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1. 1 Comment by robert reavis on 22 May 2008:

   “What we are not allowed to do, however, is to reject out of hand that which is good because it is not, somehow, fully ours.”

   Yes, such as most English and American literature and poetry, most english history, the yeomen and agrarian traditions of the American south, and The American Revolution. It is silly for Catholics to ignore this.
   Ivanhoe is, I think, a good and classic example of an excellent novel that is at the same time arguably anti- jewish and anti-catholic and damn good. I am glad you are attempting to do this conversation, Scott. But, may God Help you.

2. 2 Comment by M.A. Roberts on 22 May 2008:

   Mr. Richert, excellent post!

3. 3 Comment by Aaron D. Wolf on 22 May 2008:

   Judge, I’m not sure I understand your point.

4. 4 Comment by robert reavis on 22 May 2008:

   Thanks Aaron. I know he is old school and has numerous faults but I always drove my sons to West Texas so they could learn from the legend. ( there Mother apprecitiated the old coach because he always made the campers do their own laundry before leaving for home.)Just as I love to stop in at Rockford and meet those ” legends ” when I am in the area.

5. 5 Comment by M.A. Roberts on 22 May 2008:

   Who particularly annoys me is the neoconservative that believes that somehow mestizo Catholics are going to save European Americans from self-destruction, when, in fact, many of the problems allegedly endemic in the U.S. (abortion, illegitimacy, et al.) are just as rife, if not rifer, among Mexican immigrants.

6. 6 Comment by Scott P. Richert on 22 May 2008:

   Thanks to Robert Reavis and M.A. Roberts for the kind words. As for the question of Mexican immigration and moral issues, I plan to take them up in a future installment. For now, I thought it important to lay the groundwork for future discussion by dispensing with the dismissal of history that all too often dominates such comment threads.

7. 7 Comment by Edward on 22 May 2008:

   Terrific topic!

   Question 1: Does the need to ask this question have anything to do with Kennedy’s speech to the Baptists? Because, politically speaking, the ideas in that speech are the go-to cop out for liberal Catholics in this country (personally opposed but…).

   Question 2: Chesterton said that America has the soul of a church because it is the only nation founded upon a creed. If, therefore, being a ‘patriotic’ American entails subscribing to a specific ideology and not just loving the land on which you live, then does that, ipso facto, create a conflict between being a Catholic and an American?

8. 8 Comment by Phil Earvolino on 22 May 2008:

   It seems to me that we must ask some essential questions:

   1. What, in the context of traditional Catholic teaching, does “religious liberty” mean?

   2. Did the Church change (and if so, to what extent and in what context) its teaching regarding religious liberty in the post-conciliar period?

   3. In Catholic teaching, what are the obligations (negative and positive) of the state with respect to the practice of the faith?

   These are sensitive topics. I don’t claim to have comprehensive answers to them…

9. 9 Comment by Scott P. Richert on 22 May 2008:

   Phil Earvolino (@8):

   It seems to me that we must ask some essential questions . . .

   It seems to me that the questions you raise are, in fact, not essential to the discussion at hand, which is why I wrote:

   I have chosen the series title carefully, because it is not my intent to discuss questions of religious freedom or establishment of religion.

   Unless you’re prepared to contend that, pre-Vatican II, the Catholic Church declared all governments illegitimate that were not explicitly Catholic, and condemned all nations that did not convert en masse to the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Faith, the question of the Church’s teaching on religious liberty (and any possible change in the teaching) is irrelevant.

   That’s not to say that it’s uninteresting, and, in fact, F.J. Sarto had commissioned a piece from me for Takimag before he handed over the editorial reins. The new editor was uninterested in the topic, however, so I never wrote the piece. One day, though not as a part of this series, I’ll write it for ChroniclesMagazine.org.

10. 10 Comment by Kirt Higdon on 22 May 2008:

    If you are born into an extremely disfunctional family or even criminal family such as the mafia, you owe them a certain amount of loyalty however disgusted you may be with their crimes and vices. You certainly don’t owe them the loyalty of participating in or even applauding those crimes and vices and this applies whether you are Catholic or Protestant or of any faith. Love of country requires correcting the folly of your countrymen.

    Of course, there is the issue of your country’s folly possibly bringing ruin upon you or your country’s popular culture being a proximate occasion of sin for you or your children. In some cases emigration may be the solution. In more case, an internal emigration may be more practical – consciously separating yourself to a great extent from your country’s institutions and culture and engaging these only when there seems a chance of making a change for the better.

    This is a problem which Catholics and other Christians face not only in the US but probably now in most of the modern world. But it was always thus. This world is not our permanent home; we’re just passing through.

    Good topic!

11. 11 Comment by T. Chan on 22 May 2008:

    Question 2: Chesterton said that America has the soul of a church because it is the only nation founded upon a creed. If, therefore, being a ‘patriotic’ American entails subscribing to a specific ideology and not just loving the land on which you live, then does that, ipso facto, create a conflict between being a Catholic and an American?

    Edward, what did Chesterton mean by that?

    As for your question–I would think that most of the people here would dispute the assertion that the United States is a “proposition nation.”

    Mr. Richert writes:
    As faithful Catholics, we have to embrace what is good and true in all of those–and, as we know, the Church does teach that truth, even if sometimes only partial, can be found outside of Rome.

    Is it not easier to find truth and goodness in some areas than others?

    If we ask the question, “Can a faithful Catholic be a good American?” do we cede too much to the nationalist conception of the United States? Maybe that is a done deal, but if Catholics are to fight to preserve what is true and good, should they not also be fighting to preserve local culture and community, and hence identity?

    I don’t think you would disagree with this, Mr. Richert. It seems to me that some of the Catholics you mentioned, as well as those who blog on the Internet, who attempt a critique of the present situation do so from premises that are possibly wrong:

    (1) They assume the nationalist conception of the United States is the only one.
    (2) Or they accept an understanding of the Founding that leans more towards Enlightenment sources than the Anglo-American political tradition. (I myself have not made up my mind on this question, though I have become more open to the latter being more influential.)

    Other Catholics make the same assumptions in framing a “solution.” (They reject the Founding or the Constitution because it is tainted, or they accept that the nation-state is the most effective means of getting things done.)

    Hence I suspect their answer to the question, “How much of the Anglo-American political tradition (or the Southern political tradition) is reconcilable with Catholic political theology or Catholic social teaching?” would be different from the Catholics who post here.

    Should not Catholics prefer a ‘localalist’ understanding and solution?

12. 12 Comment by Jon W. on 22 May 2008:

    There are many aspects of fundamentalist protestant tradition and Roman Catholic tradition that both can champion. Fundamentally, the 4,000 year old definition of “family”, the duty of the Constitution to protect all life (abortion), and the lawful application of the government’s limited role in the doctrine of parens patriae are those areas of private life that all believer’s in Christ can agree must be reordered, for the sake of civilization and our nation. Civil society and our nation are in peril for having dissolved the institution of family government, failing to use it’s civil government to protect life, and protecting the private sphere of worship to further the individual’s relationship with Jesus Christ within each denominational’s domain, “church government”. Though I am not Roman Catholic, I would fight to the death to preserve their religious freedom to worship God in free assembly. My belief in Christ, and the liberty he ordains compells me to, even if I find aspects of protestant and Roman Catholic teaching peculiar to my own faith as I find in the good Book.

    Luther and the Catholic church differed little on divorce. Luther insisted on giving the power to dissolve marriages to “civil authorities” (gasp!) and remove that power from the Church. This was not universally shared by many in Rome or in Switzerland. Luther leaped from a doctrinal battle to a wedded one, and his transition was not without faults. Early protestant traditions in colonial America rejected Luther’s underdeveloped legalisms of divorce, where the local congregation performed the divorce. In early America, divorce was only obtained from the legislature, and in many if not most court rooms that centered squarely in the township they resided, the Judge sent the warring couple to the minister or priest who married them for their approval before taking “jurisdiction” of the petition before him.

    Massive immigration from Europe, was exploited in the heights of the industrial revolution by industrialists, bankers and social do-gooders. Massive numbers of Irish Catholic fathers were blamed for their children’s condition when the “monopolists” suppressed the wages of these fathers and forced their wives and children to work, under slave labor conditions in “sweat shops”. A great fire in a sweat shop in the 1880s in NYC killing 200 women and children led the industrialists to shift the blame from themselves to those “drunken” irish fathers. Thus was born the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, from the first eco-terrorist organization of like name, NYSP of Cruelty to Animals”. The society was financed by the industrialists, and the New York elitists blamed the Irish Catholic father. This “welfare society” rounded up hundreds, if not thousands of children from the streets and shipped them by train to the midwest to be used as farm laborers, and “good christians” who adopted them. The Texas FLDS case is merely another chapter in “do-gooderism” and the reflective nature of tryannical fanatical government, wherein Christian adoption agencies were forewarned of a massive influx of children by DHS in Texas prior to the raid on their religious sect. By undermining the “living wage” of the head of household, the industrialists were more than happy to finance the destruction of family and exand the labour force. The banks and industrialists embraced the concept of “women’s rights” and family destruction. It profited them.

    Adult single females were treated like dirt by so-called “traditional” christian leaders in the community (bankers and employers) who despised unmarried women in public life. There was a good reason that Susan B. Anthony wanted to champion women’s rights without destroying the institution of marriage. Stanton, her arch rival at Seneca Falls had only one desire, destroy patriarchal marriage. Her radical camp of feminism won out.

    The banks and lawyers embraced the concept of family destruction, by “doubling” the number of persons capable of “contract” within each household. Women were granted the power to contract in marriage. With two world wars in the near future, women could be drivin from the home to the factory, and compete for post war jobs and wages to keep the monopolists’ edge in lower production costs. A labor war was born in the 20s and 30s, and unions were the natural ally of anyone capable of work, but unwilling to die working uncivilized hours for survival wages.

