Bishop Barron addresses the US Embassy to the Holy See on the Catholic foundations of American democracy
Bishop Robert Barron delivers a formal address at the US Embassy to the Holy See, exploring the deep compatibility between Catholic thought and the principles of the American founding.
Summary
Bishop Robert Barron, speaking at the US Embassy to the Holy See in Rome — coinciding with his visit to ordain deacons at the North American College — delivers a scholarly address on the occasion of America's 250th anniversary. He argues that the foundational principles of American democracy, including equality, human rights, freedom, religious liberty, and limited government, are not merely Enlightenment constructs but are deeply rooted in biblical and Catholic intellectual tradition. Drawing on Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Aquinas, Pope John Paul II, and historian Tom Holland, Barron contends that the Catholic tradition and the American political experiment are far more compatible than is commonly assumed. He acknowledges the post-liberal critique — that American founding philosophy is grounded in Hobbesian individualism rather than the Catholic sense of the common good — but sets it aside as a subject for another occasion, choosing instead to celebrate the points of convergence in this anniversary year.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome and Introduction
Host: It is therefore a tremendous honor to welcome a bishop whose pastoral vision reaches from parish to the university, from the great cathedrals of the world to the screens of millions of people, and from the treasures of the Catholic tradition to the great cultural conversations of our time — and this morning to the United States Embassy to the Holy See. Please join me in warmly welcoming Bishop Robert Barron.
Opening Remarks
Bishop Barron: Well, thank you all. Good morning to everybody. Ambassador Burch, thank you for that beautiful introduction and thank you for this invitation. We had talked for some time about doing something to celebrate America 250 in relation to Catholicism, and I mentioned I was going to be here to ordain deacons at the North American College — that's tomorrow. So we thought this was a propitious time, and what an honor to be in this wonderful place. Thank you for arranging this, and thanks everyone for being here today.
I speak to you today as both a proud American and a proud bishop of the Catholic Church, and I stand with those who see no essential or fundamental tension between these two identities. To be sure, Catholicism and America have had a somewhat rocky relationship over the past two and a half centuries, and their rapport has been variously interpreted. But I do indeed believe there's a deep compatibility that's worth celebrating in this anniversary year. So, without completely ignoring the points of demarcation, I should like to spend most of my time today exploring points of contact.
Abraham Lincoln carefully added the phrase "under God" to the Gettysburg Address when he was actually delivering the speech — "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom." We know this because the earliest written versions prepared in advance do not have the phrase. What was it that prompted our greatest president to add these words? Was it simply intended as pious decoration, or did it signal something of central importance? I believe that Lincoln intuited, even as he gave his most significant speech, that this theological addition was crucial to the point he was trying to make about our country. He knew that God is essential to any coherent account of democracy, freedom, equality, and limited government. And I want to explore those connections now.
Equality and Human Rights
So first, equality and human rights. Let's go back to the very beginning of our country, to the event whose anniversary we celebrate this year. A young Virginia lawyer is laboring over a particular document in that hot summer of 1776 in Philadelphia. In the prologue to that document, he says — and it's almost a sacred text for Americans:
"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."
We can hear, of course, the tones of the Enlightenment here in the appeal to self-evident truths, but we also hear the tones of the Bible. It should be obvious to anybody that we human beings are rather dramatically unequal in size, intelligence, strength, virtue, creativity, and so on. In point of fact, this very inequality was taken as axiomatic in the classical political philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and their sense of justice was predicated upon it. If you suggested to any of these ancient worthies that all people are equal, they would have been, to say the least, puzzled.
So what changed? What changed was the arrival of biblical religion and its keen sense that all people are indeed created equal. Many attempts have been made to ground our equality and rights in something other than our createdness. For example, some have said that we're equal in our capacity for reason and speech. But doesn't this leave out infants, the unborn, those whose minds have been impaired through disease? Some have said that we're equal in our capacity for free choice. But again, by this criterion, many would be left out. The only finally coherent way we can speak of equality is by appealing, as Jefferson did, to the Creator. We are all equally children of God.
