How Catholic is the Declaration of Independence?

Commonweal, March 8, 1996

A year later Williams had the pleasure of printing a short piece (Commonweal, April 13, 1927) in which Walter Lippmann indicated his general acceptance of this interpretation.

The rediscovery of medieval sources for democracy reinforced the pre-existing Catholic enthusiasm for the Middle Ages to which James J. Walsh's The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries gave witness. Published in 1907 (Catholic Summer School Press), this glowing survey of the achievements of the high Middle Ages had gone through eight editions by 1924. In the eighth edition Walsh was able to include a passage from Henry Adams's Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1913) among the other statements by non-Catholic authorities buttressing his contention that the thirteenth century really did represent the high point of Western civilization. Against this background, it is understandable that American Catholics sometimes linked the point about the harmony of their religious and political commitments to broader claims about historical continuity between the Middle Ages and the present day. No one put the claim in bolder terms than the highly respected Columbia University historian, Carlton J. H. Hayes, a convert active in the Catholic lay movement of the 1920s and a regular Commonweal contributor. To meet their "Obligations to America," Hayes informed his coreligionists, they must "grasp the significant truth that America is the daughter of the Catholic church. Not only was this continent discovered and opened to the whole world by Catholics, but our country could not possibly be what it is now had it not been for Catholic Christianity." As "an idea, a type of culture," Catholicism had shaped the whole of Western civilization so deeply that every institution and ideal of true Americanism had its "embryo and antetype...in Catholic theory and practice." Thus the democratic institutions of early New England were rooted in "an older tradition of democratic guilds, democratic communes, institutions of representative government, trials by juries of one's peers, and Magna Chartas--an older tradition, the whole of which was inextricably interwoven with the life and spirit of mediaeval, Catholic Europe."

Longtime Commonweal managing editor George N. Shuster, who wrote the most sophisticated and irenic work of apologetics called forth by the anti-Catholicism of the 1920s, emphasized the "Catholic spirit" as the mediating ground between Catholicity and Americanism. By temperament, Shuster was less interested in political theory than in art and literature, and his "Catholic spirit" was redolent of both medievalism and romanticism; but he also drew attention to the pioneering role of colonial Maryland in providing for religious toleration. And while he rejected the thesis that the Founding Fathers had been directly influenced by Cardinal Bellarmine, he nevertheless insisted "that the United States government as it came into being corresponds admirably with what the great sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian outlined as sound Catholic doctrine."