    While men were concripted and sent to die in Viet Nam, and the streets in riot over civil rights and the war, feminist-neofascists lawyers were working hard through the NCCUSL to wed wives to the Social Security Act, by creating a quasi-legal system of “no-fault” dissolution. It walks and talks like a divorce, but it isn’t. The concept of walk away civil contract dissolution is not unconstitutional per se, it’s perversion of law is the concept that children and property can be redistributed merely by her commencement of a civil action to dissolve her marital contract. Women have, since Mt Sinai, the lawful right to abandon their family, if necessary, to protect herself from a brute. Fathers have never had that right to “walk” and abandon their fundamental duty to provide for the care and custody of their children or wife outside a finding of fact and conclusion of law that the wife or the husband breached the marital contract. Feminist jurispudence insist that courts have “subject matter jurisdiction” over the care and custody of children by Statute, without a shred of “due process” of law, substantive or procedural. The egaltarinist, socio-fascist feel that “equality” in marital child custody gives extra-constitutional rights of one party to transfer the jurisdiction of child custody from the sanctity of a home to the arms of an unloving judge, over the objection of a party who may or may not have breached the terms of the “civil contract”, or who may have breached the terms of the civil contract of “marriage”, did nothing to abandon, abuse or neglect the children within that private, civil contract. Our nations family law policy is tyranny, absent any concept of law or a Constitution designed to protect liberty from government tyranny. No amount of immigration can stave off the financial disaster of matriarchal government, though they shall try.

    Family destruction is public policy, and the bankers, industrialists and “service economy” (ABA) are it’s benefactors.

    This public policy is something that must unite both protestant and Roman Catholic if we are to survive as a democratic republic, a beacon of liberty and most importantly, restore the integrity of the “rule of law” to our nation. No body of law strikes directly to the attack against civil government than “family law” inflicts at the county level.

    We have a short window in which to unite Jewish, Protestant and Roman Catholic leadership to restore liberty and rule of law. We must, I think work together, or perish.

    To preserve family government, all believers, black and white, protestant and Catholic, must stand in the breach where the thin veil of light shines forth, or the door of darkness shall slam shut.

    The World Congress of Families, the Howard Center is the only organization on the planet and in this nation that understands family, and what it’s demise portends for civilization.

    For that, I thank God and his everlasting mercy.

13. 13 Comment by Red Phillips on 22 May 2008:

    Wow. Great topic. First a simple answer. A Catholic can certainly be a good and loyal American, but they can’t be an Americanist. But neither can a right thinking Protestant, IMO.

    I am one of those paleos who doesn’t believe that the American Founding was irredeemably tainted, although there was much too much Enlightenment liberal idiom, sources, language, etc. I lean toward the Anglo-American political tradition that T. Chan cites.

    I have noted, however, that a large percentage of those who do feel that way are traditionalist Catholics since you don’t run into a lot of monarchist Anglophiles these days.

    But a good Protestant should equally recognize the problem with Americanism, even if they are glad America is not a predominantly Catholic nation. I like John Rao’s writings. I recently recommended him to Matthew. Just where he says Catholic, I think Christian.

    The problem with Americanism comes up all the time. Modern “conservatives” and Christians don’t have a clue. They assume that pluralism, religious liberty, SOCAS, etc. are all there in so many word in the plain text of the Bible. As Americans who have never been taught otherwise, they can’t not think that way.

    When I was recently taking up much internet bandwidth in an effort to deny Alan Keyes the Constitution Party nomination, one thing I objected to was his “Declarationism.” People were flabbergasted that anyone could possibly object to Declarationism. When I would point out that it is factually incorrect, fundamentally liberal, and bad theology it was like I was speaking heresy. Like questioning the DoI was like questioning the Virgin Birth. We have much work to do in this area.

14. 14 Comment by robert m. peters on 22 May 2008:

    “Can a faithful Catholic be a good American? Can a good American be a faithful Catholic? ”

    These are questions which any follower of the Christ should be raising. I raised them in in 1978 at a European Baptist Retreat in Bechtesgaden, Germany, in the General Walker Hotel, located at the heart of and once part of Hitler’s Aplenfestung. Most of the participants were officers and senior NCO’s along their families. A minority of us were civilians. I placed my concerns in the context that my Christian ancestors and I had made a unique sojourn as Christians and Americans and that America had enjoyed the fruits of having had Christians sojourning with her; yet, I concluded, from my perspective in 1978, that America no longer wanted or needed us. I said then, with the words of Joshuah in the back of my mind, that we would soon have to choose which “god” we would serve. I would say that the time of which I spoke might even now be at hand. There was among the faithful there assembled no cry of treason put against me. In fact, there was expressed and tacit consensus that what I had expressed was likely true.

15. 15 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 22 May 2008:

    Scott, you have brought to our attention something very thought-provoking and essential, something that has been hovering around these website discussions for some time. I offer a few eccentric observations that may be of some use. I would be more willing to listen to the traditionalist Catholic rejection of America if I saw any evidence that traditional Catholicism has retarded modernism in the Catholic countries of Europe. I see no such evidence. And always, I am reminded that there are two Americas. The Puritan/ideological which is the source of the Americanist religion, and the tolerant, believing Protestant Christianity of the traditional South where Catholicism flourished before the great immigration of the late 19th centuries made it powerful in the North. I have observed that many Catholics, perhaps a majority, have pretty well been absorbed into the religion of Americanism as readily as Protestants. Is America properly understood incompatible with Catholicism? No. But America as religion is repulsive to all Christians. Traditional Catholics have a key role, perhaps the most important role, in
    combatting the Americanist heresy, but as far as I am able to observe, traditional Catholics are a beleagured minority of their own communion.

16. 16 Comment by robert m. peters on 22 May 2008:

    Dr. Wilson,

    In 1978, I had not become aware of the two Americas. My words of 1978, were, with hindsight, addressed to the Puritan ideological. It was not until the early 1990’s that I began to see this dichotomy. I must say, with regret, that we Southern Baptist have fallen under the thrall of the Puritan heresy.

17. 17 Comment by Red Phillips on 22 May 2008:

    Dr. Wilson, oddly enough, Puritanism was illiberal and hence “un-American,” by modern reckoning. But it was certainly ideological. The more “tolerant” South was in some respects more liberal (in a sense) but not ideological. We of course know how it all worked out.

    This dichotomy and seeming paradox has always intrigued me. The explanations I have seen for why Puritanism so quickly morphed into social gospel Unitarianism have never quite satisfied me. As it morphed it became more tolerant on matters of religion, but lost none of its dogmatic universalism and intolerance of difference.

18. 18 Comment by Tom Piatak on 22 May 2008:

    A great post, puncuated by some great quotes from John Paul’s final book, a book that contains much of interest to paleoconservatives.

19. 19 Comment by robert m. peters on 22 May 2008:

    Mr. Phillips @ 17

    I hold that Puritanism, particularly the New England strain, retained its dogmatic worldview even as it morphed into social gospel Unitarianism for two reasons: it had already crossed into error if not heresy by seeking to impose a theocracy and ignoring that the kingdom of the Christ is not of this world; and it had “dethroned” the Christ as God and had reduced Him to a created being, a demi-god. Thus, Puritans, again particularly of the mutant New England variety, as a consequence held that they did not needed the transforming Christ as the Author of the transformation of the hearts and minds of men but that they themselves through law and good intentions, i.e. the noble cause, could bring about such transformations; and this they held and hold today in their most secular state quite dogmatically.

20. 20 Comment by Scott P. Richert on 22 May 2008:

    Edward (@7):

    Regarding Question 1 (Kennedy’s speech to the Baptists), you’re right that he perfectly encapsulates the “personally opposed but” attitude that political liberals who are nominally Catholic always trot out. But those liberal Catholics only relate to the questions that I raised in the sense that they provide the evidence that some non-Catholics present to “prove” that you can’t be a faithful Catholic and a good American. Of course, they ignore the fact that these folks are liberals first and Catholics a distant second.

    Question 2 is quite interesting, and T. Chan, Red Phillips, Clyde Wilson, and Robert M. Peters have all addressed it quite well. I would only add that, despite all that is perceptive in the work of David Schindler and John Rao, both, I think, make a fundamental error that is echoed in your question:

    If, therefore, being a ‘patriotic’ American entails subscribing to a specific ideology and not just loving the land on which you live, then does that, ipso facto, create a conflict between being a Catholic and an American?

    When phrased that way, the answer is obviously yes. But should the question be phrased that way? After all, patriotism is not ideological; nationalism is. Frankly, I’m not concerned with being a faithful Catholic and a nationalist, but being a faithful Catholic and a patriot. And that is where I think that the quotations from John Paul II are relevant.

    More after supper.

21. 21 Comment by M.A. Roberts on 22 May 2008:

    Scott’s post raises the possibility that religion and nation can be in conflict – itself a symptom of our modern predicament. While nations and religious institutions have historically butted heads from time to time, never before were Western governments so ideologically predisposed, as they are today, against any form of Christianity. If Catholics reject the U.S. today, they certainly are not rejecting a Protestant government, but a secular, globalist empire. Nevertheless, as Scott points out, patriotism runs much deeper than this. A nation is more than a government. A nation, in the classical sense, is a tribe. It is local, consanguineous, and ancestrally aware. So, whether a conflict exists depends on how one construes ‘nation’. If one means nation in the modern propositional sense of Americanism, as Red points out, then, I’d say, there is a conflict. But if one implies nation in a more traditional sense, perhaps as an extension of the classical meaning, which itself runs contrary to empire, then no.

22. 22 Comment by robert m. peters on 22 May 2008:

    Mr. Roberts @ 21,

    From sometime well before that event which we have come to call the American War for Independence, there had emerged colonial republics on the North American Continent, republics which declared their independence from the Crown to which they individually had held allegiance and which then entered into unions with one another, first under the Articles and then under the current Constitution. That accommodation of republics was not a nation. That myth, although nurtured from the very beginning of the union, was not to be claimed as “truth” until Lincoln and his Republicans came on the scene. This “nation” is morphing or has already morphed into a global empire. As a Christian and as an American, I take my stand against both the empire and the nation which was is mythical predecessor.