Let's take a closer look at the question of rights. Was it a commonplace of classical political thought that all people are subjects of inalienable rights? Well, hardly. For Plato, only a small elite core of guardians is capable of leadership and would be the subject of rights and privileges. Similarly, Aristotle held that the vast majority of people are incapable of public life. Women, children, slaves, the uneducated, the propertyless — these would have no rights or political prerogatives. Instead, they'd be in the private realm under the tutelage and control of a paterfamilias, in a pre-political state.
So what changed? The obvious answer is the emergence of the Christian gospel. If we are continually being created by a God who loves us, then it makes perfect sense to speak of rights — indeed of inalienable rights — that inhere in each individual. And doesn't Thomas Jefferson make this as plain as possible when he specifies "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights"?
It is of course extremely instructive to attend to what happens to both equality and rights when the existence of God is set aside or even aggressively denied. See what happened to both in the atheist totalitarianisms of the last century if you doubt me. The recently blessed Fulton J. Sheen said memorably that the Declaration of Independence is also "a declaration of dependence upon God."
I find it extremely instructive in this context to consult the work of the historian Tom Holland, whose book Dominion lays out the inescapably Christian foundations of the liberal democracies of the West. Holland's central argument is that many of the values that we take uncritically to be simply universal or in accord with right reason have in fact come from a biblical sensibility. The best example he offers is the difference between the way Julius Caesar was morally assessed in the ancient world and how he'd be morally assessed today. Holland notes that Caesar was reported to have killed a million people in his conquest of Gaul, most of them innocent civilians — women and children — and to have enslaved more than a million more. But no one in ancient Rome was particularly bothered by this. In fact, his rampaging military success made him extremely popular. They might have quarreled with his personal ambition, but his bloodthirstiness was, if anything, a positive.
Why do we feel so differently about it? Holland's short answer — he develops it over many hundreds of pages — is Christianity and its ethic built around the central figure of a crucified man, a victim of powerful forces. Why did the killings in the Colosseum continue unabated until they were provocatively challenged by a Christian monk, St. Telemachus? The sea change effected by Christianity took time to work itself into Western consciousness and institutions, but its influence, it seems to me, is undoubtedly present in the Declaration of Independence.
Now, there's a criticism of the American founding that's been put forward by certain scholars of a post-liberal persuasion, and it's an important one. Their claim is that Jefferson's famous formulations are born not so much from the Bible as from the modern political philosophy that commenced with Thomas Hobbes and found more refined expression in John Locke. On this reading, rights are those things that we cannot not desire — namely life itself and those things essential to the maintenance of life, which are liberty and property, in Locke's famous formula. Hobbes does indeed say he has no interest in the idea of a moral good driving a society, or some summum bonum that politics is meant to serve. He wants not airy speculation but hard political science based upon what really motivates human beings. The Hobbesian theory of the social contract holds that individuals, protective of their own prerogatives and against the aggression of others, agree to surrender to a common authority. This has nothing to do, on Hobbes's reading, with any sort of natural sociability on the part of human beings. Just the contrary — politics for him is unnatural, artificial, the product of an agreed-upon compact of self-interested individuals. This represents a rupture with the classical sense of politics as natural, communitarian, and virtue-oriented. So instead of happiness as the goal of government, Jefferson gives us merely the pursuit of happiness, stressing the primacy of the individual and his desires.
Now, in the confines of this brief paper, I can hardly do justice to this criticism or mount anything like an adequate response to it. But permit me to draw attention to the extremely deft manner in which Pope St. John Paul II employed the rights language of our founding for moral purposes. Instead of grounding rights in individual desire, John Paul II grounds them in human dignity — made in the image and likeness of God and therefore subsisting as a subject of infinite dignity. Each human being has the right to life, freedom, especially religious freedom (I'll come back to that), health, happiness, and so on. Government accordingly does not grant and cannot remove such rights. On the contrary, government exists to support them. During his first trip to the US as pope in 1979, John Paul praised our country for its commitments to human rights, but defined in the theological, not the Hobbesian, way.
