“I am humbled to receive this award,” Judge Thomas Teodosio said after receiving the 2021 Sir Thomas More Award from Bishop Edward Malesic. Judge Teodosio, a former Summit County Common Pleas Court judge, began serving on the Ohio Court of Appeals, Ninth Appellate District bench in February 2017.
The presentation took place during the Red Mass on May 7 at St. Bernard Church in Akron, which traditionally occurs during Summit County Law Week. Bishop Michael Murphy instituted the Sir Thomas More Award in 1978 to recognize the virtues of integrity and public service that reflect those of St. Thomas More.
The event is a collaboration of the Akron Bar Association and the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland. It is hosted by St. Bernard Parish with priests from the Akron area as concelebrants. Father Chris Zerucha, St. Bernard’s pastor, concelebrated this year with Father Paul Rosing, pastor of Holy Family Parish in Stow, Judge Teodosio’s home parish.
Judge Teodosio said the profession of law includes a commitment to service, leadership and justice. He also credited the many judges, lawyers, staff members and community leaders who work with the courts, commending them for what he called “a wonderful collaboration.”
The judge said at the start of his legal career, a friend gave him a plaque featuring the image of St. Thomas More and the lawyer’s prayer. “It has been in my office throughout my career,” he said.
“The same moral principles instilled in me by my mentors are included in that prayer,” he noted.
Judge Teodosio asked the attorneys at the Mass to serve as mentors to younger lawyers in order to continue the process of guiding them.
Father Rosing represented the Akron Bar Association and introduced the judge, sharing some of this background.
Judge Teodosio – the son of an attorney – earned his law degree from the University of Akron School of Law and was admitted to the bar in 1982. He met his wife, Judge Linda Tucci Teodosio, a member of the Summit County Juvenile Court bench, while in law school. She received the Sir Thomas Award in 2014.
The couple has two children, Christopher, also an attorney, and the late Andrea Rose. Christopher Teodosio and his wife Katherine are the parents of two daughters and are expecting a third.
In his homily at the Mass, Bishop Malesic discussed a dispute in the early Church history when the Jewish apostles were wrestling with how to accept gentile believers in what was a primarily Jewish religion. There was one important question: Does one need to be Jewish before becoming a baptized Christian. The bishop said St. Paul’s answer was “No,” but others disagreed, pointing out recent Mass readings from the Acts of the Apostles dealt with this issue.
To resolve the matter, Paul and some of his companions traveled to Jerusalem to meet with Peter and other Church leaders, convening the first ecumenical council – the Council of Jerusalem – in about 50 A.D. They decided that a gentile man did not need to be circumcised before being baptized.
But the bishop said the council asked gentiles to avoid these things: meat sacrificed to idols, eating the meat of strangled animals, eating blood and entering into unlawful marriages. “The three dietary restrictions seem a bit strange to us, but these regulations were meant to build bridges between the gentile Christians and their Jewish Christian counterparts,” Bishop Malesic explained. He said abstaining from these things prevented others from becoming uneasy or scandalized.
The marriage exhortation was “more forceful and flowed from something deeper and from God’s revealed law, supported by natural law,” the bishop said. “It is a plea from the Council of Jerusalem that the new Christian converts from paganism give up former ways that cannot ever be tolerated in the Christian Church, namely sexual immorality.”
Bishop Malesic, himself a canon lawyer, said that in the end, “as people involved in the legal profession, our readings remind us to do all things out of love and respect for our neighbor. We should think more of others than of ourselves when making our own decisions. And, wherever possible, we should find ways to sit together without compromising our basic beliefs.”
He reminded those at the Mass that in the day’s Gospel, Jesus tells us, “’This I command you: love one another.’ To love means to will the good of the other, sometimes even to sacrifice ourselves and our own comfort for the sake of the person sitting next to us at table. And I will add, even if it means we won’t win every argument, since we don’t always need to.”