23. 23 Comment by robert reavis on 22 May 2008:

    CLyde Wilson @15

    Dr. Wilson your posts of more than a line or two are almost scary in their fullness of truth. Reading you and Mr. Peters is living proof that the promise of peace is now, as always, with men of “good will ” — in all that those simple two words entail. As for Europe, it all depends on France. If she rights herself and returns home after experimenting with living off “the husks that the swine did eat,” there may be hope . If not, then the death rattle will become more pronounced.
    In America it is more hopeful because as Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in the November 2005 issue of Chronicles, “as gasoline supplies diminish and become prohibitively expensive and the dollar becomes increasingly irrelevant as a measure of worth, … we will be required to re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it from the kind of communities we inhabit to the way we grow our food, the way we work and trade. ” Southern culture will understand this change best because for her,” Small has always been beautiful ” from politics to neighborhoods and churches.

24. 24 Comment by Scott P. Richert on 22 May 2008:

    I’m afraid the further comments that I promised to deliver after supper will have to wait for the morning, since the cold I’ve been fighting for three days has finally got the best of me.

25. 25 Comment by Patrick Hall on 22 May 2008:

    Can a devout Catholic remain a “good American”?

    Well, the answer is: depends on what you call a “good American”, and what you call a “devout Catholic”.

    The problems with [some] definitions of “good American” are that they conflict DIRECTLY with definitions of “devout Catholic” directly. For example, considering aborting babies as MURDER, as a DEVOUT Catholic is in direct confrontation with being a “good American”, who is instructed, by their faith, that abortion is NOT murder. Whether you want to believe it or not, the US Federal Government considers the murder of a baby, “abortion”, to be a perfectly legal medical procedure. Accepting the American government is paramount to accepting their ruling on abortion, and THERE ARE NO TWO WAYS ABOUT IT.

    As Our Lord tells us, “you will know them by their fruits”, and the “fruit” of the American government is, among other things, the murder of infants. If that’s not the “fruit” of Satanism, then what is?

26. 26 Comment by Ronduck on 22 May 2008:

    Mr. Richert
    Thank you for getting to the heart of the matter, in doing so you have chosen your words with more care and restraint than I did in my previous posts.

    Catholics would be assumed loyal to America if their bishops were loyal to the Faith. These bishops direct the education of many voters in heavily Catholic states, who knowingly elect immoral men who invite an invasion. As such the real root of anger at the church is the infidelity of its bishops to the Bible.

    Were it not for this immorality you wouldn’t be asking these questions.

27. 27 Comment by G.L.A. on 23 May 2008:

    One of the problems I’m having with this discussion is Scott’s use of the term “faithful Catholics”. I’m not sure, especially in postmodern America what this term means?
    If I were to “not set the facts aside” I would begin by saying that with rare exceptions baptised Catholics in North America , faithful and awake to the Incarnation and Christ’s precense are few and far between. The Catholic Church in North America is failing. Its once great educational structure, its priesthoods and monastic orders are a ghost of what they once were. To blame this failure on the American Protestant founding is an excuse or a diversion from this failing. That is not to say that the particular nature of the founding of the US, with its Puritan, Constitutional, Anglo, captitalist basis did not , atleast initially, keep the Catholics on the outside of the establishment. But to be Christian is by nature to be on the outside and for the “faithful Catholic’ this was not an excuse to build a true Church in America.
    Here in Canada, the Catholic Church is also failing or in many cases dying. Yet, in Canada there was no Puritan, Protestant founding that threatened the Church. In fact , atleast in the
    20th C., in spite of the strong Anglo heritage and economic dominance (Canada is officially a constitutional monarchy), the country had a majority of Catholics (French, highland Scotts, Irish and Anglo Catholics) and the majority of its 20thC
    Prime Ministers have been “Catholic”. Yet the Church in Canada is failing and dying. Scott’s second option of “the entire world gone wrong” is the place to start here and the “faithless” Catholic response would be where I would begin to point the finger.
    The Kennedy’s were/are a ruthless Irish gangster family that killed, bribed and fornicated their way into power. Any living soul awake in Christ could gather this evidence and conclude that these are bad characters and in no way Christians. Yet, great numbers of American “Catholics” indentified with and voted for these scoundrels. Why, we have to ask, can a gatahering of the Christian faithful, as the Church claims to be, not rid themselves of those who serve the master of hell? Certainly in St. Ignatius’ day the Church would have done so.
    North American Catholics have been their own worst enemies. Their failure to become true Catholics in this land discovered for the faithful by Columbus lies squarely on their own shoulders, not those of my Protestant ancestors.

28. 28 Comment by michael warning on 23 May 2008:

    “The problem for extremists on both sides is that the Catholic Church does not declare a government illegitimate simply because it is not Catholic, nor condemn a nation for not converting en masse to the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Faith.”

    From the decretals: “Outside the Church there is no empire” 24,q.I.para Sed illud

    It is not that clear.

29. 29 Comment by T.P. on 23 May 2008:

    “Chesterton said that America has the soul of a church because it is the only nation founded upon a creed.”

    I think that Chesterton was right. The statement is descriptive, not prescriptive. The neocons wish to make it prescriptive. That is their mistake. The paleocons reject it as both descriptive and prescriptive. That is their mistake. It is not a coincident that the independence of America and the formulation of its political system came at the same time, which in the case of Europe was not the norm (England existed before Magna Carta, etc.). America has not *officially, openly* abandoned its constitutional framework. If ever we do that, and the nation survives, we will see whether America really is more than its political/ideological formulation. France and Rome both have been kingdoms, republics, and dictatorships. Whatever you have to say about Lincoln, we have never *officially, explicitly* chucked federal and republican constitutionalism.

30. 30 Comment by Red Phillips on 23 May 2008:

    Mr. Peters, I don’t think that the Puritans ever officially adopted a lesser view of Christ. The Unitarians sure did. What I think you could argue is that extreme Calvinism in some ways takes Christ out of the equation. As the state of your immortal soul becomes a sort of cosmic lottery. As I read somewhere but can’t remember now where, it is really hard for people to live like that. So they are more inclined to strive to do right as partial proof to themselves that they are in fact one of the chosen ones. But Calvinists like Dabney and Jackson avoided this trap. I think the Heaven on Earth part is probably more of the issue. It is a misapplication of Scripture, ahistorical, and unattainable, but it is apparently appealing and easy to articulate (like all ideologies). As they slipped into heresy on matters overtly Christian, they retained the extra-Christian concept of ushering in Heaven on Earth.

    But the fact remains that the Puritans were illiberal on matters of religious freedom and would not be good Americanist Creedalists by today’s standards. By today’s standards they are the archetypal enemy. This is the reason I am more inclined to view the modern day Puritans as partial illiberal allies than are some.

31. 31 Comment by Scott Quinn on 23 May 2008:

    I feel a little bit like an adolescent attending his first party with adults, trying to “impress” the adults by adding something worthwhile to the discussion. Still, here goes.

    My answer to Mr. Richert’s first two questions would be a resounding “No!” to each one. I then would propose the question: Why would one desire the other? To attempt to find any relevant common ground between the two seems about as hopeless as a dog chasing his tail.

    I am puzzled as to why these questions are deemed relevant (no disrespect intended), since there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to bring about a culture that could ever approximate a culture that Chronicles readers yearn for. It makes for great discussion, but that’s about it.

    A faithful Catholic’s only real option is to withdraw from actively and directly supporting his government and get his spiritual and family lives in the best possible shape. Pay your taxes, obey the laws (well, most of them), but do not vote or otherwise involve yourself in a government that you cannot change and which will corrupt you the longer you remain engaged in a fantasy.

32. 32 Comment by R. Cort Kirkwood on 23 May 2008:

    What a fine and thoughtful piece from my pal, Scott.

    I’ve contemplated this very question over the past few years.

    Our Catholic faith requires us to be patriots, which does not mean, however, “my country right or wrong.”

    As Chesterton taught us, that is “something no patriot would say,” for the same reason he wouldn’t say, “my mother drunk or sober.”

    And, if you’re mother were driving a car off of a cliff, you would certainly be obliged to stop her. Again, from Chesterton.

    So it is with Catholic Americans like us, who see our country going off a cliff. As patriots, we have an obligation to stop that, and as well to witness truth and to offer the fraternal correction and spiritual guidance necessary to bring our friends and good Christians such as Red Phillips to the Faith.

33. 33 Comment by Tom on 23 May 2008:

    Yes, a Catholic can be a good American, and the same holds for Protestants, Jews, Pagans, and Atheists, as long as we remember that the America isn’t a government, it’s a country.

    A Catholic can certinely be a good American if he is respectful of his fellow Americans, productive, educated, and acts with dignity. So can an Atheist.

    I think the issue here is whether or not a person can be a good Catholic and have a slavering devotion to Federal policy. I would vote no, because the Federal government is clearly hostile to religion, as it sees religion as a competitor in its quest for world domination.

    I would even say that the government is hostile to Protestantism. Even though George W. is supposed to be a Protestant, he doesn’t act like one.

34. 34 Comment by woodcutter on 23 May 2008:

    “Can a faithful Catholic be a good American? Can a good American be a faithful Catholic?”

    I think “yes” would be my answer. A faithful Catholic for one thing would mean that you practice your faith in the most elemental way starting with your self and your homes. If America is indeed the land of the free then we (as faithful Catholics) have a choice when we leave home and head of to work. Do we follow the lost or do we strive for the “eye of the needle”? The gov’t will do as it will in what ever country we live in. Just because we are a minority does not make us any less citizens. And yes we are a minority. When the secular world approves a law contrary to Gods law we as Roman Catholics are obligated to appose the law with a resounding no, thus participating as a legal citizen. If we do not appose such laws are we not also saying I forfeit my right as a citizen. I say “run the good race” and not only will you be a good Catholic but also a good citizen.

