Tea at Trianon: Our Dear-Bought Liberty

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, December 5, 2021

Our Dear-Bought Liberty

From Catholic World Report:

In such a moment, Michael D. Breidenbach has published Our Dear-Bought Liberty, an informative and complicated history about the role of Catholics in the founding of the United States that is bound to strike many readers as, at best, untimely. Just over a decade ago, when Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel were all three still campaigning, in the pages of First Things and beyond, for a modern regime in which liberal democracy found ballast in a pluralistic but religious public square, Breidenbach’s history of the Calvert and Carroll families would have made a welcome, if chastening, case for the compatibility of Catholicism and the American republic.

But does anyone wish to hear such a case today?

Much of the American Church has already so cloistered its religious beliefs in a shabby room off the back of the house of their lives that revisiting the question of Catholicism in America may seem an irrelevancy. If the Church has not yet come to accept one secular notion or another, then theologian Massimo Faggioli is there to say that it will do so soon enough according to the trademarked spirit of Vatican II. Meanwhile, those who look with discontent on what has resulted from the Church’s attempt to be informed by modern culture rather than to reform that culture, will greet with a raised eyebrow the news that Catholics played a role in the founding of the American republic, and specifically in its principle of religious freedom. In doing so, as it happens, they will have much of the Church’s orthodox tradition on their side.

Let us set aside for the moment how Breidenbach’s book might be received and consider what it actually says. Many American Catholics have thought of their place in national history the way the convert Orestes Brownson once did. The United States were founded on natural law principles, more those derived from John Locke than Thomas Aquinas, but, nonetheless, on such modest foundations something genuinely just could be constructed. Our Protestant founding fathers “built wiser than they knew,” wrote Brownson, and that judgment has been echoed by many since, including the late Russell Kirk and Peter Augustine Lawler.

Such a “crypto-Catholic” story of the founding presumes that the natural law principles inscribed in our Constitution require only completion, a fleshing-out, with the richer thought of Aquinas and Catholic social teaching, in order for America to fulfill its promise as a wholly just, not to say properly Catholic, political order. Catholic immigrants to the United States have the cultural and doctrinal resources to enrich and give direction to the American project so as to bring about the realization of that promise. The most celebrated advocate of this vision is of course John Courtney Murray, who advised John F. Kennedy during his presidential campaign and played a significant role in the crafting of Vatican II’s declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humane (1965). (Read more.)

Also from Catholic World Report:

From a Catholic perspective, the conflict around education raises historical questions and reveals a certain historical short-sightedness. How did we get here? The historian can only answer that we are, in some sense, right where we have been from the beginning of public education in America. Have school boards always been at war with parents? Not directly. The original combatants were school boards and churches, most especially the Catholic Church, which at the beginning of public education in the United States struck most Protestants as the single greatest threat to American democracy.

The very existence of public schools has perhaps never fit comfortably with the American ideal of democratic self-sufficiency. The Founders certainly believed in the need for an educated citizenry, but as suffrage was restricted to a propertied (and educated) elite in the first decades of the republic, there was no need for widespread public education; educated men of property were self-sufficient by virtue of their education and property.

The difficulties began when those property restrictions fell away: with the unwashed masses able to vote, what would become of the great work of the Founders? Some, call them Jacksonian Democrats, believed that the average man was gifted by God and/or Nature with all of the qualities needed to be a politically responsible citizen. Others, call them Whigs, were not so sure. The political descendants of the old Federalist wing of the Founding generation, Whigs insisted that the common man needed education in order to be a responsible citizen—with “responsible,” of course, meaning someone who would see eye-to-eye with Whigs on the great political issues of the day. Education has thus been a matter of politics from the very start.

It was, moreover, a matter of religion. The disestablishment clause of the First Amendment had bequeathed a tradition of religious pluralism to the new nation. The overwhelmingly rural character of early American society brought with it a geographic dispersion that allowed the various religious groups to keep at a peaceable distance. Increasing urbanization, along with proposals for a common, public school system, threatened to break this peace. (Read more.)