In 1998, Justice Antonin Scalia attended the funeral service for Justice Lewis Powell at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Virginia. At the luncheon afterwards Scalia looked for the church’s pastor, the Rev. James Goodloe. Unable to find him, Scalia wrote Goodloe a letter telling him “how reverent and inspiring I found the service.”
Scalia said this from the perspective of one who in his “aging years” has attended so many funerals of prominent people as to become “a connoisseur of the genre.” In services for the deceased, he observed, “there is not much to be said except praise for the departed who is no more. But even in Christian services . . . for deceased Christians I am surprised at how often eulogy is the centerpiece, rather than (as it was in your church) the resurrection of Christ, and the eternal life which follows from that.”
The service for Powell did include three brief eulogies. But the centerpiece of the service clearly lay in Goodloe’s 12-minute sermon: “The greatest good news that the world has ever heard is that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead,” declared the minister early in the sermon. And, toward the end, he explained how “Christ’s resurrection is a rescue for us, an escape from sin, death, and evil, a journey to a life of fellowship with God and his Christ.”
In his letter, Scalia said he had been told that in Roman Catholic canon law encomiums at funeral masses weren’t permitted, “though if that is the rule, I have never seen it observed except in the breach.” There “is much to be said,” he continued, for such a prohibition, “not only because it spares from embarrassment or dissembling those of us about whom little good can truthfully be said, but also because, even when the deceased was an admirable person—indeed especially when the deceased was an admirable person—praise for his virtues can cause us to forget that we are praying for, and giving thanks for, God’s inexplicable mercy to a sinner.” Scalia then added a witty parenthetical comment: “(My goodness, that seems more like a Presbyterian thought than a Catholic one!)”
Scalia wondered whether “clergymen who conduct relatively secular services are moved by a desire not to offend the nonbelievers in attendance—whose numbers tend to increase in proportion to the prominence of the deceased.” Scalia’s strong opinion about that: “What a mistake. Weddings and funerals (but especially funerals) are the principal occasions left in modern America when you can preach the Good News not just to the faithful but to those who have never really heard it.”
Scalia ended his letter by thanking Goodloe for the service. “It was a privilege to sit with your congregation,” he wrote.
Goodloe, who is now executive director of the Foundation for Reformed Theology in Richmond, told me he “was completely surprised” when he first opened and read the letter. “It seemed to me to be evidence [of Scalia’s] robust and remarkably reformed Christian faith.” Yes, Goodloe did use the word “reformed,” since Scalia attributed to himself thinking (concerning “God’s inexplicable mercy to a sinner”) that he described as seeming more Presbyterian–and therefore Reformed–than Catholic.
For Goodloe, there was nothing unusual about the funeral sermon he gave for Lewis Powell. “It was really the way I do this,” regardless of the prominence of the deceased.
Scalia’s letter didn’t become public until after the Justice’s death. Friends of Goodloe’s who knew about it encouraged the minister to put it out. He sent it to The Charlotte Observer, but when the paper moved slowly on it, Goodloe opted for Facebook.
Scalia was buried on February 20. And in the homily at the funeral Mass on that day, Rev. Paul Scalia, Antonin Scalia’s son, brought up the letter the justice wrote “years ago” to “a Presbyterian minister whose funeral service he admired.” In it the justice “summarized quite nicely,” said Rev. Scalia, “the pitfalls of funerals and why he didn’t like eulogies”—and why, it may be added, there weren’t any at his funeral Mass.
