Speaker 1:
Welcome to Ordain and Establish, a podcast of the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition at Catholic University. To learn more, visit our website at cit.catholic.edu.
Joel Alicea:
It’s now my pleasure to introduce our lunchtime fireside chat. We’re starting at 12:30, so we’ll end at 1:30, so that’s a slight departure from our schedule, but that’ll give us 15 minutes before panel two. I’ll briefly introduce our speakers so that we can get straight to the conversation, so I’m really truncating these bios. Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. A Phi Beta Capitol graduate of Swarthmore, he holds JD and MTS degrees from Harvard University, as well as degrees of D.Phil, BCL, DCL, and D.Litt from Oxford University. He holds 23 honorary doctorates, at least by last count. Professor George is the author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, and In Defense of Natural Law, among many other well-known works. And he’s leaving straight from here to deliver the Kellogg Biennial Lecture in Jurisprudence at the Library of Congress this afternoon. He is my mentor and friend, and we’re honored to have him joining us today.
Brandon McGinley is the editorial page editor for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, where he was the terror of the former mayor of Pittsburgh, who is no longer mayor of Pittsburgh, in part due to Brandon’s investigative reporting and sharp pen. Brandon is a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He spent several years as both an author and editor in the Catholic publishing world and in Pennsylvania state politics. And relevant to today’s discussion, he’s a former student of Professor George at Princeton, and is also a dear friend. Brandon, over to you.
Brandon McGinley:
All right. Alrighty. Thank you, everybody. We should just hop right in, no need making everybody wait. I found really striking in Secretary Rubio’s remarks, the emphasis on… And our emphasis here, today, is mostly on the principles, the ideas of the American founding, on the Declaration of Independence, and that’s where we’re going to spend most of our time. But I thought it was very interesting how he emphasized the historical Catholic’s role as individuals in discovery, in politics, and that’s something that I don’t want to lead with. I just led with that, I guess, but I’d like to draw out. I’d like to draw out as we go along, because I think it’s really interesting question of the ideas, but also of the history and how we think of ourselves as Catholic Americans. But to get to where we’re supposed to be, the Declaration of Independence, we just were treated to a remarkably interesting and, at times, sharp conversation about where the ideas come from and the Catholic reception of those ideas over the generations.
So Professor George, let’s just start at the beginning. From your perspective, what are the key ideals, the key notions that we can draw out of the Declaration, and where do they come from?
Professor George:
Well, thank you, Brandon. I’ll be happy to offer some reflections. First though, let me thank my beloved former student, Joel, of whom I’m so proud for the opportunity to be here, and for organizing this wonderful event. This is a great way to begin our celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Constitution, here, at The Catholic University of America, especially at its Columbus School of Law. And I also want to thank my other beloved student here, Brandon McGinley, of whom I am also so proud. I got to know Joel and Brandon when they were at Princeton together back in the Middle Ages.
Brandon McGinley:
It feels like it.
Professor George:
They were so inseparable, that behind their backs, I started referring to them as Jonathan and David. I could never quite settle my mind on which was Jonathan and which was David, but they had a Jonathan-David friendship that I found so admirable, and one that has been very productive intellectually, or morally and spiritually, over the years. And I’m just delighted to see them working together here, today. Again, what I love about these two guys, and so many of my other former students, and so many young people today that I admire, is that they are what we should all aspire to be, determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers.
I think the vocation of a teacher is to help to form the young men and women entrusted to his or her charge to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. And in fields that, at least in theory, are devoted to truth seeking, where your vocation is to be a truth seeker, academia, journalism. Joel and Brandon have stood out as being willing to dig deep to find the truth, and then to speak the truth as God gives them to see the truth, whether it’s in season or out of season, whether it’s popular or unpopular, whether it brings applause or the opposite of applause. So I congratulate you guys, and again, thank you for the opportunity to work with you again today, after all these years.
So, what are the key ideas of the Declaration of Independence? For me, they come down to that famous and beautiful and profound second sentence. We all have it committed to memory. We can say it by heart. We could say it in unison. I won’t ask you to do that, but “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they’re endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.” Think of what’s there. Think of what’s packed in to that sentence. And of course, it’s followed by another important thought, it’s to secure these rights that governments are instituted among men, or were instituted among men. Think of all that’s packed in to that thought.
First of all, there is a creator. There is a divine source of all that is, including the moral order. There is a creator who cares enough about the affairs of mere mortal human beings, made out of material stuff, destined to die and dissolve, that he endows us with inalienable rights and makes us all in fundamental worth and dignity equal to each other. And of course, central to this proposition, as Lincoln called it, that all men are created equal, that we’re endowed by our creator with certainly inalienable rights, is the proposition, the further proposition, that our most fundamental rights, and Joel is right to say, following from that, of course, or perhaps it was Secretary Rubio who said it, our duties as well, come from ultimately from no merely human source. They don’t come from kings or presidents or parliaments or congresses or courts. They come from the hand of Almighty God himself.
