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"Endowed by Their Creator: Catholicism, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Experiment at 250" was the subject of a conference this month at The Catholic University of America (CUA) featuring a bevy of Catholic academics, jurists, and public intellectuals.
Co-hosted by CUA's Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and Carroll Forum for Citizenship and Public Life, along with the University of Notre Dame's Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government, the conference included a video address by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio highlighting Catholics' presence and influence on the nation.
"It has been 250 years since a new people declared themselves to the world. At the time, less than 2% were Catholic, but the nation they built would come to serve as one of the proudest and most enduring testaments to the eternal truth of our faith," Rubio, himself a Catholic, stated.
Rubio recalled a 1790 letter from the nation's first president, George Washington, to the country's first Catholic bishop, John Carroll, in which he spoke of the "patriotic part" American Catholics played in the accomplishment of the American Revolution.
In that same letter, Washington also anticipated that "America, under the smiles of a Divine Providence, the protection of a good government, and the cultivation of manners, morals, and piety, cannot fail of attaining an uncommon degree of eminence, in literature, commerce, agriculture, improvements at home, and respectability abroad."
Summing it up, Rubio said: "To look upon the history of this golden land is to see the face of God."
'Catholic Social Thought and the American Experiment'
One of the symposium's central panels was titled "Catholic Social Thought and the American Experiment" and featured Russell Hittinger, executive director of the Institute for Human Ecology at CUA; Kenneth Grasso, professor and department chair of political science at Texas State University; Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC); and CUA professor Sarah Gustafson.
Grasso focused his presentation on the late Father John Courtney Murray, SJ, an American Jesuit priest and theologian known for his work on the reconciliation of Catholicism with American democratic pluralism and religious freedom.
"Murray in some sense was a celebrant of the American experiment, admired the Founding Fathers, somebody who celebrated America's success; he also thought that America was in deep trouble."
The moral tradition "provided the justification and substance of the American experiment and had been the source of its success," Grasso said. However, Murray also saw that "the very moral tradition which made American democracy compatible with Catholicism no longer lives in the minds and hearts of Americans."
"And as a result, he worried that America was on the verge of becoming a mass democracy," he said. "Murray approaches this crisis from three different dimensions."
Murray's first approach was how "the Church and Catholic thought played a critical role in creating a new tradition in political thought," Grasso said. Murray referred to the tradition as "the Western liberal tradition."
"The Western liberal tradition is committed to a government that's limited in scope, subject in its operations to a rule of law, and which acknowledges the sovereignty of God and its duty to conform its actions with the universal moral law, which includes protecting the rights of the person."
Murray's second approach was "political or sociopolitical," Grasso said. Murray argued "there is a limit to how much, and what kinds of, pluralism a pluralist society can stand while remaining a functioning body politic."
"If you have different religious groups holding different convictions about the nature of man, about the precepts of morality, it's going to be hard to form that underlying consensus that the body politic needs," he said.
Lastly, Murray's approach was "theological in nature," he said. "'Is America an example of the modern political experiment?' Yes and no."
"As America evolved more and more we retheorized our public life along the dimensions of modern political experiment. At the heart of the American experiment, or rather the modern political experiment, is secularity."
"Absent Christian revelation" and "modern culture's rejection of the Christian mode of existence" have created a spiritual vacuum "that will be filled by an explicitly non-Christian mode of existence. This mode of existence will manifest itself in violence ... a violence that threatens to destroy freedom, order, and justice," Grasso said.
"The American experiment will not long survive the revelation that was its ultimate inspiration. Where does this leave us? Murray says it leaves the body politic in a grave crisis," Grasso said.
'Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'
The EPPC's Ryan Anderson focused his remarks on the contemporary application in America of Catholic social teaching (CST).
"There are four fundamental basic principles of Catholic social thought," Anderson said. "Human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity."
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church "talks about the 'imago Dei' ... so there's a transcendent source of our dignity, but it also talks about a transcendent orientation. We're all created for friendship with God. And so it's both the origin and the end of the human person that explains the nature of humanity."
"There is a Catholic account for this that is distinct from the secularist or the Enlightenment. This should easily, whether working from within the Catholic social thought perspective or the Declaration perspective, speak directly to the abortion issue."
Recognition of the right to life
"Public opinion has gone really, really badly for the pro-life side in the past decade after having been stable for relatively 30 or 40 years. In the past decade, we've seen wide divergences," he said. "I think it's too quick to say that American political culture has nothing to do with this."
When it comes to social thought and the Declaration regarding "the account of liberty and religious liberty in particular," there are "tensions" between the two, Anderson said.
"But there's also surprising overlap and harmonization between the account that [James] Madison gives us in ['Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments'], in which he says 'the reason that we have rights to religious liberty is because we have duties to the Creator.'"
"Then he says, 'before any man can be considered a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the universe.' Nice rejection of any secularism,'" Anderson noted.
Today, the matter of religious liberty has become a major issue. While on the president's Religious Liberty Commission for the past year, Anderson said he has heard "horror story after horror story during our hearings for the past 12 months," Anderson said.
"The most heated religious liberty issues" often affect Catholics and Christian values. Anderson specifically mentioned the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who "have pursued the state of New York because they are forcing them to engage in transgender nursing homes for the elderly who are dying."
Lastly, Anderson discussed the pursuit of happiness in regard to the family unit. Marriage and the family, "from a Catholic social perspective, is the basic cell of civilization and is the source of some of the deepest happiness and contentment for most people," he said.
"When you read through some of the scholars of the founding of what they thought about marriage and the family, there's virtually no daylight between the founder's vision for marriage and the family and contemporary Catholic social body's vision for marriage and the family."
"It's a man, woman, husband and wife, mother and father, a nuclear family, extended family. Yes, there are going to be disagreements about contraception, but that's much later," Anderson said. "There's a huge agreement on the nature of the human person, nature of human family."
Today there are now developments that have altered this understanding of the family. Anderson highlighted the effects of Obergefell and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Next steps
In addressing these issues impacting human dignity, Anderson laid out several next possible steps for the nation.
He referenced the Craddock article, which outlines a federal legislative strategy for banning abortion and argues that in "the original public meeting of the 14th Amendment, the word 'person' would apply to every human being and that would include the unborn child in the womb."
"From a … proper understanding of the 14th Amendment, this would empower Congress to pass legislation under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment to protect the unborn. I don't see Congress doing that," he said.
Therefore, "more immediately, the Trump administration could simply reinstate the safety provisions for the abortion pill that were in existence throughout the entirety of the first Trump administration that Biden got rid of," he said.
Lawmakers are "afraid that if they do anything bold on life right now, it will hurt them in the upcoming midterms," Anderson said. But, he explained, "there's not a single pro-life elected official who has lost reelection."
He also explained the need for marriage, because "the root cause of abortion is not the cost of diapers, nor is it the cost of childbirth," but rather it is premarital pregnancies.
"If you're the child and you're conceived outside of marriage, 40% of the time you're going to die of an abortion. If you're conceived inside of marriage, 4% of the time," Anderson said. "Marriage is the best protector of the unborn."
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