By Fr. James Molgano
Today, July 4th, we celebrate our Independence Day. Many or perhaps most of us think of July 4th as the day that represents the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the United States of America as an independent Nation. But July 4, 1776, wasn’t the day that the Continental Congress decided to declare Independence (they did that on July 2, 1776). It also wasn’t the day the American Revolution began (that had happened back in April 1775). Nor was it the day Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence (that was in June 1776). Or the date on which the Declaration was delivered to Great Britain (that didn’t happen until November 1776). Or the date it was actually signed (that was August 2, 1776).
So, what did happen on July 4, 1776? The Continental Congress approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence. Hence, July 4, 1776, became the date that was inscribed on the Declaration of Independence, and the impressive handwritten copy that is displayed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. It’s also the date that was printed on the Dunlap Broadsides, the original printed copies of the Declaration that were circulated throughout the new nation. So, when people thought of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, was the date they remembered. And we do well to remember it also.
However, all too sadly, many do not remember and perhaps many more still are not even taught about the founding of our great Country and the principles and virtues that guided the birth of our Nation. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer told Fox News Monday night that American students are being taught “about all of the pathologies of the United States and very little of the glories.” Krauthammer was reacting to a Fox News Poll released last week, in which 45 percent of voters said they were not proud of the United States. This lack of American pride represented in the poll originated with the counter-cultural left of the 1960s. “They weren’t just out there rioting and sitting in, they went into the professions – the teaching professions, and they’ve essentially taken over,” Krauthammer said, “That generation of radicals runs the universities, they run the teachers’ unions, [and] they run the curricula.”
America today is a divided Nation. It is resoundingly clear that there is little to practically no agreement about the meaning of even the most basic principles as conveyed in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The right to life is questioned still today as tenaciously as it was over 40 years ago, not only for those at the beginning of life in the wombs of their mothers but also for many of those who are near its end. Unprincipled individual expression has become the so-called law of the land. The proper objective understanding of rights as grounded in and originating from the natural law, which according to St. Thomas is “nothing more than the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law of God’s wisdom,” has been supplanted, in large part, by a radical existentialism and subjective notion of so-called rights that seeks universal indoctrination along with the unfettered control of the world’s population by misguided global elites.
Yet we, and all patriots across this great land, celebrate our Nation’s birthday today despite the myriad and manifold ways that we have become quite a different nation than the one envisioned by our Founding Fathers. Let us remember with heartfelt gratitude all those men, women and children who were willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice than to live enslaved to a king who levied not only taxes but also imposed other hardships that contravened the “law of nature and Nature’s God.”
And let us also remember all those who serve or have served in uniform of these United States, from Lexington to the present day, willing to affirmatively respond to our Nation’s call to military service and to civic duty to help protect, serve, and defend our Country, her Constitution, and the inalienable right of all people to live a life of liberty as endowed by our Creator. We can…. and we must… persevere with great hope and urgency praying for the conversion and restoration of our great Country and for the conversion and the salvation of all souls to Jesus through Mary.
Lastly, let us assist at this Holy Mass for the many transgressions against our Country and her faithful people, that one day soon we will see the dawn of a new day when this solemn day of remembrance for our Nation under God will once again be universally understood and respected, protected and defended as our Nation’s 2nd President, John Adams once wrote and prophesied: “I am apt to believe that [our Independence] will be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized from one end of this Continent to the other from this time forward forever more.”
And so let us pray:
Grant, we pray, O Heavenly Father, a clear and united voice to all your sons and daughters gathered in your Church in this decisive hour in the history of our Nation, so that, with every trial withstood and every danger overcome …for the sake of our children, our grandchildren, and all who come after us …this great land will always be “one Nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
July 2017