WASHINGTON, D.C. — “Endowed by Their Creator: Catholicism, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Experiment at 250” was the subject of a recent conference at The Catholic University of America (CUA) featuring a bevy of Catholic academics, jurists and public intellectuals.
Co-hosted by CUA’s Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and Carroll Forum for Citizenship and Public Life, along with the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government, the conference included a video address by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio highlighting Catholics’ presence and influence on the nation.
“It has been 250 years since a new people declared themselves to the world. At the time, less than 2% were Catholic, but the nation they built would come to serve as one of the proudest and most enduring testaments to the eternal truth of our faith,” Rubio, himself a Catholic, stated.
the american experiment
One of the symposium’s central panels was titled “Catholic Social Thought and the American Experiment” and featured Russell Hittinger, executive director of the Institute for Human Ecology at CUA; Kenneth Grasso, professor and department chair of political science at Texas State University; Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; and CUA professor Sarah Gustafson.
Grasso focused his presentation on the late Father John Courtney Murray, an American Jesuit priest known for reconciling Catholicism with American pluralism and religious freedom.
“Murray in some sense was a celebrant of the American experiment, admired the Founding Fathers, somebody who celebrated America’s success; he also thought that America was in deep trouble.”
The moral tradition “provided the justification and substance of the American experiment and had been the source of its success,” Grasso said. However, Murray also saw that “the very moral tradition which made American democracy compatible with Catholicism no longer lives in the minds and hearts of Americans.”
“Modern culture’s rejection of the Christian mode of existence” has created a spiritual vacuum “that will be filled by an explicitly non-Christian mode of existence,” Grasso said.
“The American experiment will not long survive the revelation that was its ultimate inspiration. Where does this leave us? Murray says it leaves the body politic in a grave crisis,” Grasso said.
Anderson focused his remarks on the contemporary application of Catholic social teaching.
“There are four fundamental basic principles of Catholic social thought,” Anderson said. “Human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity.”
“We’re all created for friendship with God. And so it’s both the origin and the end of the human person that explains the nature of humanity.”
When it comes to social thought and the Declaration regarding “the account of liberty and religious liberty in particular,” there are “tensions” between the two, Anderson said.
“But there’s also surprising overlap and harmonization between the account that [James] Madison gives us ... in which he says ‘the reason that we have rights to religious liberty is because we have duties to the Creator.’
— Tessa Gervasini, Ken Oliver-Méndez, Catholic News Agency