And because our rights and duties are not gifts, or things that are conferred on us by any purely human power, they cannot be violated or taken away, nor can we be relieved of our obligations under them by any merely human power. And then there’s that concept of equality. Boy, did that sound, in 1776, like a radical idea. Why? Because what is the history of humanity? The history of humanity is a history of inequality. Not just inequalities of strength, beauty, intelligence, skill, talent, charm, economic inequality, social inequality, but even the belief that people lacked equality, there was no equality of people, in terms of fundamental worth and dignity. The widely held belief, over time and across cultures, was that people are fundamentally unequal. There are the inferiors and the superiors. The inferiors exist to serve the superiors. The interests of the inferiors are to be subjugated to the interests of the superiors.
So, it sounded like quite a radical idea. And for its time it was, and yet, what’s the source of that idea? What’s the foundation, the intellectual and moral foundation of that idea? Nothing new at all. Something very old, just about the oldest thing we know, tracing all the way back to the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible, where we’re told, in that great Hebrew revelation, that the human being, although fashioned from the mere dust of the Earth, as I say, material stuff that’ll someday die and dissolve, is nevertheless made in the very image and likeness of the divine creator and ruler of all that is, and therefore, bearing a profound dignity, a dignity that does not depend on any individual’s strength, wisdom, intelligence, beauty, skill, talent, social standing in the eyes of others, economic standing, certainly not race, sex, ethnicity, or anything else.
The respect in which we are created equal is the respect in which our fundamental dignity is understood to be equal, so that no one can be used by anybody else, or properly regarded by anybody else, as a mere means or instrument or object. Now, obviously, we human beings have one heck of a hard time living up to that understanding. Again, as my friend Cornell West says, “We are a wretched species whose whole history is a history of organized hatred and weaponized greed.” I love Cornell’s rhetoric here, but he’s capturing an important truth, that is our whole history is a history of failing to live up to the principle of equal dignity. But it’s right there at the very beginning, very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible, and it’s captured precisely in that second sentence, that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
I’ll stop filibustering in a second, Brandon, but I can’t help but note that Lincoln, at Gettysburg, referred to this nation as a nation founded on a proposition. So we’re now 250 years from 1776. He was four score in seven years from 1776, “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” It was Lincoln who said… Now Lincoln, the great anti-slavery guy, praising a slave owner, it was Lincoln who said of Jefferson, “All praise to Jefferson.” Why all praise to Jefferson? For that proposition. And Jefferson himself, when asked, “Where did you come up with these great new ideas for the Declaration and for the founding of the country?” Many of you probably know this, I’ll just remind you. He was asked by Henry Lee in a letter that Lee wrote to the elderly Jefferson.
Jefferson responded in April of 1826, just a couple of months before he died on July 4th, 1826, 50 years to the day of the Declaration of Independence, on the same day that his friend, then enemy, then friend, John Adams died. Do you remember Jefferson’s response to Henry Lee? The letter responding to Henry Lee, in that letter, Jefferson says, “You speak of new ideas.” There were no new ideas. I simply gave effect to what Jefferson called the harmonizing sentiments of the American people, and then he referenced the source of those harmonizing sentiments as, I forget what the exact word was, but in other words, as derived from, as reflected from what he called the elementary books of public right. And then he cited a non-exhaustive list of four authors, two ancient and too modern. He cited Aristotle, Cicero, Sydney, and Locke. And Jefferson was not being falsely modest here. There were actually great new ideas, but he was too modest to admit that they were these new ideas. No, he was telling the truth. He’s deriving these from older understandings.
Now, he could have mentioned, remember, it’s a non-exhaustive list, he could have mentioned, and should have mentioned, the Bible, but we know about Jefferson’s somewhat tenuous relationship with the Bible. But there is no question that in addition to those authors and others, he could have cited a fundamental source for that foundational proposition is the principle of the Imago Dei, the profound inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family.
Brandon McGinley:
You might even say it was too far, but when he’s speaking of the harmonizing sentiments of the American people, this would be a people who were steeped in scripture to some degree or another, or at least whose worldviews were formed by scripture and by a Christian to tradition. So even it’s almost as if, excuse me, he might not have thought of it this way explicitly, but it’s almost as if it went without saying that scripture would have informed these notions.
Professor George:
Which certainly did go without saying.
Brandon McGinley:
Yeah.
Professor George:
Lincoln, even from his boyhood, carried around two books, the Bible, King James, and Shakespeare. And Lincoln was the quintessential American. He was like everybody else. Now, probably few people could do with those works what Lincoln would end up doing in the great speeches that we all so much love and admire. But what Lincoln does, in relying so much on those two books, is just what other Americans in that era, and the era before, and until very recently, all did. Our ideas, our worldview, our understanding, our angle of perception on the world was all fundamentally shaped by the Bible.
Brandon McGinley:
Yeah. I want to go back actually, to Cornell West’s rhetoric that you evoked and the idea of human beings difficulty in living up to the principles that we articulate, and that are articulated, and that the country has, at times, struggled to live up to in its own, and even at its founding, in terms of slavery, the principles of the Declaration. And I think what I’d like to try to do is draw out some of the disagreement, or at least reference some of the disagreement that occurred in the previous panel, to what degree… So, I’ll make a statement and then a question.
