THE FOURTH OF JULY AND PATRIOTISM

By Fr. James Rude, S.J,

July 4, 2007

 

On July Fourth I permit Old Glory to be placed in the sanctuary where I say Mass, but not the rest of the year.  Why not?  Basically because it is a symbol misunderstood.  And it is misunderstood because some segments of our society claim it to be their symbol.  Go back to the Vietnam War.  Remember?

The person waving the flag was trying to say that he was for the war. 

Same thing is happening today.  A car speeding by with the flag stuck on its antenna is not just proclaiming his citizenship.  How dare they claim our symbol for their own personal use!

Personally I love that flag.  Thirteen stripes, fifty stars—they don’t tell us about the past, or about the present, they really tell us about the future.  Two hundred and thirty-one years ago on the fourth, twelve British colonies (New York came on board on August 2) adopted the Declaration that declared “the causes that impel them to the Separation”, basing their action on their belief “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.”

It took the Continental Congress and a committee it established about a month to decide on the declaration and to write the Declaration; it took the Continental Army about eight years to win those rights from Mother England in battle; it has taken our nation two hundred and thirty-one years to try to realize those rights for everyone in our nation, and we are still working on it.

All men are created equal.  But that is not the way it seems to any unbiased observer of the American scene.  Obviously we still have work to do.

Patriotism is the virtue by which the people of a given nation work for the goals of that nation.  So patriotism for us Yankees must be our on-going efforts to bring equal justice and equal opportunity and equal realization of—how did Jefferson put it?—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone.  In a nation where not everyone can find a job or health care or housing, obviously we still have work to do.

Patriotism is the virtue by which we love, support and defend our country. 

But we don’t “love, support and defend” vague ideals, but rather the people who are called to live those ideals.  Love means we respect and help others, we don’t harm them.  Support means we work to make sure that others have the same opportunities that we have.  Defend means that we will struggle along with others when we have common enemies, external or internal, who seek to destroy our rights and freedoms.  Defend might mean bearing arms, and then each individual has to search within himself or herself to determine if that is theologically or spiritually acceptable—despite the respect I bear for those who do so, for me it would not be possible.

But if patriotism demands that we protect ourselves against some other nation, then it also means that to be true and honorable and complete we have to be responsive when some other nation has needs to which we can attend.  We can no more let the family next door shiver outside after a fire destroyed their house, then we can ignore the needs of a nation next door if its people are shivering because of some basic need.

Our American nation has a basic principle of separation of church and state.  And I applaud that.  But I disagree with those who think that this principle means that we may not use religious ideas to make civic decisions.

  The decisions we make, for example, in the voting booth must come forth from our religious beliefs in the dignity of the human person and their human rights.  Voting about taxes or the draft or life rights and electing administrators or representatives who will exercise power in Sacramento or Washington may not be decided solely on the basis of economics or sociology or partisan membership, but also on our moral principles which have their bases in our theological beliefs.

            Yes, Christ did tell us to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but He added that we must give to God what belongs to God.  And think about it—everything in our created world belongs to God!  Patriotism is the virtue by which we live our Christian lives in civil society.

            Happy Fourth of July to you all.