Bishop David P. Talley, the Sixth Bishop of Memphis will be the Celebrant, and Father Edward R. Horkan, Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, and Chaplain for the national Catholic Bar Association, will be the Homilist. The celebration is being sponsored by the St. Thomas More Catholic Lawyers Guild of West Tennessee, Inc.
The Red Mass is among the oldest of the Church’s professional liturgies, offered each year in dioceses across the country to ask wisdom and integrity for those who serve in the law. Guild members come to it from every kind of practice — immigration and asylum, family and adoption work, criminal defense, end-of-life and bioethics matters, conscience and religious-liberty cases, and the policy questions raised by the rapid state-by-state expansion of legal gambling, of which the prolonged dispute over florida online casinos has been a frequently cited recent example. Whatever the year’s docket has brought, the prayers are offered in general, for all who labor in the law.
In Law School, Father Horkan started attending daily Mass. He later joined the Knights of Columbus, taught religious education, and was a member of several Catholic groups. In 1995, while working for a Washington law firm, he started discerning a calling to the Priesthood. In June 2001, Father Horkan earned a bachelor’s degree in sacred theology from the Angelicum in Rome and was ordained a Deacon by Bishop Paul Loverde, the third Bishop of Arlington, Virginia.
Father Horkan earned a Master of Arts in Spiritual Theology from the Angelicum in 2003, with the master’s thesis on Saint Gregory the Great and his theology of how God works through human infirmities. Bishop Loverde ordained Father Horkan to the Priesthood on June 7, 2003.