As the United States of America draws nearer to the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the monumental Declaration of Independence, one of the nation’s most prominent Catholic leaders is clarifying that patriotism is a virtue, according to traditional Catholic teaching. In CatholicVote’s latest episode of the Virtue of Patriotism podcast series, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke addressed the moral obligation that Americans owe to their homeland.
This nation and her tradition of patriotism has been safeguarded at a high price and lovingly passed down from one generation to the next, for nearly 250 years now.
The Fourth Commandment, given by God to Moses, stipulates, “Honour thy father and thy mother, that thou mayest be longlived upon the land which the Lord thy God will give thee” (Exodus 20:12). This commandment has long been understood in Catholic teaching as a component of the virtue of piety, which is itself a component of the cardinal virtue of justice, which demands that each be given what he is due. Patriotism is a component of the virtue of piety.
“The Fourth Commandment — ‘honor your father and your mother’ — reveals a profound truth about the moral order established by God. It teaches us to revere those through whom we have received life and education,” Burke explained. “Yet the Church, in her perennial teaching, affirms that this commandment extends beyond the family. It includes the honor owed to our homeland and to civil authorities who, within the bounds of the divine and natural law, bear responsibility for the common good,” he continued. “At the heart of the common good is the flourishing of the family.”
According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the first obligation demanded by piety is to God Himself, the creator and author of life, who made man in His own image and likeness. After God, the greatest obligation one owes is to one’s parents, followed closely by one’s country. “For through them we receive existence, nourishment, education, and the foundations of virtue. Consequently, we owe to them a debt of justice and charity,” Burke explained. “The love we render to our homeland is therefore not sentiment, but piety the virtue by which we acknowledge benefactions received and respond with fidelity and generous service.”
“In our time this noble virtue is frequently obscured. Patriotism is often confused with nationalism,” the cardinal clarified. Where nationalism, he explained, risks “exalt[ing] the nation above the moral law and at times even above God, preferring power to truth,” patriotism “is rooted in the order willed by God. It honors what is good in the homeland, while refusing all compromise with injustice. It serves the nation through fidelity to truth and a commitment to the dignity of every human person.” Burke continued, “Rightly lived, patriotism becomes a work of charity, safeguarding the cultural and spiritual patrimony of a people, fostering virtue and praying for the conversion and peace of the nation entrusted to us by divine Providence.”
This virtue of patriotism was clearly evinced in the founding of the United States of America. In the final line of the Declaration of Independence, America’s founding document and charter, the 56 Signers agreed that “for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Each of the 56 men who signed their names to that document would, had the Revolutionary War been lost, have no doubt been tried for treason and, at best, sentenced to decades in prison. More than likely, they would have been hanged by the neck until dead.
These were men who understood the debt that they owed to their nation, who understood and were willing to give — in many cases did give — what piety and patriotism demanded of them. They also understood that they were not simply fighting for the opportunity to create a new nation, but that the centuries spent taming the wilderness and settling the frontier in the New World had already created a new nation, a new people. President Theodore Roosevelt acknowledged this reality in a 1901 speech addressing the people of the Rocky Mountain State, that vast wonderland of peerless mountains and fruited plains.
“The Americans are children and grandchildren of the men who came here from England, Ireland, Germany, France, Scandinavia, and the rest of Europe [and] have become Americans — a new race, with a new ethnic type, and they are no more Englishmen or Germans or Scandinavians than the descendants of the Norman invaders of England are Frenchmen,” Roosevelt declared. “The frontier conditions made a new race. The stern struggle with the wilderness and with wild men welded together the descendants of many European stocks into one people — the American,” he continued. “Out of the crucible of the wilderness came a new ethnic type, hardy, self-reliant, democratic in instinct, and with a continent for its inheritance.”
America’s Founding Fathers sought to shield this new nation from the tyranny of others, but their unwavering devotion to this endeavor did not seek to replace the tyranny of a foreign crown with the tyranny of a class of American elites. (As Mel Gibson’s character Benjamin Martin, based in large part on the real-life Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion, observes in the film The Patriot, “Why should I trade one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away? An elected legislature can trample a man’s rights as easily as a king can.”) No, as true patriots, steeped in the rich intellectual and moral traditions of the West, the Founding Fathers sought not to exalt the nation above the moral law, but rather rooted their nation’s foundational laws in the order willed by God. They honored what is good in their homeland and refused to compromise with injustice.
This nation and her tradition of patriotism has been safeguarded at a high price and lovingly passed down from one generation to the next, for nearly 250 years now. The patriots of today, under the virtue of piety, owe a debt to their beloved nation, as well as to the generations of forefathers who have protected, preserved, and cherished this great nation “to ourselves and our posterity.”
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