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Fourteenth Sunday of the Year
4 July 2010
Dear Friends in Christ,
The Declaration of Independence was promulgated 234 years ago today, and this is conventionally reckoned to be the birthday of our nation, but is it? The Continental Congress may have declared our independence from Great Britain, but this did not become a military fact until October 1781 with the surrender of British forces at Yorktown, more than five long years of fierce fighting after that first Fourth. And even then, the Crown did not renounce all claims on the American Colonies until the Treaty of Paris in 1783, nearly two years after Yorktown. Even after the war, the former British Colonies did not of course immediately become one nation. In fact, there was a very real possibility of thirteen sovereign nations emerging from the Revolutionary War, and the Articles of Confederation of 1781 proved to be unsatisfactory, in part, for this very reason. The Constitutional Convention adopted the proposed Constitution of the United States of America on 17 September 1787 but it was not ratified until 21 June 1788, and the first ten amendments, which constitute the Bill of Rights, were not complete until 1791. And everything that seemed so clear when George Washington became our first president in 1788 was tested almost beyond endurance in the War Between the States which started 73 years after the Constitution was ratified. So, when is the birthday of our nation?
The complexity of our history reminds us, as the Founding Fathers knew, that this Republic is merely an experiment in liberty and that there is no guarantee that our children and their children shall live free in a place called the United States of America simply because we did. The power of this nation and the strength of our institutions can create the illusion of perpetual vigor and permanence, but a visit to Rome in the days of Caesar Augustus would have conveyed exactly the same illusion. Human history has never known of a permanent political order, and so we can never assume that the present shape of our nation is a simple fact of life that we can take for granted. We are engaged in an experiment, and experiments can fail. So how can we help insure the success of our ongoing experiment in liberty?
The capacity of “the people” to be sovereign, to govern themselves through freely elected representatives, depends directly on the capacity of each person to govern himself. In other words, we must each be virtuous if we are all to be free. The cultivation of personal virtue is hard work, and it requires discipline and the acceptance of a standard of virtue beyond one’s own desires and choices. This is why the culture of radical autonomy and “freedom of choice” which is now used to justify moral degradation of every conceivable sort is, in truth, a greater threat to the liberty of our nation than any external enemy or armed force. Making our own desires the measure of goodness is a sure path to individual vice and national servitude, and on this 234th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we can best serve the cause of our nation’s freedom by resolving to cultivate virtue in our own lives.
Father Newman