Catholics and America

Many posts have discussed patriotism and the role of religion in American life.

Robert P. George at AEI:

With the breadth of Catholic history and teaching in mind, let us return to the underlying question with which we began: What should Catholic parents and teachers be imparting to children about our country and their role as citizens of this nation?

The answer is clear: American Catholics must teach our children to understand our country’s history, cherish and maintain its founding principles, and recognize that when we have gone wrong as a nation, it has been on those occasions when we have acted in defiance of those principles or failed to honor them.

We should teach young Catholic men and women to value our Constitution because the freedoms it protects allow us to pursue truth and goodness; they nurture and sustain our families, our communities, and our country’s civic order. And we must affirm to our children and our students that there is no reason to feel they must choose between being faithful Catholics and being patriotic Americans.

The Church does not teach that democracy is always required, or that it is the highest or best form of government. In fact, it does not pronounce any single best form of government, though it emphatically rejects certain types of government, especially totalitarian political systems such as fascism and communism. But democracy at its best does give expression — perhaps unique expression — to the principle of equal human dignity that the Church always and everywhere proclaims. Pope St. John Paul II referred to this inviolable human dignity during his visit to the United States in 1995:

Catholics of America! Always be guided by the truth — by the truth about God who created and redeemed us, and by the truth about the human person, made in the image and likeness of God and destined for a glorious fulfillment in the Kingdom to come. Always be convincing witnesses to the truth. “Stir into a flame the gift of God” that has been bestowed upon you in Baptism. Light your nation — light the world — with the power of that flame!

As John Paul also noted, “the continuing success of American democracy depends on the degree to which each new generation, native-born and immigrant, makes its own the moral truths on which the Founding Fathers staked the future of your Republic.” If this nation “under God,” as Abraham Lincoln put it in his Gettysburg Address, is to endure, we must continuously pray and work to ensure that our laws and our leaders truly honor that North Star principle — the ur-principle, as I sometimes describe it — of all sound morality: that of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family.

Natural Rights and SCOTUS

Aaron Blake at WP:

In questions for the record released after her confirmation hearings, [Judge Katanji Brown]  Jackson declined to take a position on whether people have so-called “natural rights.”

Here’s the Q&A with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.):

Q: Do you hold a position on whether individuals possess natural rights, yes or no?
JACKSON: I do not hold a position on whether individuals possess natural rights.

Some conservative legal pundits highlighted the answer Friday, with the National Review writing that Jackson “doesn’t embrace the basic American creed set forth in that passage from the Declaration” of Independence. Cruz followed that up by calling it “stunning.” The conservative group FreedomWorks on Monday called the answer “unreal.” And Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) on Monday cited the answer as part of his rationale for voting against Jackson at a hearing Monday.

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The last time this concept took the main stage in Supreme Court confirmations was the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it came up in the hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. And the two Republican nominees actually took opposing views on it.

Bork argued for a strict adherence to the text of the Constitution — an original-intent judicial philosophy that made no space for the concept of natural rights, or at least for their role in jurisprudence. Specifically, Bork rejected the idea that the Ninth Amendment (that “enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”) conferred a right to privacy — which the court used to grant the right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade. In a 1990 book after his nomination was defeated, Bork linked the natural-rights approach to a dangerous “impulse to judicial authoritarianism.”

Thomas, though, had spoken extensively about the role of natural rights in the law before his 1991 confirmation hearings. In a 1987 speech, he praised an article that said a fetus had an inalienable right to life guaranteed by the law of God in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas called it a “splendid example of applying natural law.”

The divergent approaches were spotlighted by none other than a senator by the name of Joe Biden, who was then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a lengthy Washington Post op-ed on the topic, Biden wrote:

No issue divided Judge Bork and me as much as this single question: Are there fundamental rights — not explicit in the Constitution — that are protected by that document? My answer to that question, relying on principles of natural law, was an emphatic “yes” — a view that Judge Thomas, who has sharply criticized Judge Bork’s original-intent jurisprudence, appears to share.

SEE JUSTICE KAGAN'S CONFIRMATION HEARING

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Patriotism, Piety, and the Declaration

In 1938, Father Fulton Sheen said (h/t Ken Masugi):

The treatise on Patriotism in the writings of the greatest philosopher of all times, St. Thomas Aquinas, is to be found under the subject of “Piety.” This at first may strike as strange those who think of piety as pertaining only to love of God. But once it is remembered that love of neighbor is inseparable from love of God, it is seen that love of our fellow citizens is a form of piety.

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But where find the basis for the right of a man to be his own master, captain of his own soul, free in his right to pursue his ultimate end with a free conscience? Where root and ground the right to own property as the extension of personality? Where find the rock of all liberties which would be strong enough to withstand governments and powers and states which would absorb them as the monarchies did, then, and as certain dictatorships do now?

For such a foundation the Fathers looked first to England. There the theory was advanced that our liberties and rights are rooted in Parliament. This theory they rejected on the ground that if Parliament gives rights and liberties, then the Parliament can take them away. Next they looked to France, where it was held that the liberties and rights of man are rooted in the will of the majority. The Fathers equally rejected this on the ground that if the rights of man are the gift of the majority, then the majority can take away the rights of the minority.

