How Catholic is the Declaration of Independence?

What has come to be called the American Catholic Revival of the 1920s can be closely linked to the experience of U.S. Catholics in World War I. Crucial to this new spirit was the creation of the National Catholic War Council, which became in 1919 the National Catholic Welfare Council (and still later the National Catholic Welfare Conference). A national headquarters and a staff, located in Washington, D.C., not only gave the church a more effective voice in public affairs, it also enhanced Catholic visibility, serving notice that a new era of purposeful Catholic participation in American life was about to begin. These developments had a tonic effect on Catholic morale and, following the shared experience of wartime mobilization, reinforced the sense of emotional solidarity with, and responsibility for, the nation.

The earliest manifestations of the Catholic Revival took the form of a new kind of Catholic Americanism, one drawing on new intellectual resources. he most important of these was neoscholastic social and political theory. Neoscholasticism came into prominence through what was then called "the social question" and the work of Monsignor John A. Ryan, the outstanding exponent and popularizer of "papal social teaching," which Leo XIII had laid out on the basis of Thomistic natural-law principles. Ryan's progressivism constituted a positive point of contact between the neoscholastic tradition and the reform impulse that coursed so strongly through American society in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC), in which Ryan played a leading role, gave him an official platform underlining the links between progressive Americanism and neoscholastic Catholicism.

A much more obvious link with Americanism, especially in the context of World War I, was the claim that the roots of democracy and constitutionalism were to be found in medieval scholasticism, an argument that became a distinguishing feature of Catholic Americanism in the 1920s.

The compatibility of American and Catholic principles had, of course, been affirmed since the days of John Carroll, the first American bishop. Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker, among others, had gone beyond simple affirmation by offering reasonable arguments to support the claim of compatibility. What was new in the era of World War I was an emphasis on the virtual identity of Scholastic and American political principles. The first landmark in this line of interpretation was Gaillard Hunt's "The Virginia Declaration of Rights and Cardinal Bellarmine" (Catholic Historical Review, 1917), which pointed out the similarity of language between the Declaration of Independence and certain writings of Robert Bellarmine, S.J. (a prominent figure in the Counter-Reformation revival of Thomism). The article naturally attracted attention, since the idea that Thomas Jefferson could have derived his ideas from such a source seemed startling even to Catholics and outlandish to everyone else. Although subsequently dismissed as propagating a "Bellarmine-Jefferson legend," the article itself was not extravagant in its claims, and the general line of interpretation toward which it pointed was in keeping with the best contemporary scholarship on medieval and early modern political thought.

Hunt argued that a passage from Bellarmine, which Jefferson might have read in Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, provided a better short statement of the doctrines enunciated in the Declaration of Independence than any other work of political theory available to him. Hunt acknowledged that there was no direct evidence that Jefferson had read the passage, much less that he consciously drew upon it in formulating the rationale for colonial rejection of royal authority. But the hypothesis that he had at least read it was plausible since Filmer was a major figure in the tradition of English political thought, and Jefferson's library contained a copy of Patriarcha.

Hunt was a Catholic convert of patrician stock whose opinion on America's revolutionary origins counted for something since he enjoyed high repute as a scholar for his biographies of James Madison and John C. Calhoun and as the editor of Madison's writings. When Hunt wrote the Bellarmine article he was chief of the manuscript division of the Library of Congress and was engaged on the mammoth project of editing the journals of the Continental Congress. For such a man to propose a Catholic source for American republicanism--and to do so in the sixth month of the nation's wartime crusade for democracy--could not but fill American Catholics with pride and make them more certain than ever that their religious and national loyalties fit harmoniously together.

Other articles soon followed, developing the same line of interpretation. The most influential did not focus exclusively on the Bellarmine-Jefferson question, but argued the broader thesis that medieval and Counter-Reformation Catholic thinkers made important contributions to the evolution of modern constitutional theory. Most of this literature was strongly polemical, and many writers no doubt overstated their case. But the broader contention--that the political philosophy of the Founding Fathers drew on the tradition of natural law and limited government to which the medieval Scholastics and Counter-Reformation Jesuits made important contributions--was clearly warranted by the best contemporary scholarship.

