as you live out your commitments to the Bar and your baptism.”

The Red Mass of the Holy Spirit is a tradition in the Catholic Church dating back to the 13th century when it officially opened the term of the court for most European countries. The celebrants would proceed into church dressed in red vestments signifying the fire of the Holy Spirit, which guided all who pursue justice in their lives. The tradition was introduced into the United States in 1928 at a New York church.