35. 35 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 23 May 2008:

    One of the problems with Catholicism in this country has been that many or most Catholics have acted more like immigrants than like Catholics. As immigrants they have tended toward leftwing causes, and in search of respectability have often sought to be identified with the Puritan strain that they thought was the essential American character. Is there any difference to be found in the political positions of Massachusetts Catholics and Massachusetts Protestants? Not much, I suspect. Much as I would like to see the Church as a force for Christian civilisation in America, I have doubted the possibility ever since I saw “freedom-riding” nuns invading the South in the 1960s. By the way, growing up in an overshelmingly (Southern) Methodist background, the only time I ever heard an anti-Catholic comment was from a visiting preacher from New York.

36. 36 Comment by robert reavis on 23 May 2008:

    “By the way, growing up in an overshelmingly (Southern) Methodist background, the only time I ever heard an anti-Catholic comment was from a visiting preacher from New York.”

    Figures.

37. 37 Comment by T.P. on 23 May 2008:

    “I saw “freedom-riding” nuns invading the South in the 1960s.”

    Does this really show that the Church cannot be a civilizing force here? Well, that really goes to the question of whether civilized people think blacks should be systematically excluded from their businesses and political systems simply because their black. That may well be something constititutionally protected, but it definitely seems to be, from the Church’s perspective, to be a wrong decision. “Break bread with blacks at church on Sunday, but feel free to shut them out on principle the other six days of the week,” doesn’t sound like a principle of Catholic civilization. Here Southern culture could have used some civilizing. Would that it had come through peaceful religious prompting instead of through compulsory governmental reform.

38. 38 Comment by T.P. on 23 May 2008:

    “their black”

    ERR, I hate homophones. “they’re” I also wrote “to be” twice in the next sentence.

39. 39 Comment by T. Chan on 23 May 2008:

    Here Southern culture could have used some civilizing. Would that it had come through peaceful religious prompting instead of through compulsory governmental reform.

    I think the objection is: do “we” need outsiders, even if they are religious, to do this prompting? (I am understanding Dr. Wilson to mean that the nuns did not live in the South.) Or was integration and the conversion of hearts slowly being accomplished from those who actually lived in the region and were members of the community? It’s one thing for Christian ‘missionaries’ to go to the South, settle there, and form relationships with the people there. (Even this might be objectionable to Southerners.) It’s another for non-Southern Christians to travel to the South to make a political statement and then leave. (Whether such acts did anything to help integration, I will leave that to those who actually live in the South to answer. But I doubt that it did much besides cause disruption and ill-feeling.)

40. 40 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 23 May 2008:

    T.P and I seem to have different concepts of what constitutes civilisation. Despite what most Catholics today believe, the Church in 19th century America NEVER opposed slavery, regarding it as a paternal institution. Neither egalitarianism nor outside coercion of settled Christian societies are compatible with Christian civilisation. That the Church now lends itself to such (including immigration advocacy) indicates not its devotion to charity but the degree to which it has been absorbed into and politicised by the Americanist religion.

41. 41 Comment by Joseph D'Hippolito on 23 May 2008:

    Richert’s question is completely disingenuous. He is asking whether a so-called “traditional” Catholic can be a good American, since Richert and his ideological fellow travellers seem to believe that the only legitimate Catholic is one who shares their views. This is no different from “progressive” Catholics defining Catholicism according to their own ideological agenda; in either case, it’s narcissistic.

    Instead of asking this question, Scott, perhaps you should ask whether the Catholic Church is truly Christian and whether Catholics of all stripes can change the situation? I mean, after all, with the clerical sex-abuse crisis, with corruption entrenched in the ecclesiastical bureaucracy for centuries, with bishops blissfully ignoring canon law, with Rome failing or refusing to discipline malfeasant bishops and with many “devout” Catholics in blissful denial of the whole thing, wouldn’t that question be more germain?

42. 42 Comment by robert reavis on 23 May 2008:

    #41 “Instead of asking this question, Scott, perhaps you should ask whether the Catholic Church is truly Christian ….”

    Perhaps an even better question is” Can any Christians living in America today be saved ? Can they vote without sinning ? Should they vote at all ? Can they survive without sinning? Are Christians today any different from the new post christian, pagan, Americans ? How are they different ?Should we give America back to the native americans ? Should we take America back from the current crop of destroyers who took it away it from Christians ? Who are the destroyers ? Why were our ancestors so Un — Christian , ignorant, hardworking, but stupid and opposed to the government helping them and others so much ? Where was Mr. Obama when we needed him ? Who says today what a Christian is ? Are there any Christians today ? Does McCain care about them ? Have there ever been any real Christians after the death of the last Apostle ? Did they always try to correct all the worlds wrongs ? Did they ever do anything that was helpful ? Why isn’t the world perfect after all these years of Christianity ?
    Did Socrates really say a fool can ask more questions in a few minutes than a wise man can answer in a lifetime ? Am I a fool ?
    Who is wise ?

43. 43 Comment by Bill on 23 May 2008:

    Can a traditional Catholic be a good American? I don’t see how. Given the horrific nature of the egalitarian regime, and the absolute despising of all things Christian…I think a better question would be “why would any traditional Catholic want to be a good American”?

    Outside of loving our place, land and people, how far can we go with giving adulations to a country that has systematically neutered the Christian faith to the point that putting a manger seen in the town square is considered a greater sin than infanticide? Indeed, patriotism is a virtue…until it becomes a vice.

    I think all traditionally minded people are at some point going to have to give up all false pretenses of “loving our country”… as it has evolved into an effeminate “proposition” state that has no use for any silly notions such as “culture” and “tradition”. Alas, I thank God for homemade wine and our Lord on the altar…otherwise I might get cranky.

44. 44 Comment by Edward on 23 May 2008:

    “Richert’s question is completely disingenuous. He is asking whether a so-called “traditional” Catholic can be a good American, since Richert and his ideological fellow travellers seem to believe that the only legitimate Catholic is one who shares their views. This is no different from “progressive” Catholics defining Catholicism according to their own ideological agenda; in either case, it’s narcissistic.”

    Absolutely ridiculous. Your faulty premise is that the word ‘traditional’ is describing some sort of theological flavor rather than unbridled loyalty to the Church. A ‘traditional’ Catholic is one who defers to Church Tradition and Church teaching, a ‘progressive’ is something else entirely. Whatever it is, though, it cannot properly be called Catholic because the Church’s nature is unchanging. Therefore, the phrase ‘traditional’ Catholic should, in fact, be a redundancy, but it is because of people who shirk Church teaching yet nevertheless call themselves Catholic that men like Mr. Richert feel the need to openly identify themselves as Catholics who actually follow the Catholic faith. Hardly ideological.

45. 45 Comment by Joseph D'Hippolito on 23 May 2008:

    Very well, Edward, if you’re one of those who defer to Church “tradition,” then what do you think of JPII’s de facto theological revisionism considering capital punishment, a revisionism that bespeaks of abolitionism? Consider the following:

    – During his 1999 trip to the United States, the late pope successfully convinced Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan to commute the death sentence issued to Darrell Mease, who was convicted of murdering three people – including a disabled 19-year old.

    – In 2000, John Paul asked Rome’s city officials to let the Colisseum’s lights shine continuously in memory of those who received death sentences.

    – In 2001, the late pope wrote a personal request to President George W. Bush for clemency for Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

    –John Paul revealed his true opinion about capital punishment at a large Mass in St. Louis on January 29, 1999, two days after Carnahan commuted Mease’s sentence:

    “The new evangelization calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life: who will proclaim, celebrate and serve the Gospel of life in every situation. A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil. Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform. I renew the appeal I made most recently at Christmas for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary.”

    – Cdl. Renato Martino, speaking as the Holy See’s permanent observer at the United Nations, admitted that the Catholic Church seeks to abolish capital punishment worldwide:

    “Abolition of the death penalty … is only one step towards creating a deeper respect for human life. If millions of budding lives are eliminated at their very roots, and if the family of nations can take for granted such crimes without a disturbed conscience, the argument for the abolition of capital punishment will become less credible. Will the international community be prepared to condemn such a culture of death and advocate a culture of life?”

    – The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops followed Martino’s lead in March 2005 by announcing its own comprehensive abolitionist campaign, complete with political lobbying, judicial intervention and educational efforts in every parish.

    Now consider the following:

    – Genesis 9:5-6 describes God as ordering Noah and his descendents to execute murderers: “Murder is forbidden….Any person who murders must be killed. Yes, you must execute anyone who murders another person, for to kill a person is to kill a living being made in God’s image (New Living Translation).”

    That command, according to Genesis, came after a flood that destroyed a morally chaotic world – and is repeated in the every book of the Torah, the first five books that form the Bible’s foundation.

    The command implies three theological principles. First, if God is the author of life, then God retains the prerogative to define the circumstances under which life can be taken. Second, God demands that humanity create just societies to protect the innocent. Third, murder is such a heinous violation of the divine image in humanity that execution is the only appropriate punishment.

    – Exodus 20-23 elaborates on these principles in what scholars call the lex talonis, which advocates punishment proportional to the offense – the original meaning of “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.” Instead of encouraging vengeance, as Martino maintains, the lex talonis discourages ad hoc vigilantism – the ultimate form of vindictiveness – in favor of due process.

    – In the New Testament, St. Paul reinforces the idea in his letter to the Romans. In Chapter 12, he discourages his readers from avenging themselves by quoting Deuteronomy 32:35 (“Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. I will repay!”). In the next chapter, St. Paul encourages them to rely on due process through legitimate authorities “because they do not bear the sword in vain (verse 4).”

    – In The City of God, St. Augustine states:”The same divine law which forbids the killing of a human being allows certain exceptions. Since the agent of authority is but a sword in the hand, and is not responsible for the killing, it is in no way contrary to the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ for the representative of the State’s authority to put criminals to death, according to the Law or the rule of rational justice.”