If we’re going to ever, to the extent that human beings are ever going to live in such a way that they are in keeping with the first principles that we claim and the natural law that is written on our hearts, God’s grace is essential. To what degree, or how do you respond to a critic of the Declaration who would argue that, in as much as the church mediates God’s grace, it’s absence from the document, and its general absence from most of the Founders’ perceptions of what they were working with, how would you respond to a critic who says that that ensures that the founding lacks a sure foundation?
Professor George:
I have to say I’m not sure I completely understand the question.
Brandon McGinley:
Okay, okay.
Professor George:
Let me wander around in a little bit, and if I’m not addressing which you want me to do, just try me again.
Brandon McGinley:
Yeah, please. I will.
Professor George:
So, we certainly know that the Founders understood the concept of original sin, and understood that they were original sinners themselves. Even with respect to the issue of slavery, the majority of the Founders, the majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence who held slaves. And of course, it was a combination of people who were opposed to slavery, like Hamilton and Adams, and people who own slaves, like Washington and Jefferson and Madison, others. But even with respect to slavery, Jefferson famously said, speaking specifically of slavery, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just and that his justice will not sleep forever.” They didn’t know how to get out of it. Jefferson didn’t even know personally how to get out of it. He was such spendthrift that he couldn’t actually afford to manumit his slaves. He couldn’t even do what Washington did, which was to free his slaves in his will. And Washington not only freed to slaves, but made financial provision for them, knowing that just freeing them and sending them out there into the world, in a state of economic severe distress, would be catastrophic for them.
And they had a sense that man’s sinfulness mattered for the design of a constitutional order that could sustain a republic. All you have to do is read Federalist 10. Federalist 10 is the real proof that James Madison went to Princeton and studied with John Witherspoon. What do we know about John Witherspoon’s religion? Presbyterian, Calvinist. What do we know about Calvinism? Utter depravity. When I studied a philosophy of religion as an undergraduate at Swarthmore with a wonderful professor named Linwood Urban, Professor Urban would quote to us from Calvin. Now, I’ve never checked this quotation, and I’m afraid to check because it might turn out not to be true, so I haven’t checked. But he used to quote Calvin as saying “That on the day of judgment, even the elect will be obnoxious in the sight of God.” That’s how depraved we are. If you read Federalist 10, there’s a real account of human depravity there.
So they understood that this mattered, and it mattered for politics. It mattered for culture. It mattered for the structure of constitutional design. It’s why we get the great Madisonian system of structural constraints on power that are the real protections of liberty in the eyes of our Founders. Something to be preferred to mere parchment guarantees, such as bills of rights, and things like that. Now, the question is, who is going to tend to the souls of us sinners, us original sinners, and tend to it in such a way, or tend to them, to those souls, in such a way as to enable them to be the best that they can be in their fallen condition? Their answer is the institutions of civil society, beginning with the family and the church. The family and the religious community, the institutions that bear the lion’s share of the load when it comes to providing basic health, education, and welfare for bringing up each new generation to be… Nobody’s going to be perfect given our sinfulness, but to be basically decent people, capable of leading successful lives and being responsible citizens.
Now, government has a role there. The structural constraints and guarantees of the Constitution have a role there, but in the Federalist Papers, Publius tells us that the role of government is secondary. The word he uses is auxiliary. So if government’s role is auxiliary, who’s got the primary role? Okay, family, church, mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, auntie, uncle, pastor, teacher, coach, librarian, Boy Scout leader, Girl Scout, the people who know the kid by name, who know his particular strengths and weaknesses and sensitivities and sensibilities, and can nurture a kid. I mean, those of you who are parents of more than one child, my wonderful assistant, Kathleen’s here, she’s got a couple. We can tell you, and if you have more than one kid of your own, you can tell us no two kids are alike. Two kids in the same family, coming from the same mom and dad, brought up in the same environment, can have radically different talents, abilities, sensibilities, sensitivities, strengths, weaknesses, temptations, it’s how different it is. To attend to that, government can’t do it. It can’t know the kid. It doesn’t even know the kid’s name.
That’s why Paul’s mom and dad, grandma, grandpa, pastor, teacher, coach, librarian, scout leader, and so forth. So the Founders understood the need for grace. They understood the need for moral and spiritual formation. They understood that mere structural guarantees, governmental processes, or institutions can at most help, can most be supportive. What we in the Catholic tradition would refer to here as subsidiarity. They can be subsidiary. They can’t be primary. I think that was their understanding.
Brandon McGinley:
Yeah. No, and I think that is what I was getting at. And specifically the idea that the, and this kind of goes to actually Joel’s question at the end of the last session, the absence of the specific kind of Catholic language from the Declaration is not an exclusion, but rather an opening, an opening for Catholic understandings to enter in?
Professor George:
Well, I don’t think they had in mind Catholic versus Protestant or Christian, or anything else. I just don’t think that was what the project was all about.
Brandon McGinley:
Sure. Oh, I agree.