Now, how close is John Paul's reading of rights to the minds of the founders? Many have argued that Jefferson, far more influenced by John Locke than by Thomas Aquinas, would not have recognized the Pope's articulation of the theme. But I wonder whether Jefferson's unabashedly theological language doesn't at least imply a strong connection to the classical tradition. Moreover, like all the other founders, Jefferson would have read the Anglican divine Richard Hooker, who strongly influenced Locke and was himself deeply influenced by the medieval scholastics, especially in his political thinking. We also know, by the way, that Robert Bellarmine — at least some of his books were in Jefferson's library. How fully he would have imbibed Bellarmine we don't know, but he had his books.
But more basically, doesn't Jefferson's emphasis upon happiness give away the game? Like anyone classically trained in the 18th century, Jefferson would have known that happiness in the true sense — and not just gladness or superficial contentment — is necessarily related to virtue. Indeed, this is the opening argument of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. All men desire happiness. Happiness is activity of soul in accord with perfect virtue. Virtue is acquired through habit, and habit is shaped by the dictates of the law. Therefore, to speak of the pursuit of happiness is not to succumb to Hobbesian subjectivism, but to open the soul to the virtuous pursuit of beatitude.
Freedom
Next, I want to look at freedom. Why is freedom so important to the American founders? Well, it's essential to human dignity. No one wants to be under the boot of someone else. No one wants to be oppressed or ignored. And if everyone has the dignity of a child of God, then everyone has a right to freedom. But there's more to it. Freedom is the condition for the possibility of love, and love is what makes us fully alive.
Remember in A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt's Thomas More says, "God made the plants for their simplicity and the animals for their innocence, but man he made to serve him witty in the tangle of his mind." He could have added: and in the decisions of his will. God could have made us automatons, but automatons are incapable of love. If you're forced to love, you're not really loving.
And this points to a deeper truth. There are two very distinct understandings of freedom, and the great Dominican moral theologian Servais Pinckaers has distinguished them with particular clarity. The first he calls freedom of indifference. This is the liberty to decide what I will do simply on the basis of my own private choice. It's arbitrary freedom — pure freedom of choice. It's what most people today understand by the term freedom, I would say. But the Bible and the classical tradition, and I would argue the founders of our country, had a different understanding of freedom. Pinckaers calls it freedom for excellence. This is not so much liberty of choice but rather the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good first possible and then effortless. Think here of the way in which someone becomes over time a free speaker of a language or a free player of a musical instrument. In both cases, the value of the language or the instrument works its way so thoroughly into the mind, heart, and indeed body of someone that it becomes second nature to him.
Now, on that first reading of freedom — freedom of indifference — law is at best a necessary evil, something accepted faute de mieux. But on the second reading, law is the friend of freedom, for it shapes desire in accord with the good. Might I submit that this is the kind of freedom that the founders are talking about? This is the freedom that Lincoln was extolling at Gettysburg and for the rebirth of which he was calling.
In the prologue to the Declaration, Jefferson also references "the laws of nature and of nature's God." Can we see how this reference to law is perfectly congruent with the emphasis on freedom, once we understand the kind of freedom that Jefferson is intending? What are the laws of nature to which Jefferson refers? Well, this is the ancient idea — repeated by the medieval scholastics and reverenced by the founders' teachers — that there are moral principles discoverable through reason and embedded in the very nature of human beings: life, friendship, play, knowledge, religion, and so on. These are the goods that order human freedom. Where do these values come from? They come, Jefferson insists, from nature's God. There's an eternal law that grounds the natural law that informs the positive law, which gives order to freedom. Thomas Aquinas, of course, saw the three types of law in a kind of Russian doll nesting relationship.
Now, lest this all sound too medieval, permit me to draw your attention to a piece of writing from one of the very greatest Americans — a man who stood in the late summer of 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and shared his dream of racial equality with America. A short time before that address, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a letter to a group of white Christian clergymen who were skeptical of his methods during the civil rights era, from the Birmingham City Jail where he was incarcerated. King wrote that he couldn't delay his protest, for he was fighting against unjust laws which amount finally to an affront against God. Listen now to what he said:
"One may well ask, how can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws, just and unjust. I'd be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws."
But then King contrasts this with obedience to an unjust law:
"Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all."
