SOME SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS

 A SERMON FOR INDEPENDENCE DAY

It was on this day, 245 years ago, in the year 1776, that the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, officially adopted the Declaration of Independence.  This manuscript, written by Thomas Jefferson, was indeed a declaration.  So what did it declare?  It declared the official birth of this nation, and has ever since been held as the single most influential document in America’s history.  Perhaps its most famous and important sentence is the following: that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Like all written texts, these words are capable of many interpretations—and you know, of course, that as soon as there is a possibility of interpreting words in different ways, someone somewhere is eventually going to get it wrong.  This is why we have a Supreme Court, to ensure that the Constitution based on the Declaration is applied fairly and justly to the laws of the land.  In a certain respect it’s actually a good thing that the Declaration can be interpreted in different ways, because one of those ways is the Catholic way.  For we Catholics do indeed believe that all men are created equal in the eyes of God, whether they be kings or paupers, white men or black men, or even women!  We were all born with a soul, a soul with free will, that allows all of us the same potential for eternal salvation or damnation.  It’s the actions of each person, their thoughts, words and deeds, that will determine how God will judge us, certainly not by our gender, our nationality, or the color of our skin.

The question of whether we have unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is somewhat more vexed.  The founding fathers were mostly slave owners, and this gave rise, and still does, to the conflict between what the Declaration says and the reality of slavery which was allowed to continue.  If I may be permitted to quote an Englishman on this “hallowed day”, the abolitionist Thomas Day wrote, in 1776, that “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”  Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote a whole paragraph in his original draft of the Declaration, condemning the slave trade as an assemblage of horrors.  Meanwhile, he owned six hundred slaves on his Monticello plantation.  Another signer of the Declaration on the other hand, William Whipple, freed his slave, believing that he could not both fight for liberty and own slaves at the same time.

Since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, slavery continued for many years, especially in the southern part of the United States.  Heavily Democratic, the South remained a bastion of racism even after abolition, with the segregation of blacks institutionalized by strict state laws that continued into my own lifetime.  Groups like the Ku Klux Klan helped enforce these laws in ways that can be described only as barbarous, lynching with impunity any negroes they spotted “stepping out of line.”  

Interestingly enough, the Klan was also intensely anti-Catholic, and that leads us to the very important observation that Catholics followed the spirit of the Declaration of Independence far better than many of their more fanatical Protestant brethren.  And for this reason, Catholics were generally mistrusted and even hated, in the Deep South, because as we’ve pointed out already , we actually do believe that all men are created equal in the sight of God, and that no man has the right to “own” another.  We believe in those unalienable rights, like Liberty for example, endowed by their Creator.  How can any man believe in the Declaration of Independence which says that all men have the unalienable right to Liberty, when blacks were denied that liberty in the most obvious way imaginable? 

Thank God, we’ve come a long way since those dark days of slavery.  And yet, the Democrats seek desperately to prolong the division between blacks and whites by reminding us at every opportunity that racism is part of the essence of being a white man—which of course it isn’t.  Such division is useful to them, as it helps prolong the control they had for so long over the black minority.  “If we can’t own them, we can still buy them.”  They buy their votes with welfare programs, hand-outs, and even free abortions.  With their provocative mantra of racism, they provoke athletes, once proud to represent their nation in the Olympics, to make fools of themselves by putting tee-shirts over their head when the national anthem is played.  People like this, all the ones who will not stand and respect their flag, if they were given the ability for a moment to be articulate, would probably trace their hatred back to our Declaration of Independence, and this unfortunate contradiction between what it says about Liberty and what it nevertheless failed for so long to prevent.

But contempt for our nation’s flag is not the Catholic way.  While we can recognize the same contradiction the ignorant Miss Berry so defiantly points to, rather than lose respect for our country, we are instead motivated all the more to work towards the resolution of such contradictions.  And we have a Constitution that has allowed us to make such progress.  Thanks to presidents like Republican Abraham Lincoln and Catholic John Fitzgerald Kennedy (notwithstanding their other faults), progress has been made.  Slavery has been abolished, the Jim Crow laws have been eradicated, and today blacks are entitled by law to the same freedoms as the rest of us.  They are now recognized truly, at least in law, as equal in the sight of God.

The same, alas, cannot be said for all, and while we have made great strides in race relations, the Democrats have turned to other groups on whom to impose their evil tyranny.  Because among those inalienable rights endowed by our Creator is the Pursuit of Life.  The Right to Life.  Year after year goes by in which millions of unborn babies are denied that right granted by God himself.  In the name of the woman’s Right to the Pursuit of Happiness, the baby’s Right to Life is rejected.  This again is in direct contradiction to the Declaration of Independence.  As Catholics, we approach this contradiction in the right way, by participating in protests such as the March for Life, by voting for Right to Life candidates in the elections, by praying that God will help stop the never-ending slaughter.  It never occurs to us to put a tee-shirt over our head whenever we hear the National Anthem.  We don’t consider for a moment that the best way to stop abortion is by hating and defiling our national flag.

The reason we love and honor the United States of America today, is the same reason we love our wives or husbands.  They may have faults, sometimes even grievous faults, but we still love them in spite of these failings.  We simply work, day after day if we’re given the opportunity, to make them better people.  That’s our main job in marriage, isn’t it?  To bring our better half to the salvation we desire for ourselves.  On this Independence Day, we must recognize our responsibility as citizens to seek the same for our country, to make these United States a haven for all those who seek to enjoy those inalienable rights given us by God, never trampling on these rights of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the tiny infants huddled in their womb, yearning to be born.  As true Catholics and true Americans, we must give back to God what is rightfully his, and to Caesar what is his, ensuring this country provides for all our citizens the ability to pursue, in the true Catholic sense, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  Let this be our resolve on this Fourth of July.