How Catholic is the Declaration of Independence?

Commonweal, March 8, 1996

In his History of Freedom in Christianity, first published in 1907, Lord Acton quoted Thomas Aquinas on the need to ground political authority in popular consent, on the right of the people to overthrow an unjust ruler, and on several other points of like import, and then observed: "This language...contains the earliest exposition of the Whig theory of the revolution...." The same year, John Neville Figgis acknowledged that "the original sovereignty of the people" was a "cardinal doctrine of the Jesuit thinkers," and was more heavily emphasized by them "than by Protestant controversialists" of the Counter-Reformation era. In 1918, Charles H. McIlwain of Harvard took note of the extent to which the English Protestant dissenters silently made use of Jesuit arguments in their contest with the Stuart kings of England. Not long thereafter, Ernest Barker went even further:

"Saint Thomas--like the clerical thinkers of the Middle Ages in general--is a Whig; he believes in popular sovereignty, popular institution of monarchy, a pact between king and people, and the general tenets of Locke. It was not idly that Sir Robert Filmer wrote that `this tenent [sic] was first hatched in the schools [i.e., by medieval Scholastics], and has been fostered by all succeeding papists for good divinity."

The American Catholic writer who made this line of interpretation his specialty was Moorhouse F. X. Millar, S.J., a convert of Scottish and old American background. Millar began to write on these matters during the war years. He served as chairman of the graduate department of political philosophy and social science at Fordham between 1929 and 1953. Among Millar's strongest statements of the continuity between medieval and early modern Catholic political principles and those of the American republic were three chapters he contributed to The State and the Church (1922), a volume that he coauthored with John A. Ryan for the social action department of the NCWC. In 1928, when the Al Smith campaign made Catholic civic loyalty a burning issue, Millar brought out a collection of his earlier articles denying that the nation owed its liberty to Protestantism, and elaborating instead the linkages between the American system and the political traditions of the Catholic Middle Ages. Although he was better known for his neoscholastic socioeconomic commentary, Ryan also expounded the medieval-roots-of-democracy thesis in dealing with the issue of Wilsonian self-determination in the winter of 1918-19 and of Catholic civic loyalty in 1928.

The medieval lineage of democracy was so well established among educated American Catholics that in 1926 Michael Williams, the editor of Commonweal, cited Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., editor of America, as the authority for asserting "that it is from Saint Thomas Aquinas and the political theories of the Catholic Middle Ages that the American political tradition derives. The founders of the republic took their political thought from the English Whigs of the eighteenth century, who themselves took it directly from the writings of the Jesuit theologians, Suarez and Ballarmine [sic], who took it from Saint Thomas--and the thought of Saint Thomas has been sealed with the approval of the church."