    – St. Thomas Aquinas, in his masterpiece Summa Theologica, argues against the idea that incarceration alone is enough to protect the community: “If a man is a danger to the community, threatening it with disintegration by some wrongdoing of his, then his execution for the healing and preservation of the common good is to be commended. Only the public authority, not private persons, may licitly execute malefactors by public judgment. Men shall be sentenced to death for crimes of irreparable harm or which are particularly perverted.”

    – In Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas even argues that impending execution can stimulate repentance: “The fact that the evil, as long as they live, can be corrected from their errors does not prohibit the fact that they may be justly executed, for the danger which threatens from their way of life is greater and more certain than the good which may be expected from their improvement. They also have at that critical point of death the opportunity to be converted to God through repentance. And if they are so stubborn that even at the point of death their heart does not draw back from evil, it is possible to make a highly probable judgment that they would never come away from evil to the right use of their powers.”

    –In 1952, when Pope Pius XII said:“When it is a question of the execution of a man condemned to death it is then reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned of the benefit of life, in expiation of his fault, when already, by his fault, he has dispossessed himself of the right to live.”

    –Not even Sister Helen Prejean, one of the most popular opponents of capital punishment, contends that the abolitionist position has biblical roots, as she admitted in her book, Dead Man Walking:“It is abundantly clear that the Bible depicts murder as a capital crime for which death is considered the appropriate punishment, and one is hard pressed to find a biblical ‘proof text’ in either the Hebrew Testament or the New Testament which unequivocally refutes this. Even Jesus’ admonition ‘Let him without sin cast the first stone,’ when He was asked the appropriate punishment for an adulteress (John 8:7) – the Mosaic Law prescribed death – should be read in its proper context. This passage is an ‘entrapment’ story, which sought to show Jesus’ wisdom in besting His adversaries. It is not an ethical pronouncement about capital punishment.”

46. 46 Comment by Edward on 23 May 2008:

    You have amassed quite a bit of information. The problem, however, is that Pope John Paul II did not reverse the Catholic Church’s position on the death penalty. The Church sides with Scripture, Augustine, and Aquinas on this issue and always will. Pope John Paul II, whatever his personal opinions and hopes were, did not infallibly alter Church teaching. Every item you list is an example of him being prudentially opposed to the death penalty, not principally opposed. This is to say that, as a Catholic (even the Pope), one can freely decide whether the death penalty is just or unjust in a given and particular situation. What a Catholic (even the Pope) cannot do is say that the death penalty is an intrinsic evil and therefore wrong always, like abortion. While the Pope does seem strongly to oppose the death penalty in most instances, ultimately, none of these collected statements amounts to a reversal of traditional Church teaching.

47. 47 Comment by Old School Traditionalist on 23 May 2008:

    T.P., do you mind showing me the Bible verse that condemns segregation or that requires an egalitarian ordering of society?

    Thanks.

48. 48 Comment by Jeffrey Wilson on 24 May 2008:

    Mr. Richert, the question posed is a great one, given the many posts one has seen over the years on Chronicles.

    It would appear that the nub of the problem is contained in the definition you quoted by John Paul II: The term “nation” designates a community based in a given territory and distinguished by its culture. Catholic social doctrine holds that the family and the nation are both natural societies, not the product of mere convention. [While Patriotism] is a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, its natural features. It is a love which extends also to the works of our compatriots and the fruits of their genius.

    All “traditional” Catholics should agree that we should love our mother land, for like our natural mother, it has given us many benefits. And like our natural mothers, we must look for the good and honor and love those qualities and traits in our country. But Catholics are also admonished to have true love, Caritas, for the other, in this case our Country. Caritas is willing the highest (true) good of the other.

    So the task, as you have ably pointed out is to accept and even embrace the good that is in our country, while, if not outright rejection of the bad, at least not be accepting of those areas which are not in line with the true good. And as admonished, we must restrict ourselves to what is actually before us, and not what we wish it to be. As these are the issues, it would be easy to accept many aspects of the nation as it existed and as it exists: the Natural beauty, the genius of the inventors of this land (the use of the inventions can be argued), the ability of local groups of individuals to carry out real works of mercy in a crisis, the traditions and music of local community or region, etc.

    But turning from the ‘country’ (which all patriots can love) to the governmental institutions, can a Catholic “love” a system of government that at its founding, and shortly thereafter, was greatly influenced by Enlightenment ideas, especially that of radical egalitarianism. And as those Enlightenment ideas became deeply embedded into the “culture” of the USofA, especially after the Civil War, can one embrace that culture? Dr. Rao has commented on the conflict with many of the founding principles in the governmental system and traditional Catholic teaching. The Southern culture, as Dr. Wilson and others have pointed out numerous times, (certainly ante-bellum) does seem to have retained a culture, and institutions, that resisted some of the more radical ideas of the rest of the country.

    And is these conflicts would seem to not be exclusively Catholic ones, as based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the more traditional Protestant denominations, they may also have issues with the more radical jurisprudential/philosophical underpinnings of our Nation, at least as understood by some of the Northern founders.

    Is there also another issue in the question- one that existed at the time of the founding, and highlighted by Dr. Wilson and others, that the shear size of the USA, then and now, means that while the USA was and is juridically one nation, there actually existed (and to a lesser extent today exists) many “cultures” and modes of being. And while the North may have been more infused by Enlightenment philosophies, the South maintained a more traditional understanding of the nature of man, and thus viewed the founding institutions differently. It was Pope Pius IX that recognized the Confederacy, and it has been inferred from some of the correspondence that part of the reasoning of the support of the Catholic Sovereign for the South was because of the upholding of a traditional concept of the state and the better understanding of the nature of man and government than that of the northern view of government.

    While I suppose that there may be no Great conflict with the ante-bellum, Southern understanding of the instutions of Government (broadly understood) and traditional Catholicism, what is one to do with TODAY’S Country and TODAY’S Nation. If we must take them as they are, it would seem that NO Christian of any traditional stripe, let alone Catholic, could accept much of our current institutions and mass culture. See Red Phillips above. Whatever the merits of the philosophical/jurisprudential arguments of the 19th century, except for the relatively small number of paleo-conservatives, it seems like a “lost cause”. And may this not be what one sees in the reactions of many traditional Christians? A reaction to the culture and institutions as they exist now, and have existed for over 50 years? While we may all come to an agreement on this site that at its founding, the USA was a nation and therefore a natural society, not the product of mere convention, the actual USA as it exists today seems to be a product of mere convention. Given the mass culture (dispensed through the idiot box), and the high mobility of people and families, and the radical individualism of many in our society, all that seems to hold us together is a proposition, a mere convention. And if this is true, then is the rejection of most of what the USA has become, de jure, not in line with Catholic teaching?

49. 49 Comment by Jeffrey Wilson on 24 May 2008:

    An amendment to my post- the last line should read- And if this is true, then is the rejection of most of what the USA has become, de facto if not de jure, not in line with Catholic teaching?

50. 50 Comment by Buster on 24 May 2008:

    Prior to Vatican II the Church condemned religious liberty as indifferentism, and tolerated it only as a necessary evil. As with so much else, the current teaching is far more ambiguous.

    For orthodox Catholic doctrine, I suggest sspx.org, or the web page of The Remnant. At least those are my favorites.

    Incidentally, the Pope has now vindicated those who claimed that the Old Mass was never abrogated. The next step is for him to say it himself.

    I doubt he ever would or could admit that Vatican II and the New Mass were catastrophic mistakes. He had too great a hand in promoting both of them.

51. 51 Comment by Michael Warning on 24 May 2008:

    The Catholic Church or better yet the Churchmen can and do declare a government illegitimate. But this does not take away from the fact that unbelievers can and do have true lordship. Sometimes the Churchmen forget this and therefore do more harm than good by declaring a government illegitimate. The United States of American has true lordship but this lordship is merely permitted and tolerated by the Blessed Trinity and therefore this form of government can be changed by the will of a few good men. These men will never give offense to the Blessed Trinity by changing the country’s bad customs and bad laws.

    My question to you Scott P. Richert is if you will be able to write a few works on nation and state without ignoring the history of Roman Catholic governmental offices (HRE) that have since been annihilated by modern man (Treaty of Pressburg 1806)?

    And if these Roman Catholic governmental offices are neccessary to govern modern man. If so how to re-establish such an neccessary Office.

52. 52 Comment by robert m. peters on 24 May 2008:

    Red Phillips @ 30

    You and I essentially agree; I would, however, argue that Puritianism flowed out of Calvinism (not all Calvinists were Puritan.). New England Puritans were a select set of Puritans (not all Puritans were New Englanders.). Among the New England Puritans there emerged a new manifestation of the Arian heresy. (Not all New England Puritans embraced it.) The Unitarian view of Christ and ultimately a secularized version thereof came and has come to prevail in the intellectual, religious and political classes of New England and has spread itself across the republics of this union.

53. 53 Comment by Joseph D'Hippolito on 24 May 2008:

    Edward, I brought up the Church’s contemporary stance on capital punishment because many devout Catholics believe that the Church has an abolitionist attitude, as exemplified by Denver’s Absp. Chaput when he equated Justice Scalia to Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice (the pro-abortion group). Scalia himself seemed to think that supporting capital punishment would be going against Church teaching, as this essay from First Things indicates:

    http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2022

    Scalia’s salient point:

    So I have given this new position thoughtful and careful consideration-and I disagree. That is not to say I favor the death penalty (I am judicially and judiciously neutral on that point); it is only to say that I do not find the death penalty immoral. I am happy to have reached that conclusion, because I like my job, and would rather not resign. And I am happy because I do not think it would be a good thing if American Catholics running for legislative office had to oppose the death penalty (most of them would not be elected); if American Catholics running for Governor had to promise commutation of all death sentences (most of them would never reach the Governor’s mansion); if American Catholics were ineligible to go on the bench in all jurisdictions imposing the death penalty; or if American Catholics were subject to recusal when called for jury duty in capital cases.

