Quincy’s government cannot install two 10-foot-tall statues on a new public safety building, for now, a judge ruled Tuesday.
Judge William Sullivan declined to dismiss the suit, as the city’s attorneys had requested, and is preventing the government from putting up the already-commissioned statues under a preliminary injunction.
More than a dozen Quincy residents filed a lawsuit in Norfolk County Superior Court in February, seeking to stop the city from erecting two 10-foot-tall bronze statues that depict the Catholic Saints Florian and Michael.
The basis of their suit is Massachusetts’ constitution, which establishes in Article 3 that “all religious sects and denominations ... shall be equally under the protection of the law; and no subordination of any one sect or denomination to another shall ever be established by law.”
“It is not a basis for this Court, informed by two centuries of human experience, to shrink from its duty to ensure that promise of Article 3 is fulfilled,” Judge William Sullivan wrote in his order Tuesday.
The attorneys for the plaintiffs, he said, made “plausible claims” that the statues could be viewed as a signal for who would be favored by the police and firefighters who work inside that building.
American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts attorney Rachel Davidson represents the multifaith residents in court. She told GBH News the city’s action violates the Massachusetts constitution and the separation of church and state.
“[The state constitution] prohibits the government from engaging in religious favoritism. It says that the government should equally protect all religions,” Davidson said. “Our argument is: by choosing to install religious figures that are primarily associated with one religion — in this case Catholicism — on a public building violates this principle because it’s elevating one religion above others.”
She celebrated the preliminary injunction in a statement Tuesday.
“We are grateful to the court for acknowledging the immediate harm that the installation of these statues would cause and for ensuring that Quincy residents can continue to make their case for the proper separation of church and state, as the Massachusetts Constitution requires,” she wrote in a press release.
Mayor Thomas Koch’s decision sparked controversy because he commissioned the statues in 2023 for $850,000 in city dollars without public input.
Koch has defended the statues as merely symbolic, asserting in an affidavit that “there was nothing religious” about them.
Davidson said the statues would be a constitutional violation even if no taxpayer funds were spent on them.
“I would say that permanently affixing two statues of Catholic saints on a public building that’s going to stand for 100 years is perhaps a more flagrant constitutional violation,” she said.
The police and firefighters’ unions filed briefs in support of the city. St. Florian is considered the patron saint of firefighters.
A spokesperson for the city of Quincy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Quincy City solicitor James Timmons told the judge at a September hearing that the statues, sculpted in Italy, would likely arrive to Eastern Massachusetts around the end of October.
