How Catholic is the Declaration of Independence?

Commonweal, March 8, 1996

What has come to be called the American Catholic Revival of the 1920s can be closely linked to the experience of U.S. Catholics in World War I. Crucial to this new spirit was the creation of the National Catholic War Council, which became in 1919 the National Catholic Welfare Council (and still later the National Catholic Welfare Conference). A national headquarters and a staff, located in Washington, D.C., not only gave the church a more effective voice in public affairs, it also enhanced Catholic visibility, serving notice that a new era of purposeful Catholic participation in American life was about to begin. These developments had a tonic effect on Catholic morale and, following the shared experience of wartime mobilization, reinforced the sense of emotional solidarity with, and responsibility for, the nation.

The earliest manifestations of the Catholic Revival took the form of a new kind of Catholic Americanism, one drawing on new intellectual resources. he most important of these was neoscholastic social and political theory. Neoscholasticism came into prominence through what was then called "the social question" and the work of Monsignor John A. Ryan, the outstanding exponent and popularizer of "papal social teaching," which Leo XIII had laid out on the basis of Thomistic natural-law principles. Ryan's progressivism constituted a positive point of contact between the neoscholastic tradition and the reform impulse that coursed so strongly through American society in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC), in which Ryan played a leading role, gave him an official platform underlining the links between progressive Americanism and neoscholastic Catholicism.

A much more obvious link with Americanism, especially in the context of World War I, was the claim that the roots of democracy and constitutionalism were to be found in medieval scholasticism, an argument that became a distinguishing feature of Catholic Americanism in the 1920s.

The compatibility of American and Catholic principles had, of course, been affirmed since the days of John Carroll, the first American bishop. Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker, among others, had gone beyond simple affirmation by offering reasonable arguments to support the claim of compatibility. What was new in the era of World War I was an emphasis on the virtual identity of Scholastic and American political principles. The first landmark in this line of interpretation was Gaillard Hunt's "The Virginia Declaration of Rights and Cardinal Bellarmine" (Catholic Historical Review, 1917), which pointed out the similarity of language between the Declaration of Independence and certain writings of Robert Bellarmine, S.J. (a prominent figure in the Counter-Reformation revival of Thomism). The article naturally attracted attention, since the idea that Thomas Jefferson could have derived his ideas from such a source seemed startling even to Catholics and outlandish to everyone else. Although subsequently dismissed as propagating a "Bellarmine-Jefferson legend," the article itself was not extravagant in its claims, and the general line of interpretation toward which it pointed was in keeping with the best contemporary scholarship on medieval and early modern political thought.

Hunt argued that a passage from Bellarmine, which Jefferson might have read in Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, provided a better short statement of the doctrines enunciated in the Declaration of Independence than any other work of political theory available to him. Hunt acknowledged that there was no direct evidence that Jefferson had read the passage, much less that he consciously drew upon it in formulating the rationale for colonial rejection of royal authority. But the hypothesis that he had at least read it was plausible since Filmer was a major figure in the tradition of English political thought, and Jefferson's library contained a copy of Patriarcha.

Hunt was a Catholic convert of patrician stock whose opinion on America's revolutionary origins counted for something since he enjoyed high repute as a scholar for his biographies of James Madison and John C. Calhoun and as the editor of Madison's writings. When Hunt wrote the Bellarmine article he was chief of the manuscript division of the Library of Congress and was engaged on the mammoth project of editing the journals of the Continental Congress. For such a man to propose a Catholic source for American republicanism--and to do so in the sixth month of the nation's wartime crusade for democracy--could not but fill American Catholics with pride and make them more certain than ever that their religious and national loyalties fit harmoniously together.

Other articles soon followed, developing the same line of interpretation. The most influential did not focus exclusively on the Bellarmine-Jefferson question, but argued the broader thesis that medieval and Counter-Reformation Catholic thinkers made important contributions to the evolution of modern constitutional theory. Most of this literature was strongly polemical, and many writers no doubt overstated their case. But the broader contention--that the political philosophy of the Founding Fathers drew on the tradition of natural law and limited government to which the medieval Scholastics and Counter-Reformation Jesuits made important contributions--was clearly warranted by the best contemporary scholarship.