    This was Chaput’s response:

    When Catholic Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia publicly disputes church teaching on the death penalty, the message he sends is not all that different from Frances Kissling disputing what the church teaches about abortion,… the impulse to pick and choose what we’re going to accept is exactly the same kind of ‘cafeteria Catholicism’ in both cases.

    Chaput is considered to be one of the American Church’s guiding lights. Yet he not only displays ignorance about Church history and ethics but he publicly smears the credibilty of a decent man for doing nothing more than examining the implications of the late Pope’s “prudential judgement” concerning capital punishment.

    What’s the point? Sometimes those who are charged with maintaining fidelity with divine revelation — even bishops and popes — break that committment to pursue their own agendas. If that’s true, then perhaps American Catholics should spend their time more profitably by challenging the superiors in their own faith, if they are to use that faith as a guide to being a good citizen.

54. 54 Comment by Joseph D'Hippolito on 24 May 2008:

    BTW, Edward, the CCC (while not denying the state’s ability or necessity to impose punishment proportional to the crime), adds this exerpt from Evangelium vitae to article 2267:

    If, instead, bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, given the means at the State’s disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender ‘today … are very rare, if not practically non-existent.’

    If the CCC is a compendium of doctrine that all Catholics are advised to study, then how are they to determine which papal pronouncements are “prudential” and which are not?

55. 55 Comment by Edward on 24 May 2008:

    What the CCC seems to be saying is that, while we cannot deny the inherent morality of the death penalty, we can warn political leaders to be extremely prudential and selective when applying it to specific cases. If there was something principally or intrinsically wrong with the death penalty then the CCC would state it quite simply. It does not.

    The Scalia issue just illustrates my point. He is obviously right and the Bishop is wrong, but the Bishop is wrong in a very specific way. He is wrongfully condemning the death penalty as an intrinsic evil akin to abortion. This is not part of the Tradition of the Church. The Catholic Church has always maintained the threefold effect of imposition of the death penalty: Legitimate defense, spiritual rehabilitation, and (last but not least) retribution or retributive justice. The reason this issue can become so clouded is because the death penalty is rarely discussed in principal and is almost always placed within the context of a specific case within a specific country’s penal system. And it is precisely in this situation where Catholics are free to agree or disagree with its imposition.

    If we can get back to what started this, though, we can see that there is no struggle, properly understood, between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘progressives’ for the sole rights to the title of ‘Catholic’. The Church has specific positions and doctrines and either you agree with and believe in them or you do not. Calling people who follow the Church ‘traditional’ as opposed to ‘progressive’ is what is truly disingenuous.

56. 56 Comment by robert m. peters on 24 May 2008:

    “Legitimate defense, spiritual rehabilitation, and (last but not least) retribution or retributive justice. ”

    As a life-long Protestant and as a Christian since the age of nine, I can and do support the three-fold imposition of the death penalty cited supra. However, I too have grave difficulty with the death penalty in the context of the “justice” system in many states in which state prosecutors and judges have embraced the death penalty as a mean to and a means to keep political office. In reality, my concern goes well beyond the death penalty – it goes to the corruption of the entire system – the rise of positive law and the adjudication of almost all of social life, i.e. the state encroaching ever more on the domains of life which rightly and historically belong to the family, to the Church and other non-state institutions.

    It is as evil to send a man to prison for a rape which he did not commit as it is to send him to prison with a death sentence for a murder which he did not commit. Ironically, the guy on death row, usually separated from other inmates, might well survive longer in prison than the guy sent in for rape. The guy sent in for rape may well be murdered by one of his fellow inmates or contract a STD, including HIV, from the relationships forced upon him.

57. 57 Comment by CPR on 25 May 2008:

    It is possible that the Greeks avoided truth per se *instinctively, in behalf of propositional truth. Then were coincidently fascinated by the notion of Christ as the truth, himself. All of this no doubt occurring on the road toward our all being further and further civilized as a result, thankfully. Until dealing with the raw nerve ending of truth itself becomes doable. [Here's where people tend to turn white (even people of color) and I say 'Breathe,' thus reminding myself as well.]

    So what one has always is both the need for propositional truth arrived at as the Greeks did by discussing derivative essences of truth. Juxtapositioned inevitaby with the essence (i.e. totality) of truth itself which the Greeks did not consciously acknowledge, though of course can’t ever be ‘gotten rid of.’ And usually in fact is more or less experienced by most of us as a hot potato. Like Pilate, literally and metaphorically washing his hands of it and saying in exasperation – here you deal with the hot potato… err, “what is truth?”

    The above comments of mine Scott are just another you might say derivative take on your quote: “Of course, as faithful Catholics, we are also called to provide witness to the fullness of the truth, but that’s a discussion for another post (or posts). What we are not allowed to do, however, is to reject out of hand that which is good because it is not, somehow, fully ours.” (end quote)

    I wholeheartedly agree, as I’ve attempted to delve down toward above.

58. 58 Comment by Mike Ezzo on 25 May 2008:

    Regarding Buster’s final comment (50), Pope Benedict seems to come awfully close, actually, in statements such as the following, but I can’t determine whether he refers to the content of the Mass itself; or to the liturgical abuse whereby it has been poorly celebrated so much.

    “What happened after the Council was something completely different [from how liturgy had historically developed] : in the place of the liturgy as the fruit of development came fabricated liturgy. We abandoned the organic, living process of growth and development over centuries, and replaced it, as in a manufacturing process, with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product.”

59. 59 Comment by NGPM on 26 May 2008:

    My own deficient thoughts…

    American institutions and traditions are coloured by “Protestant nature” because they were established by British Protestants and their descendants. If the U.S.A. is not a proposition nation, then there is nothing preventing a “good American” from also being a “good Catholic. If it is a proposition nation, then being fully “American” entails subscription to some sort of creed that is decisively not Catholic.

    If by “American founding” we speak of the separation from England, it is difficult not to see that “founding” as squarely Freemasonic and deist. The founding may not have been “irredeemably tainted” insofar as said central government left the sovereign states alone, but we all know how that turned out.

    So what is then the difference between being a good American Catholic and, say, being a good French Catholic? The Republic of France is another rabidly, perhaps even more so, Freemasonic and arguably atheist state, founded on a movement whose origins were direct and explicit manifestations against the Catholic Church. The difference is that no [real] Frenchman is French only because of a tie to the national government. He is French because of his folk, ethnic and linguistic ties: no government can take those away from him.

    (Given the diversity of the French compared to other European ethno-linguistic groups such as the Dutch, Czech, Welsh, etc. [though less so than, say, the Italians, but the Conquest of Italy is a whole other issue to be dealt with (and hopefully reputed)], one could reasonably argue that the French national identity rests in part on identification with an historic state. However, the historic French state was not an enlightened republic but a Catholic monarchy; at times, THE pinnacle of Catholic monarchies. Nearly all decent Frenchmen I have met who involve themselves in politics are at least royal nostalgists.)

    Most Americans rely upon the existence of this particular federal government from which to derive their national identity. To those who object, consider: if the state supposedly based upon the Constitution of 1787 were to collapse, what would replace it? What would hold the fifty States together? What would we be called? I do not know the answers to these questions, but I have a strong inkling that perhaps they would not be held together and we would no longer be usurping the hemespheric adjective “American” for our nationality.

    I am hopeful this discussion will touch seriously upon what it means to be “American,” whether there is such thing as being a “good” or “bad” American (we say a born-and-bred Frenchman is a “loyal” or “trecherous” Frenchman, but a “good” versus a “bad” Frenchman? Usually not unless we’re making jokes about whether he prefers Brie to Kraft cheese or Bordeaux to Bud Light), whether being a “good” American requires a commitment to some sort of creed and whether said creed is compatible with the Credo.

60. 60 Comment by Paul Bergeron on 26 May 2008:

    My Catholic ancestors in Louisiana and Texas helped the American colonies obtain independence, so I believe that the answer to the question, “Can a Catholic be a good American?” is “yes.” However, I have difficulty identifying what nation I belong to if I reject the proposition that “Might makes Right.” Louisiana has been under 10 flags in a (by world history standards) very short period of time. Should I call myself an Apache Choctaw? a Frenchman? A Spaniard? an Acadian? A West Floridian? A Louisianian? A Confederate? an American? I appreciated Pope John Paul II’s Easter message in 1995 in which he called for the recognition of the political aspirations of the Palestinians and the Kurds, and I appreciate Pope Benedict XVI’s message of 2005 “that no nation should be the target of a collectively assigned culpability and that we have to see the individual person and his personal value before we condemn him for his national origin.” I know those Popes have had special insights into what it means to belong to a nation that has been conquered but still deserves recognition and respect. Jesus gave his apostles the commission to go forth and make disciples of all nations. I look forward to being received into heaven and knowing what flag I’m supposed to rally to.

61. 61 Comment by CPR on 26 May 2008:

    Thanks for yours NGPM. I see America as having taken the subconscious Greek error of imbalancing too far in the direction of propositional truth ‘as if’ truth itself, and her/i.e. America’s having elevated that up to the level of the sacred.

    If so, then the traditional Catholic notion held by a relative few, that this original sin of America’s, since not the truth (i.e. truly too imbalanced in that regard) will inevitably bring her down. … And we’ll all become something else closer to not only reality but the actual, or that which is more *essential or whole in terms of the truth, that can’t by its very nature ‘go away.’

    I am not what has come to be known as a “blood & soil” type ‘as if’ that were the whole truth. Although since it may come closer to it, than the largely or overly propositional (‘as if’ the divine or the deity or God or truth itself.) This niggling, invisible mistake of Western Civilization is more attenutated in Europe precisely because of each group or people’s ancient history of blood and thus place or soil.

