Outright Love for This Land
Robert Royal
In Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo invokes the Biblical story of Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem as a poignant alternative to the Tower of Babel’s effort to reach Heaven without God. It’s a good reminder – but of something more than the pope indicated. In the days of walled cities, rebuilding walls was a defensive measure, establishing a safe perimeter before the reconstruction of the city itself could take place. There were threats outside – and within: “half of my servants worked on construction, and half held the spears, shields, bows, and coats of mail. . . .each labored on the work with one hand and held his weapon with the other.” (Nehemiah 4:16-17)
And once the walls were rebuilt, Nehemiah had the priest Ezra publicly recite the Law of Moses before the whole people, who pledged themselves anew to the Covenant.
If I could have one wish on this anniversary, it’s that we – at least many of us – will come to realize that America must be defended as well as reconsecrated. We’ve developed an allergy to this truth because we don’t want to appear “defensive.” But without a defense, those who are offensive – and they are legion – will have their way with us and many other nations.
It doesn’t stop there. The defense exists so that we may build, and abundantly – in both a physical and a moral sense – because time is always wearing things down. We must work not just to keep what we have, but to extend it for ourselves and those who will come after.
In a confused and contested time like ours, that seems impossible because our divisions run so deep that we cannot even agree on what rebuilding would mean.
But here’s a proposal. Every year for almost a quarter century, I’ve been running a Summer Seminar on the Free Society in the Slovak Republic, founded by the great Catholic and American, Michael Novak. In the concluding session, I lead students through “The Gift Outright,” a poem that Robert Frost read at the inauguration of our first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy (Kennedy had asked Frost to write something for the occasion, which he did, but the day was so sunny – and Frost’s aging eyes so weak – that he couldn’t read the text, and instead recited this poem from memory).
It laments how Americans remained colonials – until they changed. It ends:
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
That transformation was not peaceful (“many deeds of war”), but it was heartfelt, a free gift to an uncertain future, in short, the only thing that might renew us all, of whatever persuasions, yet again: outright love for this land.
250 and Counting
Brad Miner
I don’t remember much about Mesopotamia, but they say it’s where civilization began. As has been the case throughout history, it was good for those on top but not for the rest. This was true of the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, although, unlike Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt, the Greco-Roman legacy remains very much with us. It has always been true.
You can see that legacy in the Constitution of the United States. You can also see there the Fall of Man, after which no civilization has been or could be a City of God. I’m thinking here of the Three-Fifths Compromise, a deal with the Devil if ever there was one.
But name a society before the U.S. that was able to correct its trajectory in less than two centuries, and to restore amity.
We know we’ll never be perfect. Still, as G.K. Chesterton wrote about America, ours is the “only nation in the world that is founded on a creed”:
That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. (What I Saw in America)
We celebrate today the semiquincentennial of the signing of that Declaration. And, putting aside all current controversies, the document and its creed have stood the test of time.
Yes, that Founding document is a promissory note, and the Framers of our flawed Constitution knew it wasn’t enough simply to address a structure of government, so they added reminders for future governors, none more powerful than this:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Mr. Lincoln put it best:
In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just – a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless. (Second Annual Message to Congress, December 01, 1862)
Living What We Claim to Believe
Francis X. Maier
I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, in the fading shadow of the Second World War. My Uncle Joe had served on an attack sub in the South Pacific. My Uncle Bill was the lone survivor of a mobile anti-tank gun that took a direct hit and blew up at the Bulge. My dad had an “essential worker” deferment, supervising truck production at a General Motors defense plant. All three, like all of my extended family, were Catholic. And all three, like all of my extended family, were Democrats. There was one special exception. My mother (shanty Irish, but wickedly intelligent and not a woman to be trifled with) voted Republican in 1960 – less from conviction than a deep-rooted contempt for the behavior of the Kennedy men.
This Independence Day, I wonder what any of them would think of the country we’ve become, the nation they once loved, supported, and risked their lives for. The truth is quite simple: The Democratic Party they saw as “theirs” dumped people like them decades ago. And – no surprise, finally – it was a whole lot of ordinary people like them who then committed the unforgivable crime of electing Donald Trump twice. This, despite his narcissism and legion of sins and flaws. This, despite all the really smart advice from all the really smart talking heads in our knowledge-class compliant media; ten years of it, nonstop: He’s a fascist! He’s an existential threat!
My family’s Democratic Party today is the champion of abortion, disordered sex, collapsed borders, and a truckload of other destructive ideas. Are there good people in the party? Of course, and plenty of them. But they’re not the ones running the show. And given the party’s hard-left primary results so far this year, the “good people” won’t be running it anytime soon.
All of the relentless poison directed at Donald Trump over the past decade – some of it warranted, much of it wildly excessive – is now bearing bitter fruit: three assassination attempts on a sitting president, harassment of Supreme Court judges and their families, organized street brawls with federal agents enforcing the law, and angry young political murderers like Luigi Mangione and Tyler Robinson.
We’re watching a political party in the process of matriphagy: I refer here to that species of spider that lays her eggs and then is devoured by her children as they hatch.
Does any of the above make Donald Trump a “good” man? Not by a light year. Nor does it absolve the Republican Party of its own many sins. Trump is merely the catalyst for a deeper conflict about national purpose and identity that’s been brewing for a long time. Now it’s here.
