As we celebrate the great occasion of the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding this weekend, it is good to think about why we should love and care for the country we call home. In 1938, a time in which various totalitarian ideologies were vying for political supremacy throughout the world, Msgr. Fulton Sheen gave a talk about patriotism and the essence of the American project. He said that, even though our country was born from revolution, it was not revolution in the sense that those who favor Marxist theory understand it. “The American Revolution,” he argued, “was a political revolution against a government across the sea, and not a civil war and class struggle against one another.” And so, he explains, “the essence of Americanism is not revolution, but the recognition of the sacredness of human personality and the inherent inalienable rights which every man possesses independently of the State.” Americans oppose dictatorships of all kinds – be they Communist, Fascist, or Nazi – because those kinds of regimes do not acknowledge a source of rights greater than the party, the state or the ruler. When the Founders of our country were pondering the question of the source of human rights and liberties, “they sought the foundations of man’s rights and liberties in something so sacred and so inalienable that no State, no Parliament, no Dictator, no human power could ever take them away, and so they rooted them in God. Hence our Declaration of Independence reads: all men ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’”
If at the heart of our society is a shared understanding that our sacredness, and our shared dignity and liberty as human beings is derived from our Creator, then, Sheen argues, those who believe in God are the necessary and best defenders of our American society. “If human dignity and liberty come from God, then it follows that loss of faith in Him means loss of faith in those liberties which derive from Him. If we wish to have the light we must keep the sun…. if we wish to keep our rights, then we must keep our God. It is just as vain to try to keep triangles without keeping three-sided figures, as to try to keep Liberty without the spirit which makes man independent of matter and therefore free.”
Mere faith in the existence of a divinity, however, is not sufficient, according to Sheen. “A democracy needs religion, for it assumes that man has not only a stomach but also a soul which is the seat of his rights; and since that soul must be fed as well as the body, he must have religion. Democracy has to rely not on force, but on freedom and liberty. But freedom and liberty are inseparable from responsibility, and responsibility is inseparable from conscience, and conscience is inseparable from religion.” Our Catholic faith not only tells us about God, our Creator and Redeemer, it also tells us about ourselves – what we are, what we are for, how we are to live, and what we owe our neighbor. As Catholics, we have received the fullness of truth by which we can form our consciences well, and we are blessed to live in a place where we can do that freely and share what we have received with others. May God bless and protect our beloved homeland for many generations to come.
posted 7/4/26
The Parish of St. Cecilia-St. Gabriel 