    Also Euopean nations did not take a proposition and elevate it to a sacred level, to my knowledge. Again this was/still is one of the mistakes of Western Civilization which is otherwise more accurate than not. But a mistake that only so far America apparently has writ large and has been moving in the direction of making the imbalance larger still. Yes it feels good the propositional to be sure. That’s precisely why it’s so tempting. That doesn’t automatically mean it can endure, sadly. But both sadly, as well as happily are of the truth.

    So how can one be a good American and a good Catholic or a good American and a good Jew or a good American and a good Muslim or a good American and a good anything that does not wish to go over the edge? I do not know. The mistake, in its inflamation now seems to be becoming more and more apparent to more and more people?
    Simply because like the truth can’t go away subsequently so too mistakes uncovered and unaddressed cannot go away either until ameliorated.

    A good American today may be one dedicated to addressing this invisible ‘given’ and hoping to redress it perhaps in some form of Constitutional convention, if that is still possible. I would rely on your knowedge NGPM in that area much more so than on my own.

    As of today what does it mean to be an American? It probably means being unaware, that we took a heretofore invisible Greek error of imbalancing toward the propositional truth ‘as if’ truth itself. And in also not seeing the error and no doubt subconsciously hoping to transcend the mistake via even greater denial of it we wrote it larger. That’s human, sometimes when we don’t see a mistake we can assume we were deficient or insufficient in its application and so we simply need more of the same.

62. 62 Comment by John Willson on 26 May 2008:

    An outstanding essay, Scott, on a point that is much more fundamental than any particular issue about the “public square.” Let’s make sure that the way you stated the issue, “whether the protestant nature of the American founding represents a fatal flaw at the heart of the American nation–one which prevents Catholics from being true Americans,” is indeed what we focus on here. First, let’s dismiss the relevance of JFK’s speech to the Houston Baptists: Kennedy was the most secular of men, and if you read the Houston speech carefully you will discover that he was saying, “Don’t worry about me, my Catholicism has nothing to do with either my public or my personal life.” Second, I’m not sure the “founding” (a poor and meaningless term, except to Straussians and neocons) was especially Protestant. As Barry Shain and others have convincingly pointed out, the Enlightenment language of many leaders wasn’t even Christian, much less particularly Protestant. The City on a Hill triumphalism of modern evangelicals doesn’t do justice to the tolerant and loving Christianity of John Witherspoon, Timothy Dwight, Elias Boudinot and many others who articulated the prudential American relationship between church and nation. Certainly the Carroll family didn’t feel left out of such a formulation. Third, Peter, James, Paul and almost all the Doctors of the early Church (especially Augustine) were united in saying that the Church trumps the world, and I’m not sure any of my Protestant friends would, come right down to it, disagree. Fourth, the former Unitarian ideologue turned Catholic Orestes Brownson gave a view of “The American Republic” which was probably as well thought-out a decentralist essay as ever was produced in the overwhelmingly Protestant South. Let me stop there, for now. In more recent American letters the Jesuit John Courtney Murray, the historian Carlton J.H. Hayes, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen have a great deal to teach us about the central question you propose. Again, a terrific start to a most important topic, Scott.

63. 63 Comment by CPR on 26 May 2008:

    “Third, Peter, James, Paul and almost all the Doctors of the early Church (especially Augustine) were united in saying that the Church trumps the world, and I’m not sure any of my Protestant friends would, come right down to it, disagree.” -Allen Wilson

    I agree with all of yours above in #64 to the extent I understood it, especially the quote of yours I’ve highlighted here above. I would just go further (for myself in terms of clarification) in indicating that in fullness or wholeness of truth the Church is world. The distinction being herein between world (all of our worlds each being a world unto themself) and Earth which belongs in my estimation solely to God or the divine, as do we all also in our respective worlds. They’re the same world and Earth but not identical.

    Which is the ‘why’ of why it is so that art for example, one facet of the divine, or truth at work, belongs to that which is wrested (not in a taking but in an essential manifestation) from the earth or mother Nature herself. This means Church in so far as she is wed to truth is also of God and His Earth.

    So church is then not merely a will to power but rather a happening and a letting happen of the truth. It’s why I like Catholicism.

    This is important given our inherited cultural proclivity where truth is concerned toward the propositional. I too am thankful and in agreement with Scott. Don’t mirror, if you are, any will to power in me if it yet resides in yourself, if that is the case, which it perhaps is not.

64. 64 Comment by CPR on 26 May 2008:

    [p.s. sorry I quoted and referenced John Willson in my post #65 above, not Allen Willson.]

65. 65 Comment by John Willson on 26 May 2008:

    Carlton J.H. Hayes is one of the least appreciated Catholic thinkers of the 20th century. He helped to start Commonweal in the 1920s long before it became a voice for liberal Catholics; Hayes wanted it to show that the Catholic principle of subsidiarity was identical to the Tocquevillian understanding of America as a nation of family, church, neighborhood, and voluntary associations. Hayes also founded the study of nationalism and in a series of books made the important distinction between nationalism and patriotism that is at the heart of so much of what you have to say, Scott.

    Fr. John Courtney Murray showed that the basic American beliefs of constitutionalism, limited government and the rule of law were not American innovations but medieval in origin, and the product of Catholic tradition. This was also the burden of the arguments of Erik Maria Ritter von Keuhnelt Leddihn, who like Murray and Hayes has been too soon forgotten.

    Bishop Sheen, who is almost always portrayed by pseudo-scholars as a Christian popularizer in the company of Norman Vincent Peal, was actually one of the greatest Christian scholars of the 20th century. Along with reintroducing Aquinas to America and dissecting the communist regimes that murdered more Christians than any other in human history, he correctly identified the simple yet basic American problem: “The family is the barometer of the nation. What the average home is, that is the nation.”

    As the Church defends the family, the nation has a chance to be healthy.

66. 66 Comment by NGPM on 27 May 2008:

    “A good American today may be one dedicated to addressing this invisible ‘given’ and hoping to redress it perhaps in some form of Constitutional convention, if that is still possible. I would rely on your knowedge NGPM in that area much more so than on my own.”

    I have long believed that if our country (if we can now call it that) is to survive it must in one way or another be reconstituted, though I admit that how to approach this for a people who derive their national identity from a particular constitution (in England the constitutional tradition runs the other way, as well it should) escapes me.

    But don’t rely on my knowledge too much; it’s been years since I read the words of any American patriarch in anything more than passing.

    “Fr. John Courtney Murray showed that the basic American beliefs of constitutionalism, limited government and the rule of law were not American innovations but medieval in origin, and the product of Catholic tradition. This was also the burden of the arguments of Erik Maria Ritter von Keuhnelt Leddihn, who like Murray and Hayes has been too soon forgotten.”

    Just a remark: I am not overly familiar with many American Catholic intellectuals, but I am well-acquainted with Kuehnelt-Leddhin, and while I appreciate a great deal of what he has to say, there are some serious flaws in his philosophy. It has been several years since I have read his works, but I recall in particular of “Leftism Revisited”:

    1. That his central argument rested upon Leftism as an idealization of equity as opposed to the Right, which emphasized liberty;
    2. That he did not once address the Freemasonry and deism of many of America’s founders and only briefly conceded that there was a hint of toxic “enlightenment” egalitarianism;
    3. That he whitewashed classic 19th century liberals and libertarians.

    Kuehnelt-Leddhin was a well-travelled, highly educated and extremely intelligent gentleman, and to his credit, he did at one point hint that serious changes might now be necessary for this country “saddled with the Constitution of a small eighteenth-century farmer’s republic.” However, overall I had the impression that he was so in love with his adopted U.S.A. and probably reacting with such horror at the (admittedly horrifying) ensnaring of half his home continent by the U.S.S.R. that he was bending his very solid conservative instincts to support the former.

    (I also have to question Kuehnelt-Leddhin’s discretion for choosing to write under William Buckley, even though National Review was less terrible in those days.)

    Leftism is a reaction against the Christian foundations of Western Civilization; there is simply no way around that. Within Christendom there is room for various states and institutions of varying sizes and degrees of centralization; there can be no room for deistic “natural rights.”

67. 67 Comment by Theodore Van Oosbree on 27 May 2008:

    Catholics of old favored the “Confessional State”, with the Church recognized by law as the dominant religion and other sects or religions given bare toleration. Only such an arrangement can preserve the Catholic faith in a nation (or any other Christian faith for that matter – the European experience of Confessional states becoming liberalized and thus de-Christianized is instructive). This is of course has not been nor could it be the situation in America, with its Catholic minority and its liberal, secular legal foundation and religious pluralism. We are reduced, therefore, to a sort of non-violent guerilla warfare – opposing the liberalizing, secularizing trends that threaten the Church within and without, attempting to preserve ourselves and our children in the Faith in a society hostile to Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It is not unlike the situation faced by the Church in its early Roman Empire days (absent the lions!).

68. 68 Comment by Theodore Van Oosbree on 27 May 2008:

    An addendum for Dr. Wilson (from the Catholic Encyclopedia):

    A second revival of slavery took place after the discovery of the New World by the Spaniards in 1492. To give the history of it would be to exceed the limits of this article. It will be sufficient to recall the efforts of Las Casas in behalf of the aborigines of America and the protestations of popes against the enslavement of those aborigines and the traffic in negro slaves. England, France, Portugal, and Spain, all participated in this nefarious traffic. England only made amends for its transgressions when, in 1815, it took the initiative in the suppression of the slave trade. In 1871 a writer had the temerity to assert that the Papacy had not its mind to condemn slavery” (Ernest Havet, “Le christianisme et ses origines”, I, p. xxi). He forgot that, in 1462, Pius II declared slavery to be “a great crime” (magnum scelus); that, in 1537, Paul III forbade the enslavement of the Indians; that Urban VIII forbade it in 1639, and Benedict XIV in 1741; that Pius VII demanded of the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, the suppression of the slave trade and Gregory XVI condemned it in 1839; that, in the Bull of Canonization of the Jesuit Peter Claver, one of the most illustrious adversaries of slavery, Pius IX branded the “supreme villainy” (summum nefas) of the slave traders. Everyone knows of the beautiful letter which Leo XIII, in 1888, addressed to the Brazilian bishops, exhorting them to banish from their country the remnants of slavery — a letter to which the bishops responded with their most energetic efforts, and some generous slave-owners by freeing their slaves in a body, as in the first ages of the Church.