Professor George:
They were justifying a radical step, something that needed justification. The sentence that comes before that second sentence is a sentence that says, “We owe it.” A decent respect for the opinions of mankind means we owe it to explain the reasons, to give the justification for us taking this step, breaking with the established order, with the king, with the parliament, with England. And of course, they have in mind, I mean, they haven’t actually won the revolution yet, and the odds at that particular moment were that they weren’t going to win it, but nevertheless, it’s clear that they have in mind the establishment of a republic. That’s new. That’s new. It wasn’t obvious. All previous republics failed. Many, when they failed, had collapsed into the worst forms of tyranny.
But you can see already that they’re thinking we’re not going to go the root of trying to have a benign despite or a benign monarch, or anything like that. That doesn’t work out so well. Yeah, the history of republics is a pretty depressing history, but we’re going to try it. And then of course, the whole Madisonian system, Federalist 10 makes this clear as well, is meant to deal with the problems that had created the collapse of republics before, especially the problem of faction, which we all should be thinking about a lot just today. But they launched… So as soon as they start doing it, so the first sentence says, “Here’s why we’re going to do it, because a decent respect for the opinions of mankind means we owe it to you to say what we’re going to take this represent.” What’s the very next thing that comes? It’s not the bill of indictment against the king, with all the “He stirred up the native savages,” and all that stuff. It’s, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” Boom, boom, big idea. Biblical idea ultimately.
Oh, by the way, you don’t get that. I yield to… My students here, Ryan and Joel and Brandon, I yield to no one in my praise and admiration for the great philosophers of antiquity. I teach you guys. I’ve taught you guys Plato and Aristotle. I think there’s so much wisdom to be drawn from that. I think of, this is going to mildly contradict Secretary Rubio, it says there were no Catholics being drawn on there. Well, I kind of think of Aristotle and Cicero as sort of proto-Catholics, and I know some of my Protestant friends think that’s true, which is bad. They really were. But I yield to no one in my admiration for these guys. What they can’t give us is the Imago Dei. They can’t give us that essential understanding of the nature and dignity of the human being, the individual human person made in the image and likeness of God, that you do get from the Hebrew Bible. So I’m sorry, but you don’t get to that second sentence just with Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Xenophon, Musonius. You need here, that biblical revelation.
Brandon McGinley:
And I think this is something Secretary Rubio did say, that I think that leap that you’re making, and just the sense that we described earlier, of these scriptural Christian ideas were simply the air that was breathed by the people at the time. The idea that this is purely an enlightenment project, that seems to be contradicted immediately.
Professor George:
I think Professor Steve Pinker up at Harvard does a lot of good, and I admire a lot of what he does. He’s a wonderful spokesman for academic freedom and the importance of freedom of speech, and things like that. But he’s really pushing this idea that there’s this fundamental break between Christianity and the enlightenment, and he’s bought into this whole myth of the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages, and all that kind of stuff, but that’s just not reality.
Brandon McGinley:
Yeah.
Professor George:
Now, we have good reasons for considering the Enlightenment, or if we’re going to be serious, Enlightenments, plural. There was not just one Enlightenment, there were very different Enlightenments. We’re talking about Germany, we’re talking about France, we’re talking about Scotland, we’re talking about England, very different characters. And it’s certainly true that some Enlightenment figures, especially, but not exclusively in France, but not all in France, not all of them in France were what we would today call hardcore secularists or atheists, but a lot weren’t. Begin that list with Sir Isaac Newton, right? A lot weren’t. Some of the great Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, some of the great English Enlightenment thinkers, Hume would be in the other camp here, but plenty of others, including Smith. So yeah, I mean, it’s just a myth that there’s this radical break of the Enlightenment with Christianity, and the American founding is an Enlightenment project. And to the extent that you can identify a revolution with Enlightenment ideology just as such, considered as the kind of ideology Brother Pinker has in mind, you look not to the American Revolution, but to the French Revolution, and Brother Steve would not like that.
Brandon McGinley:
Yes, certainly. Certainly. So, what about the history then of Catholic engagement with the Declaration? The conversation we just had earlier engaged Professor Schindler with Professor Muñoz and Pastor Lewis. We had a… I mean, I don’t know if Professor Schindler’s still here, but from him, on the one hand, quite traditional critique, but also one that is increasingly that you hear more often, and that for that reason, I think has taken on a certain modern component. But let’s go back farther, what’s the history of Catholic engagement with the Declaration?
Professor George:
Well, as Secretary Rubio, I think, pointed out, there was one signer, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who was Catholic. Great patriot, by the way. He’s not a hesitant figure in embracing the principles of the Declaration. There weren’t a lot of Catholics around in those days. It was really a Protestant country at the founding. Catholics were rare birds, only very tiny Jewish population. Secretary Rubio pointed out, absolutely correctly, that George Washington did thank the Catholic community for its patriotism. He also thanked the Jewish community, and reassured the tiny, teeny, teeny, tiny Jewish community, in a letter, a couple of letters, but the most prominent and famous one is the one to the Hebrew congregation at Newport in Rhode Island.