And in clarifying the difference, he turns to my great spiritual hero St. Thomas Aquinas:
"Now what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law."
That's Martin Luther King. What could be more American than King's letter, and what could be more redolent of the Catholic tradition? At the same time, he was an American political figure, but he was entirely inspired by the call to serve justice that he had received as a young man from God, and he saw clearly the link between freedom for his people and subservience to the law properly understood. There it seems to me he's perfectly in line with Jefferson.
Religious Liberty
Here's a third topic. A third major point of overlap between Catholicism and America is in regard to a particular type of freedom, namely religious liberty — a theme that's been a particular preoccupation of mine this past year.
The formulation of the First Amendment to our Constitution is an extraordinary accomplishment. I think James Madison's exquisite balance between the non-establishment of religion and the free exercise thereof opens up the space in which religion properly functions in American society. The American founders obviously did not want an established religion in the new republic. They knew from painful experience what the establishment of one religion would mean for the society as a whole, and they saw it as disruptive to both the civic order and the religions themselves. It would allow for the fullest range of freedom for any and all religions, and it would prevent the government from interfering with the inner life of any religious enterprise. More to it, it would preclude the possibility of any one religion using the state to coerce members of other religions.
Now, all this is perfectly congruent with the balancing clause to the effect that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. It's crucial to note that the term exercise implies the practicing of one's religion in the public sphere. The First Amendment is positively asserting that religion is not merely a matter of private conviction or the worship undertaken by like-minded people. It must be allowed to show up within the space of civil society — a principle that was taken for granted for the bulk of our national history.
As numerous commentators have indicated, it was just this understanding that was undermined in much of the relevant jurisprudence over the past roughly 75 years. A number of Supreme Court decisions invoking the infamous "wall of separation" mentioned by Jefferson in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 pressed against the presence of religion in any and all public environments. Happily, I would say more recent decisions of the High Court have pushed in the opposite direction, opening up a much more generous space for the free exercise of religion.
Now, though the story of the Church's assessment of religious liberty is a complex one, there's no question that in its recent magisterium the Catholic Church is explicitly and enthusiastically an advocate for just the kind of religious liberty called for in our First Amendment. An initial point of reference is the extraordinary speech given by Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore as he took possession of his titular church of Santa Maria in Trastevere on March 25th, 1887. To the surprise of many of his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, the cardinal pronounced a rousing endorsement of the American arrangement in matters of church and state. Here's a relevant quotation:
"I belong to a country where the civil government holds over us the aegis of its protection without interfering with us in the legitimate exercise of our sublime mission as ministers of the gospel of Christ. Our country has liberty without license and authority without despotism."
The new cardinal noted that, contrary to the dire predictions of many mid-19th century Catholics, the Church had flourished under the conditions set by the First Amendment. In 1909, Gibbons reiterated the central argument of his earlier speech:
"American Catholics rejoice in our separation of church and state, and I can conceive no combination of circumstances likely to arise which would make a union desirable to either church or state."
A second key point of reference here is the declaration on religious liberty issued by the fathers of the Second Vatican Council under the title Dignitatis Humanae. It's fair to say this was the most contested document of the council and the one that received the most negative votes from the fathers. Nevertheless, it was passed with an overwhelming majority. And since its chief architect was Father John Courtney Murray of the New York province of the Jesuits, it represents the first instance of American Catholic thought having a profound role in shaping the teaching of the universal magisterium.
It's interesting to note that one of the most vocal opponents of Dignitatis Humanae was Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, whose followers to this day contest it. Their central argument is that religious liberty conduces to religious indifferentism and even to a restriction upon Catholicism's right to proclaim the gospel publicly. But this is false. Here's what the Vatican II fathers meant by religious freedom:
"That all men should be sheltered from all constraint, whether on the part of individuals or of social groupings or any human power whatsoever, so that in religious matters no one should be compelled to act contrary to his conscience, nor prevented from acting within reasonable limits according to his conscience in private or in public."
And the fathers of Vatican II specify where this prerogative comes from:
"The right of religious liberty has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person, as this has been made known by the word of God and by reason itself."