In his History of Freedom in Christianity, first published in 1907, Lord Acton quoted Thomas Aquinas on the need to ground political authority in popular consent, on the right of the people to overthrow an unjust ruler, and on several other points of like import, and then observed: "This language...contains the earliest exposition of the Whig theory of the revolution...." The same year, John Neville Figgis acknowledged that "the original sovereignty of the people" was a "cardinal doctrine of the Jesuit thinkers," and was more heavily emphasized by them "than by Protestant controversialists" of the Counter-Reformation era. In 1918, Charles H. McIlwain of Harvard took note of the extent to which the English Protestant dissenters silently made use of Jesuit arguments in their contest with the Stuart kings of England. Not long thereafter, Ernest Barker went even further:

"Saint Thomas--like the clerical thinkers of the Middle Ages in general--is a Whig; he believes in popular sovereignty, popular institution of monarchy, a pact between king and people, and the general tenets of Locke. It was not idly that Sir Robert Filmer wrote that `this tenent [sic] was first hatched in the schools [i.e., by medieval Scholastics], and has been fostered by all succeeding papists for good divinity."

The American Catholic writer who made this line of interpretation his specialty was Moorhouse F. X. Millar, S.J., a convert of Scottish and old American background. Millar began to write on these matters during the war years. He served as chairman of the graduate department of political philosophy and social science at Fordham between 1929 and 1953. Among Millar's strongest statements of the continuity between medieval and early modern Catholic political principles and those of the American republic were three chapters he contributed to The State and the Church (1922), a volume that he coauthored with John A. Ryan for the social action department of the NCWC. In 1928, when the Al Smith campaign made Catholic civic loyalty a burning issue, Millar brought out a collection of his earlier articles denying that the nation owed its liberty to Protestantism, and elaborating instead the linkages between the American system and the political traditions of the Catholic Middle Ages. Although he was better known for his neoscholastic socioeconomic commentary, Ryan also expounded the medieval-roots-of-democracy thesis in dealing with the issue of Wilsonian self-determination in the winter of 1918-19 and of Catholic civic loyalty in 1928.

The medieval lineage of democracy was so well established among educated American Catholics that in 1926 Michael Williams, the editor of Commonweal, cited Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., editor of America, as the authority for asserting "that it is from Saint Thomas Aquinas and the political theories of the Catholic Middle Ages that the American political tradition derives. The founders of the republic took their political thought from the English Whigs of the eighteenth century, who themselves took it directly from the writings of the Jesuit theologians, Suarez and Ballarmine [sic], who took it from Saint Thomas--and the thought of Saint Thomas has been sealed with the approval of the church."

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."

For many Catholics today, claims of this sort are embarrassing specimens of triumphalism--or perhaps evidence of something worse: capitulation to American nationalism. While understandable, such reactions fall far short of an adequate appreciation of the situation as it then existed. To do justice to that situation, we must remember several points, the first of which is that there was genuine merit to the argument that Scholastic political principles formed an important element in the "higher law" background of American constitutional thought. Catholics naturally felt that this dimension of the American heritage deserved recognition, and they were hurt and offended by its being dismissed as "legendary."

Second, affirming the congruence of Catholic natural-law theory with the basic principles of the national polity was not the same as accepting superpatriotic "Americanism" in an uncritical way. On the contrary, it enabled Catholics to counterpose their own interpretation of the national tradition against others with which they disagreed. This is precisely what they did from the 1920s, when disagreement focused on the extension of federal power over education and family matters, to the 1950s, when John Courtney Murray, S.J., marshaled natural-law arguments in favor of public support for Catholic parochial schools.

Third, it is important to keep in mind the timing of this historical recovery of the Scholastic-roots-of-democracy theory. The theory was broached in the midst of a great war in which Catholics were swept up in the prevailing patriotic fervor, and it was popularized while the nation was being shaken by the most powerful eruption of anti-Catholic feeling since the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s. Moreover, the Ku Klux Klan, which portrayed itself as the last bulwark of true Americanism, denied precisely what was at issue in the theory--the credibility of Catholics' claims to be devoted to American principles.

It is also interest, though no doubt merely coincidental, that a Klan stronghold like Indiana seems to have been the only state to witness a violent confrontation between Catholic collegians and members of the Klan. The episode was precipitated when students from Notre Dame broke up a regional KKK rally and parade in South Bend on May 17, 1924. Two days later, violence flared briefly a second time as the students marched on the local Klan headquarters in response to rumors that one of their number was being mistreated there. An emotional appeal by Notre Dame president Matthew J. Walsh, C.S.C., persuaded the students to return to campus before the second episode of violence got completely out of hand.

The intensity of anti-Catholic feeling embodied in the Ku Klux Klan, along with widespread questioning in more genteel circles of Catholic's commitment to American principles, constitute the background against which we must situate both the emergence of the theory and the extravagant claims its popularization encouraged about "the blessed harmony" that always had and always would exist "between the spirit of the Catholic church and the spirit of the United States of America."