And what’s beautiful and wonderful about what Washington says there, is that the Jewish community had written to congratulate him on becoming the nation’s first president, and then requested, really pleaded with him, that America would be a place where the children of the stock of Abraham would be tolerated. And you can feel the poignancy of that plea, given what Jews had experienced in old Europe. And Washington writes back a beautiful letter thanking them, reassuring them. But he says, “You speak of tolerance. You ask for toleration. You have to understand things have changed. In this republic, we no longer speak of tolerance or toleration as if some people got to be here on the sufferance of other people. We speak of equal citizenship.” Everybody’s equal regardless of your religion, not just Christians, not just Protestants, everybody, including Jews, and we ask only that you be loyal patriotic citizens, and that when called upon, you give your effectual support to the nation.
In other words, I think what he had in mind there was supporting the nation in times of war, or invasion, or something like that. But I bring all this up to say that we didn’t really have, at the beginning, a really significant Catholic population here. That comes later, with waves of immigration. And those waves of immigration come only after something else really big and very powerful, and that affects the Catholic church in a major way happens, and that’s the French Revolution. And I think you have to take into account just how traumatizing, how dreadful, and how traumatizing the French Revolution was, especially to the church, to understand the writings of the 19th century popes, which I’m guessing, Brandon, you have in mind, who are, to say the least, deeply suspicious of some, quote, “American ideas,” such as democracy, human rights, separation of church and state, religious liberty.
But here, I think it’s critical to see that those labels in the ears of 19th century Catholic Europeans, and this is in a period when no Pope had ventured outside of Europe, right? It’s a European-dominated church and a European-dominated hierarchy. I mean, Italian popes for 400 years consecutively. When they heard those concepts, they heard those concepts as they were shaped and believed by the partisans of the French Revolution.
Brandon McGinley:
Who were closer to home, who were closer to the papacy.
Professor George:
Traumatized Europe. I mean, the anti-clericalism, the proposition that the church was utterly subservient to the state, the proposition that religious vows did not bind in conscience, the proposition that it was immoral to take religious vows, the belief in religious relativism or indifferentism. When they heard things like freedom of religion or democracy, they had all those kinds of… And of course, if that’s what you mean by democracy, freedom of religion, separation of church and state, well, yeah, I mean, there’s no way the Catholic Church is going to buy into that stuff. But that French revolutionary understanding is really quite… People want to argue with me about this, let’s have a go. But I’d argue quite strenuously there’s a world of difference between the American conception of, let’s say, the free exercise of religion, and the French revolutionary.
There’s nothing in the American concept that implies that religious vows don’t bind, or that it’s immoral to take religious vows, or that there’s the complete, not only separation, but subjugation of the church by the state, or subordination of the church to the interests of the state, or that the state can be telling the church who to appoint as bishops, and all that kind of stuff.
Brandon McGinley:
Right, yes. And a lot of the virulence of the French Revolution on these points surprisingly emerges out of a Catholic… This is something I forget which speaker I earlier said it, but that emerges out of a Catholic society where the church was seen to be complicit in the problems, to put it mildly, of the ancient régime.
Professor George:
Oh, sure. No, that’s right. I mean, it’s a conflict between the church and the revolutionaries with the church, not wholly, but important elements, very significant elements of the church on the side of the ancient régime. Now,
Brandon McGinley:
By the time you get to Leo XIII, and I think it’s in you see… And I’m going to circle back to what I said at the beginning about the principled and the historic. He expresses resurrections about the principles of American liberalism, but he is very positive about the historic circumstances, the lived experience of church in America, which I think you’re starting to see a softening there, that history is… The experience of history, the experience about you human beings is beginning to overcome or temper the church’s understanding.
Professor George:
Yeah. I mean, Secretary Rubio brought it out very, very well in that quotation from Leo XIII about America’s destined for greatness. And it’s being destined for greatness had something to do with the unique circumstances of its founding as a nation founded on principles, the nature of the principles that it had. It’s not a blood and soil nation. It’s not a throne and altar nation. There is no ancient régime. Now, at the same time, he’s still shaped. He’s a European guy, he’s an Italian guy, he’s still shaped by that experience, that unbelievably traumatizing experience of the French Revolution, and he is worried about some ideologies that he thinks, or fears, might be common to both the French and American backgrounds. And one of those is radical individualism, which is obviously contrary to the teaching of the Catholic church. So if that’s what you mean, if your conception of civil liberty is rooted in a kind of radical individualism that sees all social relations as fundamentally instrumental, then that’s going to be contrary to Catholic teaching.
I think what eventually brings the church around on this is to seeing that there’s less here to worry about. No, they have things to worry about.
Brandon McGinley:
Oh, certainly. Yeah.
Professor George:
But those specific things are less things to worry about than maybe they thought earlier on, was the American experience of religious freedom, the flourishing of the church under conditions of religious freedom, the emergence of thinkers and pastors of prominence in America, such as John Courtney Murray, Fulton J. Sheen. With the waves of immigration, the church really did flourish, and without compromising its mission. So if you look at the encyclical against Americanism, first of all, you’ll notice how tentative it all… It’s all, “Well, if this is what you mean, if this is what you mean,” but I think there’s a reassurance that-
Brandon McGinley:
Yeah, there’s always a caveat.
