We Hold These Truths

In 1960 a Catholic theologian wrote an insightful book about America, and as I was reading through it came across a very timely paragraph.

As you read it, keep in mind what many Catholics have called the protestanization of Catholicism since Vatican II, and liberal reaction to the Iraq War:

“The third source of Protestant moral anxiety is the problem of power. The practical problem, as put to policy, is enormously complicated in the nuclear age, in the midst of a profound historical crisis of civilization, and over against an ideology of force that is also a spreading political imperialism. This, however, is surely no reason for distorting the problem by thrusting into it a set of theoretically false dilemmas—by saying, for instance, that to use power is prideful and therefore bad, and not to use it is irresponsible and therefore worse. The tradition of reason declines all such reckless simplism. It rejects the cynical dictum of Lenin that “the state is a club.” On the other hand, it does not attempt to fashion the state in the image of an Eastern-seaboard “liberal” who at once abhors power and adores it (since by him, emergent from the matrix of American Protestant culture, power is unconsciously regarded as satanic). The traditional ethic starts with the assumption that, as there is no law without force to vindicate it, so there is no politics without power to promote it. All politics is power politics—up to a point.” (John Courtenay Murray, S.J. (1960) We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. New York: Sheed and Ward. p. 288)

The American proposition is that all are created equal, a situation existing nowhere else on earth, certainly not within the monarchies that governed virtually everywhere else where no one was equal to royalty.

The Ameerican proposition became a global phenomena—the beckoning of the new world—most strongly felt and lived during the California Gold Rush, when The World Rushed In.