The great Dominican theologian Yves Congar noted that Dignitatis Humanae, far from being an outlier, "represents the crowning point of a continuous movement from Leo XIII via Pius XI and above all Pius XII to John XXIII" — every one of whom more clearly and more resolutely pressed the claim of the dignity of the human person against regimes and other means of constraint.
A final point of reference here would be the magisterium of Pope John Paul II. It's likely that as bishop at the Second Vatican Council, Karol Wojtyła had a hand in the drafting of Dignitatis Humanae. It's certainly the case that upon becoming pope, he ardently defended the central teaching of that document. This quotation, taken from the World Peace Day message of 1988, is representative of John Paul's mind on the matter throughout his papacy:
"Religious freedom, an essential requirement of the dignity of every person, is a cornerstone of the structure of human rights and for this reason an irreplaceable factor in the good of individuals and the whole of society as well as the personal fulfillment of each individual. It follows that the freedom of individuals and communities to profess and practice their religion is an essential element for peaceful human coexistence. The civil and social right to religious freedom, in as much as it touches the most intimate sphere of the spirit, is a point of reference for the other fundamental rights and in some way becomes a measure of them."
That point I find very interesting in Wojtyła — John Paul II. Religious freedom was the cornerstone of human rights. The same thing is true in America: we refer to the First Amendment as the first freedom. I can't help but see a connection there between the primacy our founders gave to it and the primacy John Paul gives to it.
Limited Government
Okay, I'll do one more theme. So: equality, freedom, rights, religious liberty — and finally, the idea of limited government.
One of the most remarkable coincidences between Catholic teaching and the American founding is the insistence upon limited government. The roots of the Catholic conviction in this regard are biblical. Almost every other nation in the ancient world tended to deify its leaders. The kings of Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Assyria, and so on were typically apotheosized. The same obtained even in Republican Rome, at least at the end of its run. Julius Caesar upon his death was declared divine, which is why his adopted son Octavian Augustus bore the title Divi Filius — son of the god. What this deifying instinct accomplished, of course, was the totalizing and unquestioned authority of the leader. If he's simply a politician who can be voted out of office, his power is severely restricted. But if he's divine, then his pronouncements and actions are beyond criticism.
And then there's the Bible. Kingship is undoubtedly a pivotal theme in the scriptures, but the biblical authors insist again and again that kings are always under the authority of God. Pay close attention to the section of the First Book of Samuel that describes the people's desire for a king. The prophet conveys to them what this means, given the sinful human tendency to abuse power. This marvelous quote from 1 Samuel:
"These will be the ways of a king who will reign over you. He will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. He will appoint for himself commanders of thousands, commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. And in that day you will cry out because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you on that day."
I love that text. It's a great answer to the classical view of deifying political leaders. The Bible is egregious, it seems to me, in its impatience with that. And this is precisely why the prophets regularly rail against the kings of Israel for their corruption, their setting aside of the law, their idolatry, and especially their abuse of the poor. Consider here Elijah's confrontation with Ahab, Amos's prophecy against Jeroboam, Jeremiah's warning to Jehoiakim, Jonah's threat to the king of Nineveh, and perhaps most famously, Nathan's devastating rebuke of David. One would be hard-pressed indeed to read these stories and conclude that the Bible deifies political leadership. Every king, even the greatest and most beloved by God, is under the law of God.
In this context, it's fascinating to contemplate the conversation between Jesus and Pontius Pilate. When Pilate asserts that he has power to release Jesus or crucify him, the Lord calmly responds that Pilate would have no power unless it had been given to him from above. The point is that whatever legitimate authority Pilate exercises is conditioned by the moral absolutes grounded in the divine will.
Now, against the background of this biblical analysis, we more thoroughly understand the political writings of the Church's greatest theologian. Thomas Aquinas explores political matters in a number of texts in the Summa Theologiae, but his most concentrated examination occurs in a little-known late-career work entitled De Regno — concerning kingship. In accord with his teleological sensibilities, Aquinas holds that any congregation of human beings requires some mode of leadership:
"For in every multitude there must be a governing power."