Professor George:
Yeah, it’s all caveat. There are caveats all over the place, because Leo XIII is not yet sure what it is that we’re dealing with. What does all this mean? What is it all?
Brandon McGinley:
It’s impossible for us to imagine, but very difficult to imagine, especially with the American Pope. But at the time, in the church’s thinking, we were still
Professor George:
We were a mission field.
Brandon McGinley:
Yes, exactly.
Professor George:
Now we’ve become a mission field again, but it’s not the Europeans who are missionizing us, it’s the Nigerians. Yeah. And now the other thing, of course, is you’re dealing with a lot of anti-Catholicism in the United States, a lot of largely Protestant anti-Catholicism. And a part of that is the fruit of Protestant Americans worrying about the stuff that the 19th century Pope said about democracy, separation of church and state, and all this kind of stuff. And here, I think what finally settled all that, and put it all to rest, was simply that it turned out that Catholics could be, and were, extremely patriotic and loyal Americans, every bit as patriotic and loyal as non-Catholic Americans. And you could see it in the battlefield cemeteries. It was the valor of Catholic men fighting in the First World War and in the Second World War, showing their loyalty to the country. That’s what fundamentally undid the dual loyalty charge.
Brandon McGinley:
If the experience of the first half of the 20th century largely sorted things off from an American perspective, and then JFK puts it to bed of. Well, that’s a more difficult-
Professor George:
JFK is a problematic case.
Brandon McGinley:
It’s a problematic case. But in terms of historically though, that is the point at which Americans and the residual anti-Catholicism, as it was expressed politically, is largely good to bet at that point.
Professor George:
That’s right.
Brandon McGinley:
But I think historically, that sounds right.
Professor George:
Yeah. I mean, the conditions that were faced by Kennedy were much mitigated from the conditions that were faced by Al Smith.
Brandon McGinley:
Oh, absolutely.
Professor George:
1928.
Brandon McGinley:
Yes. No question. Well, I don’t really know too well, the Kennedy case. Would it be fair to say that as the… This is actually where I was going to go before I bullishly went down that path. That in a way analogous to what we just said about the Catholic American tension getting somewhat result on the American side, that Dignitatis Humanae represents it being, resolved is too strong a word, but that a lot of the fears that the church had are being softened, or you’re seeing that that historical development at its fullest.
Professor George:
Yeah. I mean, I think Dignitatis Humanae in part, I don’t want to over-claim, but it’s in no significant, no small insignificant part, no small part is the fruit of the American experience. And indeed, the influence of American thinkers and writers, like Murray. John Courtney Murray was a Jesuit priest and theologian in Scotland.
Brandon McGinley:
Absolutely, yeah.
Professor George:
I mean, the title of his most important book, it was actually a collection of essays, was, if I recall correctly, We Hold These Truths.
Brandon McGinley:
Yeah.
Professor George:
It was a direct quotation from the Declaration. And by the end of the council, the churches, and her corporate deliberation, the body of bishops, the Magisterium, is really taking all of this on board, the American experience, what people like Murray and Fulton Sheen, and others, are explaining, the reality that the church is flourishing in the United States without compromising the beliefs that Pope Leo is worried about, with all those caveats in that encyclical on Americanism.
Brandon McGinley:
Yeah.
Professor George:
So, it’s a different world. Dignitatis Humanae, in a certain way, is less cause than effect.
Brandon McGinley:
Yes.
Professor George:
It reflects the change that had taken place mentally.
Brandon McGinley:
Yeah. And I think that’s what all true developmental doctrine is.
Professor George:
Yeah, I think that’s right.
Brandon McGinley:
I think if we were saying it was effect, we would be getting close to claiming Russia, which I don’t think we want to do.
Professor George:
That’s right. Now, of course, there are elements in the church today, there’s been a revival in the church today, of people who think that the church took a wrong turn with Dignitatis Humanae.
Brandon McGinley:
Yeah, no question.
Professor George:
I’m going to be talking a little bit about that, not so much the religious angle, as a political angle in my lecture this afternoon at the library.
Brandon McGinley:
Sure. Yeah. I want to leave some time for questions.
Professor George:
Sure.
Brandon McGinley:
As much as I’d love to go down that road, I want to ask one more historic question, and it’s something that just popped to mind at the end, actually, of the last section. And this is why I was actually thinking at the beginning, about how Secretary Rubio focused so much in history, and I thought that was very interesting. And you said that America was a deeply Protestant nation at the time. It struck me that it may be fair to say that a lot of the criticisms of the Declaration come from a historical contingency that could not have been any different. In other words, it’s impossible to imagine this document that some Catholic critics of the Declaration would want it to have been, because there simply weren’t Catholics here. Which leads me to the question of, given the historical contingency of the revolution that they were trying to justify to a Protestant-Anglo colony, and to largely Protestant Anglo English speakers in England, is it the best that we could have hoped for?