As America turns 250, I want my family’s party back. More importantly, I want the country I love back. And it won’t happen unless Catholics and other Christians get serious about living what we claim to believe – in private, in public, and yes, in the voting booth.
‘Built Wiser than They Knew’
Michael Pakaluk
The American Bishops at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 did not say, in their Pastoral Letter, that the Founders “built better than they knew.” Fr. John Courtney Murray and countless others have claimed this. But the claim is false.
Teach your children to take a special interest in the history of our own country. We consider the establishment of our country’s independence, the shaping of its liberties and laws as a work of special Providence, its framers “building wiser than they knew,” the Almighty’s hand guiding them.
Their words were “wiser than they knew,” not “better than they knew.” What’s the difference? The phrase “better than they knew” was, at the time, a very well-known allusion to a poem by Emerson. It was widely used to describe the Founding: that is why our bishops put the phrase in quotation marks; they were not inventing the phrase but repeating it.
As popularly used, it meant that things turned out even better than hoped for. Our bishops took care to change “better” to “wiser,” however, precisely to place a supernatural interpretation upon the Founding, as the work of divine providence. Of course, all those who participate in divine wisdom do things that are “wiser” than they know.
Let’s pause and consider that it’s not compatible with this view, of the providential Founding, that the Founding was vitiated from the start by an implicit philosophy of Hobbesian selfishness.
Our bishops, gathering in Baltimore in 1884, were only repeating what the first American bishops believed a hundred years earlier – the ones who were present at the Founding. Soon after George Washington’s election as our first president, those bishops wrote to him to express their good wishes: “Your exalted maxims and unwearied attention to the moral and physical improvement of our country have produced already the happiest effects.”
They added:
By example as well as by vigilance, you extend the influence of laws on the manners of our fellow citizens you encourage respect for religion, and inculcate, by words and actions, that principle, on which the welfare of nations so much depends, that a superintending Providence governs the events of the world, and watches over the conduct of men.
They describe Washington as “the principal instrument” of this providence and opine, “we conceive that no human means are so available to promote the welfare of the United States, as the prolongation of your health and life, in which are included the energy of your example, the wisdom of your counsels, and the persuasive eloquence of your virtues.”
Those who are blind must rely upon those who can see. If the corruption of our politicians since then, the greed and self-assertion of our fellow citizens, and the misguided interpretations of our Constitution by foolish jurists, have blinded us to the wisdom of and divine blessing upon the Founding, we must look to Catholics of an earlier age to see aright, and seeing, as Catholics, to fall in love with our country again.
An Archipelago of Holiness and Truth
Joseph Wood
In the Federalist Papers, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton argued that while the new Constitution was imperfect – as all such basic laws are – it held out the prospect of preventing tyranny and securing the unity of the country. The prospect, though, was uncertain, as in all human affairs.
They hoped the union would endure, but they seemed to understand that all polities eventually fail, a lesson from ancient political thinkers who observed in political communities a tendency towards eventual corruption, decline, and fall – sometimes followed by renewal, sometimes not. That tendency was especially pronounced in democracies, which Aristotle considered a deviant form of government.
The Founders shared that skepticism and proposed a republic with different elements of rule, some aristocratic and some broadly inclusive. This was the kind of “mixed regime” that Aristotle thought was the best available in most situations.
But even with that weight of philosophy and history behind them, Jay wrote:
I sincerely wish that it may be as clearly foreseen by every good citizen, that whenever the dissolution of the Union arrives, America will have reason to exclaim, in the words of the poet: “FAREWELL! A LONG FAREWELL TO ALL MY GREATNESS.” (Federalist 2)
The quotation is from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, the words of Cardinal Wolsey, whose high-flying political career was ending in tears.
I’ve taken a cross-country drive this summer that began at St. Mary, Star of the Sea Church in Ocean City, Maryland, steps from the Atlantic Ocean, and ended at St. Mary, Star of the Sea Church in Oceanside, California, steps from the Pacific Ocean.
I was struck yet again during the journey both by the natural beauty of the country and by the human and material achievements that the political system devised by the Founders has permitted. Neither was a surprise, but seeing them anew was wonderful.
The political divisions in the country are deep, and they spring from irreconcilable theological and philosophical differences about the true ends of human life, and whether there is a moral order that we do not ourselves create but must seek to understand and follow.
I’ve not been able to discern on this trip whether the moment that Jay imagined, when we look back on the greatness of the United States as a thing of the past, has arrived.
But one thing is clear. As Fr. Stanley Jaki wrote, when the “storms of moral destruction” blow, the Church is really an archipelago of islands of holiness and truth rather than a continental whole. The saints sustain these islands over the centuries, even as their locations change amidst the contingencies of history.
He was referring to Europe, his own birthplace. But from U.S. churches on the coasts and every few miles between, to abbeys in the Ozarks and the California mountains, to Orthodox monasteries in the West Virginia Appalachians and the Arizona desert, there are quietly thriving islands of that archipelago in America today. These places often attract intentional communities of laity around them. They share truths that go back much further than 250 years, to the beginning of time and before. Unlike political arrangements, those truths will endure until time ends – and beyond.
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