Catholic Transcript Online

Being a Catholic today, in America, entails a series of special consequences, many inconvenient, some quite onerous, and a few rather painful. Surely, this is one thought that occurs to a thinking American Catholic on or around our formal birthday as a nation, the Fourth of July.

If we happen to be living in the most admired country of all time, in a democratic republic whose founders, in the Bill of Rights, literally enshrined the God-given freedoms by which we live, beginning with freedom of worship and freedom of speech, thought and assembly – all firmly anchored in freedom of religion – we nonetheless know that we must be especially vigilant lest our carelessness, or worse, our arrogant drift toward already disproven or oft-disgraced socio/political/economic myths, continue to tempt us.

Again, the first freedom is that of religion; man instinctively yearns for God. Remember how the Polish people, long oppressed by the Soviet Union, used to chant the phrase, "We want our God," during the first great rallies held to welcome Karol Wojtyla after he returned home as Pope in June 1979.

"We want our God" (My chcemy Boga) literally ushered in the beginning of a new world that historic year of ’79. Renewal of religious faith inevitably led to the recognition of other God-given freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly – all of the liberties connatural to human beings, and which governments must safeguard as sacred obligations for the sake of the commonweal.

In his famous work, Democracy in America (1835), the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

"When a people’s religion is destroyed, doubt invades the highest faculties of the mind and half paralyzes all the rest. Each man gets in the way of having nothing but confused and changing notions about the matters of greatest importance to himself and his fellows … In despair of solving unaided the greatest problems of human destiny, men ignobly give up thinking about them.

"Such a state inevitably enervates the soul, and … prepares a people for bondage…

"Then not only will they let their freedom be taken from them, but often they actually hand it over themselves."

De Tocqueville’s assessment of America also emphasized that religion becomes particularly practical in cultures that codify equality. In his words:

"The great usefulness of religions is even more apparent among egalitarian peoples than elsewhere.

"One must admit that equality, while it brings great benefits to mankind, opens the door … to very dangerous instincts. It tends to isolate men from each other so that each thinks only of himself.

"It lays the soul open to an inordinate love of material pleasure."

However, religious experience, he grants, also "imposes on each man some obligations toward mankind, to be performed in common with the rest of mankind, and so draws him away from time to time, from thinking about himself …"

Thus, "religious peoples are naturally strong just at the point where democratic peoples are weak."

Pope John Paul II, of course, and our present Holy Father, Benedict XVI, have strongly cautioned that there is no such possibility as an atheistic humanism. By virtue of the awesome mystery of the Incarnation, Divinity has assumed human nature so that mankind’s ultimate fulfillment is found in Divinity.

Here one could cite John Adams from a Letter to Zabdiel Adams written in 1776:

"Statesmen … may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand… The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater Measure, than they have it now, they may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty…"