Professor George:
I don’t know the answer to that question, but I certainly think it’s pretty darn good. And of course, we were interested in bringing the French aboard to help us, and they weren’t Anglo-Protestants.
Brandon McGinley:
Right, right.
Professor George:
So yeah, I mean, I don’t think we need any really fancy explanation for why the Declaration doesn’t have kind of Catholic bells and whistles attached to it. I don’t think there’s anything in the poor principles that are articulated there that are contrary to what the church confirms and holds and believes, or that calls into question anything that the church confirms and holds and believes. I think Charles Carroll of Carrollton was right to sign it, and I think we should rededicate ourselves to it.
Brandon McGinley:
Yeah. And then I guess the point for me is just it’s remarkable that we can say that given all the headwinds that would’ve been there at the time to such a document.
Professor George:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it did seem like a radical new set of ideas at the time. Although at the beginning of my comments today, I tried to make clear that it actually is all rooted in one very, very old idea that we’ve always had trouble living up to, this principle of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family, which principle is a just immediate implication of the idea that man is made in the image and likeness of God.
Brandon McGinley:
Absolutely. Well, thank you, Professor George. And yeah, we have about 12 or so minutes for questions. So, here.
Brian Brown:
Thank you. My name is Brian Brown, and I’m a first-year student here, at the Columbus School of Law. And my question is, while Aquinas, in De Regno, advocates for monarchy as the best form of government in the Summa, he also advocates for a mixed regime similar to the American form of government. My question is, were the Founders directly aware of Aquinas’s thought? And if not, is there an indirect line that can be drawn? And also, how similar or different are Aquinas’s conception of mixed regime and the American Founder’s conception of mixed regime?
Professor George:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I’ve never known quite what to make of De Regno. It does seem inconsistent with the corpus of Aquinas’ work, the broader corpus of Aquinas’ work. Now, he’s got a particular assignment here, he’s writing to a king. So when you write to a king, you might praise a monarch, that makes a certain amount of sense, especially if you’re trying to influence him to be a good king, and so forth. But it is true in other places, and for the most part, he seems to be arguing for some sort of mixed form of government. I don’t know of quotations, perhaps others who are more knowledgeable of the history would know of cases where American Founders, or members of that generation, were saying Aquinas. They were certainly familiar with Aristotle. And of course, so much, especially in the political and ethical aspect of his writings, that the Aquinas’ writings are just riffing on Aristotle, developing stuff out of Aristotle, taking a kernel of an idea out of Aristotle and developing it.
Aristotle, again, is one of the two ancients, along with Cicero, that Jefferson points to as examples of the ideas that fed the American founding in the Declaration. The church, as I understand it, the Catholic Church teaches, and has not, continues to teach, that there is no uniquely correct form of government, that much in the choice of what form of government should be established by any particular people will depend on their historically contingent circumstances, traditions, history, challenges, dangers, sensitivities, and even sheer preferences. But there are some basic things that government has an obligation to do, and basic things that governments have obligations to not do to people, which means that while there’s no uniquely correct form of government, there are lots of incorrect forms of government. And basically, any form of government that is essentially tyrannical, an Aristotle’s, an Aquinas’ sense of tyrannical.
So yeah, we’re in the domain that Aquinas calls determinacio here, where you’ve got some general principles, but the specification or concretization of the principles requires prudential judgments that could reasonably vary with circumstances in different places and different times, or even in the same place, at the same time, where you just have to make a choice among rationally and morally available, but not mutually compatible options. And our Founders made the choice for first, the principles of the Declaration, and then for a particular constitutional structure meant to sustain a republic.
Brandon McGinley:
Right there.
Speaker 7:
Thank you, Professor Birch. And my question for you is the Declaration does not try to justify itself. It says these are the causes which compel us to the separation, would give our thoughts to a candid world, and when we rely on the protection of divine providence. And so I’m wondering, those ideas presented in the Declaration, in the form in tapes, in the words it uses, how do you see those fitting within the Catholic just war tradition when it comes to justifying revolution in terms of the just war tradition of Augustine and Aquinas, among others? And thank you for taking the time to answer my question.
Professor George:
Yeah. Well, thank you. It’s not obvious if you read the Indictment of the King, the Bill of Particulars of the King, that what you’ve got adds up to a justification of a violent revolution. It’s not obvious that it doesn’t, that they don’t, but it’s not obvious that it does, so I think this is a legitimate, debatable question. And my Oxford doctoral contemporary across town here, Professor John Keon, I don’t know if any of you know Professor Keon, his work, I think he’s now retired from Georgetown. He’s got emeritus status. But some of his late work, he’s an Englishman, some of his late work is really a critique of the American Revolution as not justified by just… Keon’s a Catholic as well, justified by just war principles. But if you look at what Augusta and Aquinas have to say, and even if you take them on their own terms and don’t look at the modern developments, post-American revolutionary developments in just war thinking, especially by the 19th and 20th century popes.
So I think that there’s a legitimate debate here about whether, under the best understanding, under the church’s understanding of just war principles, the American Revolution can be justified by the considerations listed in the Declaration of Independence. I don’t want to dodge your… Did I answer your question?