What naturally follows is the question of the nature of this power. Would it best be exercised by a single person or by a group? Well, since the goal of any ruling authority is to — in Aquinas's language — procure the unity of peace, and since it's manifest that what is itself one can more efficaciously bring about unity than several, the rule of one man is more useful than the rule of many. Thomas bolsters this logical demonstration with the empirical observation that a governing force of many tends to fall into bickering and hence to require its own regulation. Finally, he observes that the ruling power ought to stand vis-à-vis the governed as the soul stands to the body and God to the world. Therefore, just as soul and God are one, so the governor of the political order should be one.
Well, this examination is logical enough, at least in the abstract, and in one form or another it certainly provided justification for the monarchies of Christendom until the modern period. But here's what I find really interesting in Aquinas — not so much that part of it, but the way in which he qualifies this conclusion. A king, a monarch, is indeed the best form of government, provided that he rule for the good of his people. If he reigns instead self-interestedly, using his power for his own advantage, his monarchy devolves into a tyranny, which is precisely the worst form of government. And so the managing of the menace of tyranny emerges as an almost obsessive preoccupation of the author of De Regno — so much so that I think he sounds at times like an 18th-century revolutionary. Here are some quotes from Aquinas:
"The dominion of a tyrant is the worst. Tyranny is more harmful than oligarchy. Therefore this kind of government — tyranny — is to be avoided. Keep far from the man who has the power to kill."
And: "Considering these ill effects of tyranny, King Solomon says: 'When the wicked reign, men are ruined' — and 'as a roaring lion or a charging bear, so is a wicked prince over his poor people.'"
And this is precisely why the great defender of monarchy in the abstract becomes in concreto a defender of what he calls mixed government — one that combines features of the kingly, the aristocratic, and the popular. The clearest presentation of this teaching is on offer not in De Regno but in Thomas's treatment of the Old Testament law in the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae. There he observes:
"A kingdom is the best form of government so long as it is not corrupt."
That's a big "so long as," right? It emphasizes:
"Since the power granted to a king is so great, it easily degenerates into tyranny unless he to whom the power is given be a very virtuous man."
And Thomas is sufficiently clear-eyed to know that such men are rare indeed, and so concludes that realistically speaking:
"The best form of government is in a state or kingdom where one is given the power to preside over all, while under him are others having governing powers, and yet a government of this kind is shared by all, both because all are eligible to govern and because the rulers are chosen by all."
Surprising from a medieval thinker, isn't it? The text to me is a most intriguing anticipation of the political provisions of the 18th-century political reformers. Within my own American frame of reference, I can recognize easily enough the play between chief executive officer — something like a king — the Senate — something like an aristocracy — and the House of Representatives, closest to the common will of the people. And I imagine many are surprised to hear a medieval scholastic speak so plainly of the eligibility of all for public office and of universal suffrage. Aristotle and Plato wouldn't dream of it, but there it is.
To justify the schema further, Thomas looks back to biblical history and finds a similarly tripartite arrangement: a king — Moses and his successors; an aristocracy — the 72 elders who advised Moses; and finally a kind of democracy, in the measure that the rulers were chosen from all the people.
Conclusion
So, a couple of words of conclusion. Given the great anniversary that the United States celebrates this year, I wanted to place special emphasis upon the points of contact between American political arrangements and Catholicism, and I hope I've persuasively argued that there are many such agreements.
But as I hinted above, there are many serious thinkers who would insist upon points of disagreement between Catholicism and the American sensibility. One thinks here again of the post-liberal criticism of the fundamentally liberal underpinnings of the American experiment — which is to say its grounding in the rights of the individual rather than in a robust sense of the common good. As some have put it, a typically modern government is protective rather than directive, conditioned still by Hobbes's bracketing of any consideration of the summum bonum in the political order. One might also remark that American political philosophy is conditioned by an individualism born more of Protestant anthropology, whereas Catholic political thought is more communitarian, born of the participation metaphysics of Aquinas. But all that would be subject for another paper, if you have me back again.
Given the remarkable points of concord between the Catholic and American political sensibilities, I can reiterate what I said at the outset: I stand before you today as both a proud bishop of the Catholic Church and a proud citizen of the United States. Thanks everybody for your attention today.