69. 69 Comment by Mike Ezzo on 27 May 2008:

    I believe Dr. Wilson was referring not to the Church as a broad teaching institution, but rather to the particular episcopacy in the particular area of America’s South, in the particular time of the 19th century.

    As for the Mormons not fighting to defend their religious rights, I’m not really surprised. Perhaps they (mistakenly? I’m not sure…) believe that political correctness and the ACLU will strive to do to them what has been done to the Ten Commandments and prayer.

    Mr. Oosbree, I’m in agreement with you. I just wonder WHEN the lions will be added to the mix. And whether or not they will be preying upon not just us, but everyone who refuses to espouse syncretism.

70. 70 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 28 May 2008:

    The Church’s strictures were primarily directed against the slave trade, which was also banned by the Confederate Constitution.
    The slave trade to Catholic Brazil and Catholic Cuba remained active long after 1815, and indeed even after emancipation in the U.S.
    Las Casas opposed enslavement of the native Americans and offered enslavement of Africans as a positive alternative.

71. 71 Comment by Theodore Van Oosbree on 28 May 2008:

    Dr. Wilson: The ban on the slave trade by the Confederate Constitution was motivated by a fear that European nations would withhold recognition otherwise and by a wish to protect the internal slave trade in the Confederacy (an exception to the usual Southern opposition to protectionism!). Moral scruples took third place. The Church’s failure to convince secular authorities to ban slavery or the slave trade illustrates the sad fact that it is next to impossible to convince a man of the truth of something if it will cost him money.

72. 72 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 28 May 2008:

    Mr. V O. You are wrong about the Confederate Constitution. You are making hypothetical judgments of the motives of people you know nothing about. Southern opinion had been overwhelmingly against the foreign slave trade for a long time by 1860, except for a few fire-eaters who proposed re-opening it mainly to irritate the attacking Yankees. If you wish to put it on self-interest, then you can say that the trade was totally unnecessary because the black population in the South had been multiplying prolifically (which was not true of the free blacks in the North nor of the slave population in the Catholic countries and colonies). The American Catholic Church, like most Southerners, was doubtful about slavery abstractly considered, but it vigorously opposed abolitionism. Prior to 1860, Catholics were most numerous and most welcome in the South. Convents were attacked and burned down in Boston and Philadelphia with collusion of local authorities. Yankee soldiers destroyed Catholic churches, schools, etc. just as readily as any others, perhaps more so. May I respectfully suggest that you learn more about the people you are judging. Then you can make moral judgments based upon accurate information rather the ideology.

73. 73 Comment by C. Edward on 28 May 2008:

    Dr. Wilson: Was there a turn against catholics in the south after the civil war or is that overstated? Was there a majority denomination in the south prior to and after the civil war?

74. 74 Comment by Ronduck on 28 May 2008:

    72Clyde Wilson
    Convents were attacked and burned down in Boston and Philadelphia with the collusion of local authorities. Yankee soldiers destroyed Catholic churches, schools, etc. just as readily as any others, perhaps more so.

    I would suggest that the Yankee anti-catholicism came from the mass immigration that was occurring at the time. Many of the Yankees were concerned that mass Catholic immigration would overwhelm them, which it did. The fact is that the states that were founded by the Protestant Yankees are now majority Catholic, with the original settlers a minority in the lands their fathers settled.

    Seeing the local Catholics celebrating ‘El Virgen de Guadelupe’ makes me reconsider any support I ever had for St. Patrick’s day. Both are ethnic festivals originally Catholic in origin promoted by the Roman church here in America to prevent the immigrants and their children from dropping their previous identity. The effects of this alienation be seen in the northeast and southwest where ethnic Catholics celebrate their ethnic festivals and vote Liberal as a way of sticking it to the native Yankees.

75. 75 Comment by Ronduck on 28 May 2008:

    I seem to have screwed up my html tag in the above post. I meant to put at the end of the first paragraph not , oops.

76. 76 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 29 May 2008:

    #73. The South did not suffer from any considerable anti-Catholicism until the late 19th and early 20th century. When it did appear it was 1)part of the reaction against the many alien seeming aspects of the hostile and exploitive North and 2) a product of absorption of Southern Protestantism (from the top down) into the intellectual world of Northern Protestantism.

77. 77 Comment by G.S. on 29 May 2008:

    I appreciate Mr. Duck’s point.

    However the flip side is equally worth considering: In my experience the problem is not that of too many American Catholics fiercely holding on to their Catholic identity — but that American Catholics are obsessed with fitting in, and acquiring the trappings of success as per the Yankee model.

    The WASP-iest people here in Louisville are the ones who send their kids to elite Catholic schools as a ticket to respectable “moderate Republican” yuppiedom.

    Historically a great many Catholic bishops have fallen all over themselves to prove their loyalty to the Enlightenment-inspired, American Proposition — such as by suppressing and/or discouraging German identity among German Catholics.

    Probably had the distinctively ethnic character — German, French, Italian, Pole, etc. — of various Catholic parishes been retained, there would be considerably less taint of leftism and statism found in American Catholicism today.

    If Catholics vote for pro-abortion, pro- gay lobby, pro-feminist politicians “as a way of sticking it to the native Yankees”, they can hardly be said to have held on to their Catholic identity, now have they?

78. 78 Comment by G.S. on 29 May 2008:

    And since we’re speaking of America’s Original Sin — and hopefully I won’t be mistaken for a leftie here — what about the American Indian?

    Would “America” as we know it — a vast, unitary industrial state networked across the entire continent — have been possible without the dishonorable treatment of the tribes native to this continent?

79. 79 Comment by Ronduck on 29 May 2008:

    78G.S.

    Would “America” as we know it — a vast, unitary industrial state networked across the entire continent — have been possible without the dishonorable treatment of the tribes native to this continent?

    No, America probably wouldn’t be what it is today if it had not killed the Indians, it would be Mexico from the beginning. A significant part of the population of Mexico is either full blooded native or at least part, which partly explains the differences between the US and its’ southern neighbor.

    Since we were talking about New England and the Indians, here is the first Indian war fought in the colonies:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Philip’s_War

    I would say that at the very least we should honor our treaties with the Indians we have now or negotiate a treaty with them we are willing to keep.

80. 80 Comment by Ronduck on 29 May 2008:

    77G.S.

    I appreciate Mr. Duck’s point.
    Thank you.

    However the flip side is equally worth considering: In my experience the problem is not that of too many American Catholics fiercely holding on to their Catholic identity — but that American Catholics are obsessed with fitting in, and acquiring the trappings of success as per the Yankee model.

    Probably had the distinctively ethnic character — German, French, Italian, Pole, etc. — of various Catholic parishes been retained, there would be considerably less taint of leftism and statism found in American Catholicism today.

    I see your point, but this loss of ethnic character does give the church an opportunity to clean house. By emphasizing the unity of American catholics as a single group with common concerns, the church hierarchy could use them as a tool to clean up America. In one central American country the bishop was able to call out 300,000 people to gather in the nation’s capital to rally to criminalize abortion. That kind of national unity isn’t possible if the various parishes are emphasizing their differences.

    In fact if the church were to see itself as a national branch of the Catholic church instead of a tower of Babel, it would be a backdoor way for you traditionalists to reintroduce the latin Mass and set itself up as THE standard of what is and is not American. This is why in some of my earlier anti-Catholic rants I have suggested that the Pope eliminate the USCCB, cut the US cardinals down to archbishop and appoint a single national cardinal to lead the national church. This man would be a focus of unity for US catholics and a recognized spokesman for the church. Instead of having that Catholic League defending the church, the church could defend itself in public.

    Don’t get me wrong, I am still anti-catholic, but the churches decay, size and new leadership at the top does give it an opportunity to clean house and grow.

81. 81 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 29 May 2008:

    Since the only “americanists” I know are Mormon John Birchers, I don’t consider myself one. I would have to subscribe to a “my country right or wrong” mentality. I see the leaders of the US attacking various and sundry bogeymen chosen by David Frum and other non-Americans, and must disagree with such wrong actions — read: wars.

    Whenever I return to the UK, I tell folks there that I am a Virginian because that’s where I plant my garden and pay property taxes. It is a response that leaves Europeans of all stripes befuddled. And why not? It was at Jamestown where I learned that the tripartite essence of being English, was king, language, and church (not place). Since the constitution forbids the establishment of a national church, and we are a republic not an empire, that leaves us with the English language, itself an institution under fire from enlightened progressives.

    As for the church, well, my beloved Anglicans have checked into the funny farm, and since I decided that no American religion measured up to any decent tradition, I became Romanian Orthodox!

82. 82 Pingback by Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture | Your Home for Traditional Conservatism » Church and Nation: A Credal Nation, Part I on 30 May 2008:

    [...] introducing this series last week, I noted that I had been careful in my choice of the title “Church and [...]

83. 83 Comment by I am not Spartacus on 2 June 2008:

    One of the problems I’m having with this discussion is Scott’s use of the term “faithful Catholics”. I’m not sure, especially in postmodern America what this term means?

    A Faithful Catholic is one who maintains the Bonds of Unity in Worship, Doctrine, and Authority.

    I am living proof one can be a Faithful Catholic and a good American.

    I am one who rejects the ideology of splitting the history of the Church into Pre or Post any Ecumenical Council, especially if the idea bears the toxic and heretical notion the Church as the authoritative Pillar and Ground of truth has ceased to exist.

84. 84 Pingback by Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture | Your Home for Traditional Conservatism » Church and Nation: A Credal Nation, Part 3 on 3 July 2008:

    [...] America’s Original Sin [...]