As our country celebrates its 245th birthday this weekend, it’s good for us to remember what our Faith has to say about public life and our role in society as Christian believers.  Our Faith teaches us that the role of the state is to defend and promote the common good.  To protect what is actually good for us.  To ensure the freedom necessary for each person to be able to flourish, to establish a successful family life, to do good and to avoid evil.  Our country is the context and the framework within which we do that.  And this is the purpose of law in society.  It would be bad for us, both individually and collectively, if someone could just commandeer your house or your car or your child with no consequences. It would be bad for the common good if it were possible to drive 90 miles an hour up 2nd Avenue.  So the state provides the legal means to prevent those kinds of things from happening, things that would be harmful to people and to the common good.  Just laws protect the common good this way.  Society has various tools and programs to protect the common good and give us the freedom to do great things with our lives: what the church refers to as pursuing “integral human development.” 

Patriotism is a virtue; extreme nationalism is not.  We should love our homeland.  But, no country is perfect; no human society is perfect.  This is not heaven, and we shouldn’t expect it to be.  There are ways that our own country has been inadequate at protecting the common good, in various different ways over these 245 years.  But we rightly give thanks for what we have.  For the incredible freedoms and opportunities that have been guaranteed to us, including religious liberty which the Church teaches is a natural right: defined in the Catechism as “immunity, within just limits, from external constraint in religious matters by political authorities.”  We have this right because religion cannot be separated from life, either in theory or in reality.  Separation of Church and State in our country is a good thing: it protects faithful people, at least it should, from being coerced by the government into actions which we know would be unacceptable.  It also protects us from being conscripted into a national religion against our will, which is particularly important to Catholics of British and Irish heritage.  It also prevents the Church from getting too comfortable in society, which always creates danger of corruption and watering down of the gospel.  This healthy insulation doesn’t mean that religion has nothing to do with civic life.  Quite the contrary in fact, because Faith is not just the way we choose to worship.  It’s a whole system of how we look at the world and at the human person.  And so, as long as there’s even one person who’s both a faithful Catholic and a proud American, Church and State will never be truly separate, because they come together in the heart of every person who is both a patriotic American citizen and a sincere Catholic believer. 

Pope John Paul said that “authentic democracy is only possible in a state ruled by law, on the basis of a correct idea of the human person…If there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power.  As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.”  So, it’s not just that being in America is convenient for living the Catholic Faith, because we’re not legally required to be Anglicans, or whatever.  Catholics should be the best Americans.  We have no excuse not to be.  Because we have received so much in our faith and our tradition to know what truly makes a human person flourish, what truly leads to deep and abiding personal fulfillment, what truly is good for one and all.  We should be unmatched in our virtue of realistic patriotism.  How do we do that?  We’re should pray for those who govern us.  We should pay our taxes, and vote, and be involved in activities that promote the common good; we’re called to be active in the world and we’re called to do what we can to protect and promote human dignity, for all, beyond our own particular self-interest.  We don’t forget about people, even those who are not right in front of us.  We don’t forget about the poor, we don’t forget about those in prison, or those in the womb, or those otherwise hidden from the view of the world.  We’re ready to sacrifice our own comfort and convenience for the sake of the common good. 

We believe that our true and lasting citizenship is in heaven.  The greatest passport that we bear is the indelible mark of baptism on our soul.  And we live for heaven.  But in the meantime, while we are here on this earth, we commit to do what we can, both individually and together, to promote and foster the common good of all, especially those whom the Lord has placed in our lives, and those who are most forgotten and vulnerable.  And so, on this day, may our invocation be: America, America, God mend thine every flaw.  Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.