Speaker 7:
No, no, yes.
Brandon McGinley:
Yeah.
Speaker 7:
Thank you.
Brandon McGinley:
Some of you may have detected, in my own remarks about history, that I’m kind of drawing a little bit on Tom Holland, and some of you may be fans of the Rest is History podcast, but… Yeah, I’m hearing some murmurs. But Dominic Sandbrook, the conservative agnostic, I don’t know, British historian, loves to refer to the American tax dodgers. Every single time he talks about us, he says it.
Professor George:
And of course, I think it’s a perpetually, and will be to the end of time, stinging rebuke that the American revolutionaries had from the great Johnson, from Samuel Johnson, who argued with his great friend and his only real intellectual equal at the time, Edmund Burke. And Burke was roughly supportive of the American Revolutionary cause. And Johnson said, you all know the quotation, right, “Why are the whelps for liberty loudest from the drivers of Negroes?” Put his finger right on the slavery, you people are demanding liberty from the king and yet you hold people in slavery.
Brandon McGinley:
In fact, the Rest is History just did a series on Dr. Jackson.
Professor George:
Oh, yeah.
Brandon McGinley:
There we go. Let’s see here, where do we have… Oh, what about over here? There’s three minutes left, so we have to be a hard stop, so this is our last question.
Gabriel:
My name is Gabriel, I’m a senior undergrad here at CUA. My question is, because within an ordered society, there’s required to be hierarchy, and part of the American Revolution was to throw off the aristocratic hierarchy previous in the society. Yeah, what is the hierarchy that then is established within the political society, within the American evolution, within American political tradition, and what is its source? Where does that hierarchy come from? Because it seems to throw off a sense of natural hierarchy, what is the replacement for it?
Professor George:
Okay. Yeah, that’s a really great question. I’ll just step back before I get directly to your questions, step back to remind us all that one of the objections, and nobody can say this is not an understandable objection at the time, so one of the objections of many Protestant Americans in the 19th century to having so many Catholics around, to Catholic immigration, some of the motivation for establishing the public school system to Americanize the Catholic kids, which simply generated the response by the bishops, “Okay, if you’re going to de-catholicize our kids in your public schools, we’re going to create our own parochial private schools to do it.” But anyway, one of the concerns, and you can’t say that it was a crazy concern, was that coming from an essentially hierarchical church, these Catholics would lack the habits of mind and the kind of sensibilities of democracy that you need, democratic sensibilities that you need to function properly as democratic citizens, or citizens of a democratic republic.
Now, eventually it was shown that, well, thank you very much, Catholics can function very well and very responsible as democratic citizens, despite having… We didn’t change the church’s hierarchical form and still are… But it took time to prove that. You can see before there’s actually a test of it, why people might be concerned about that. But I think the reality is, of course, hierarchy is unavoidable. There’s going to be hierarchy. There’s going to be authority. Jefferson believed that there could emerge, with a proper Republican civic order, there could emerge, and we could rely on, a consistent replenishing of a kind of natural hierarchy of virtue and talent, that the best would, no matter what circumstances they came from, so this would be unlike European feudal hierarchies., The best, whether they came from wealthy backgrounds, poor backgrounds, whatever, the best would rise to the top.
And the hope was, you can even see this in the Madisonian structures of the Constitution, the hope was the best would stand out and would therefore become the office holders in the institutions created, and whose power is separated, by the Constitution. That hasn’t worked out too well, but you can see again why that was not an unreasonable hope that it could work that way. I think the best we can do is to try to make something like that work to the extent that it can work. This is why I’m a strong believer not in… This is a point on which Cornell West and I debate a lot, I’m a strong believer not in equality of wealth or equality of income considered as an ideal at all. It’s not just what Cornell thinks, which is it’s an ideal, but it’s an unattainable ideal. Or to attain the ideal, you would have to sacrifice too many other important values, especially in terms of civil liberty.
So he’s a modified socialist because he still thinks the ideal is economic equality. I don’t think it’s an ideal at all. What I think is needed is social mobility that would enable, put people in a position, by virtue of education and background and opportunity, put people in a position to make of themselves the most they can make of themselves, to rise up even if they’re from humble circumstances, poorly educated backgrounds without educated parents, financially poor backgrounds, and so forth, so that they can become part of a natural aristocracy. They can rise up in business, in the professions, in politics, in religion, in all the domains of life. There will be a hierarchy, and you need the best people occupying it. You won’t always get them, not in this vale of tears. Things are going to go badly, but we should do our best to put the best people, and not just in politics, but to put the best people, the most talented people, the most committed people, the people who are most dedicated to the good and the true and the beautiful, in positions of authority.
I think that should be our objective. And there’s no way, in a democratic republic, to do better than that, and I don’t think that the return to something like a feudal system would do us any good.
Brandon McGinley:
Well, that is it. Thank you, again, to Professor George.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to Ordain and Establish. Subscribe to our podcast, and if you’d like to learn more, visit our website at cit.catholic.edu.