Where find the source of the liberties and the rights of man? On what stable foundation are they to be reared? What is their source? The answer they gave was the right one. 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.”

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We Catholics are taking religion so seriously in reference to our country that rather than see God perish out of our national life we conduct 7,929 elementary schools and 1,945 high schools, employing 58,903 and 16,784 teachers respectively. . . .and figuring on the basis of public school costs, we save the taxpayers of the country an immediate one billion dollar building program and, for maintenance, about $139,600,000 every year. Every cent of this money comes out of the pockets of Catholics, and why? Because we believe that the 2,102,889 children in Catholic elementary schools and 284,736 in Catholic high schools have a right to know the truth which makes them free.

In other words, we take very seriously the Declaration of Independence which derives the rights of man from God.

The Finality of the Declaration

Ninety years ago today, Calvin Coolidge said:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Endowed by their Creator with Certain Unalienable Rights

Matt K. Lewis writes at The Week:

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo recently declared: "Our rights do not come from God." Then this week, Sen. Ted Cruz's assertion that "our rights don't come from man, they come from God Almighty" came under scrutiny when Meredith Shiner, a Yahoo reporter,tweeted: "Bizarre to talk about how rights are God-made and not man-made in your speech announcing a POTUS bid? When Constitution was man-made?" [Cruz was closely paraphrasing JFK.]

I am astounded by how many people in this country (and particularly in the media) don't believe the Declaration of Independence's assertion that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." The Declaration of Independence also refers to "The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Believing that our laws are God-given, and not man-made, has become something that secular liberals seem to take joy in openly mocking. As if there were something inherently funny or backwards about faith. As if there were something hollow and foolish about believing in God....

Without an absolute law that transcends the whims of man, the very concept of "rights" metastasizes into a definition having more to do with the current and often capricious preference of the majority. Oppressed minorities have long found comfort (and, in fact, seized the moral high ground) by pointing out that there is a greater law, a universal sense of right and wrong, that transcends the will of the majority.

The majority can be wrong. The majority can be in the wrong. History is littered with examples of the folly of man-made law, of man-made injustice. (This is not to say people haven't done terrible things in the name of God — they have!)

Consider Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail": "We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights," he wrote. "To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law."

More and more, the secular left seems to want to entrust human law to always be just. That's fine when it is. But what happens when it isn't?

Where Rights Come From

At Commentary, Peter Wehner writes:

In a recent interview, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore told CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, “Our rights, contained in the Bill of Rights, do not come from the Constitution, they come from God.”

“Our rights do not come from God,” Cuomo replied. “That’s your faith. That’s my faith. But that’s not our country.” (For this portion of the exchange, see starting around the 13:00 minute mark.)

In fact, Mr. Cuomo is wrong and Judge Moore is right, at least in the context of America and its history. To understand why, it’s important to point out that the Constitution is America’s governing charter, one that sets up a structure of government. To be sure, the Bill of Rights lay out certain rights the people are entitled to against every government on earth. But to understand where those rights come from, what their source is, one needs to turn to the Declaration of Independence. And here is what the Declaration states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men…

It could hardly be clearer, then: Governments are instituted in order to secure rights that are God-given. And faith in divinely given rights is a consistent theme not only of the founders but of nearly every president. John F. Kennedy, in his inaugural address, crystalized the point this way: “Yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe–the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.”
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Where Mr. Cuomo goes off the rails is in asserting that “it is not our country” to say our rights come from God. This actually is a philosophical thread that runs throughout the history of our country with astonishing consistency and, at least until now, a proposition very few people disputed. So Mr. Cuomo’s statement is not only wrong; it is historically illiterate.

Natural Law and the American Creed

An earlier post excerpted Brian Vanyo's article on the origins of the American creed.  He has a new piece on the creed's meaning:

In the very first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, our founders wrote that the American people were breaking from British rule to live by the tenets of Natural Law — “to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and coequal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them.” To understand the meaning of our creed, we must come to know Natural Law.

Natural Law philosophy, which was first developed over 2,000 years ago, is the idea that universal laws govern all human interactions and that these laws, or truths, are discoverable by human reason. Aristotle wrote in Rhetoric (ca. 350 BC), “Universal law is the Law of Nature. For there really is, as everyone to some extent divines, a natural justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or covenant with each other.”
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Government is therefore bound to respect the people’s life, liberty, and property, because, as Alexander Hamilton explained, the universal Law of Nature is always and everywhere supreme:

Good and wise men, in all ages ... have supposed that the Deity ... has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is, indispensably, obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever.

This is what is called the Law of Nature, “which, being coeval with mankind and dictated by God Himself, is, of course, superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid, derive all their authority, mediately, or immediately, from this original.” Blackstone.

Upon this law, depend the natural rights of mankind.

This is the meaning of our creed. We are a free people who joined in society to live by the principles of Natural Law — principles that became the purpose for our union, the cause for our independence, and the foundation for our government. These principles, of course, were proclaimed with conviction in our Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson later regarded as the “Declaratory Charter of our rights and the rights of man.”