July 14, 2002

Popular myth has Martin Luther burning the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas in the marketplace of Wittenburg. Not so. The hapless heretic wanted to destroy one of the world's greatest works but none of the townsfolk was willing to surrender a copy. We should cherish Aquinas like that today, for he prevents a lot of pseudo-philosophical humbug.

In the month of Independence Day and Bastille Day, we recall that St. Thomas lists patriotism and piety as virtues under the governing virtue of justice. Patriotism gives the nation its due. The anarchist Emma Goldman called patriotism a superstition. Our Founding Fathers did not make the mistake of the French radicals who in 1789 denied God and His Church. One of the revolutionaries, Madame Jeanne Manon Phlipon Roland, a founder of the Girondist party, learned that liberty running away from the judgment of God leads to terror. She went to the guillotine crying: "O Liberty, Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!."

Dr. Johnson called patriotism "the last refuge of a scoundrel." His friend Boswell explained that he did not mean "a real and generous love of our own country, but that pretended patriotism which so many in all ages and countries, have made a cloak of self-interest." Camera-conscious politicians singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" (or refusing to do so out of political correctness) are not models of Aquinas's virtue of patriotism. Anyone can wrap himself in the flag and the cross, or demand a separation of the two, for self-promotion. The virtue is in those who offer their honor and lives for their fellow men. .

God is God whether or not we pledge ourselves to be one nation under him, but to unsay it is to deny that America is under divine judgment. George Washington took John Adams to a Catholic Mass in Philadelphia. These men of virtue, while not enjoying the fullness of the Catholic Faith, admired the Mass for its beauty and the sermon for its purity of moral doctrine. May the same be said of our own parish.

New York Harbor welcomed many immigrants. The Book of Revelation shows another shore where Heaven our true native land awaits. Our earthly home is worthy only as a sign of it. The Statue of Liberty is a civil icon of the Blessed Virgin whose lamp is the Light of Christ. Genuine liberty is the freedom from sin and death: "the glorious liberty of the sons of God."

Washington wrote in his journal: "O eternal and everlasting God, Direct my thought, words and work. Wash away my sins in the immaculate blood of the lamb, and purge my heart by thy Holy Spirit, from the dross of my natural corruption, that I may with more freedom of mind and liberty of will serve thee, the everlasting God, in righteousness and holiness this day, and all the days of my life."

Fr. George W. Rutler