On the semiquincentennial of the United States’s birth, the virtue of patriotism has received renewed discussion in the public square. Just what is patriotism? And what does it mean for a Catholic to be a patriot?
Patriotism can be defined as a kind of loyalty, specifically a loyalty to one’s country and all that entails. This conception of patriotism can be traced back to the ancient natural law tradition, for loyalty expresses an aspect of what Cicero called pietas. Pietas, Cicero contended, was the root of duty to one’s own, one’s parents and family, and one’s countrymen. While Cicero affirmed the brotherhood of all men and duties of piety to the gods, he suggested that a special love of the republic was required, and even that it was an all-encompassing love.
Love of the gods and love of the republic were practically speaking loves enfolded upon one another for the ancient Romans. Consider one of the greatest acts of patriotic virtue remembered by the Romans and lauded by Cicero, that of the sacrifice of Marcus Regulus. Regulus, a captured prisoner of the Punic Wars, swore an oath to the Carthaginians to return should he fail to convince the Senate to release high value Carthaginian prisoners of war. But when Regulus arrived, he argued against their release, in the name of the good of the Republic. Then, contrary to the pleadings of his wife, children, and friends, he returned to Carthage where he was brutally tortured to death. (He was apparently made to stand in a narrow box surrounded by nails and was sleep-deprived to death.) Cicero praises this extraordinary act of patriotism as the most praiseworthy and heroic in the annals of Roman virtue. And, as Cicero points out, while the sacredness of Regulus’s oath derived from being witnessed by the gods, the moral quality of the act derived from its service to the republic. In other words, in the ancient pagan vision, religious piety was placed in service of the state.
The most famous Greek parallel to the example of Regulus’s sacrifice was the extraordinary defense of Greece against Xerxes’s invasion mounted by Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. When Leonidas’s wife Gorgo tells him in the film 300, “Come back with your shield, or on it,” the film authentically expresses the Spartan ideal of patriotism. Surrender was not an option, and the highest form of virtue was to die for Sparta in battle. On the other hand, the film’s portrayal of religion—the ruling ephors as lecherous, “diseased old mystics,” and Leonidas as a rational skeptic—is a Hollywood distortion of the Spartan way. Leonidas marched to Thermopylae with only 300 out of respect for the national religious feast in honor of Apollo, the Carneia, not in spite of it. In reality, for the Spartans and Romans alike, religious and civic duty were two sides of the same coin.
American patriotism has always had an essentially aspirational component, of loyalty to what America could be and seeking to advance beloved ideals like equal justice for all.
Yet, as Augustine argued in the City of God, reckoning with stories like those of Regulus and Leonidas presents a conundrum for the pagan. For the worship offered to the gods was based on a divine patronage theory of the city, namely, that devotion to the patron gods of the city was rewarded with divine protection and temporal blessings. What greater religious act of devotion to the republic could be conceived of than Regulus’s—and yet he personally died a most painful death. Why didn’t the god or gods of Rome intervene to save a man of such great piety? A similar question could be asked about why Apollo, patron god of Sparta, did not intervene to save Leonidas and his 300 Spartans.
Moreover, Augustine contended that even the greatest pagan heroes aped true virtue, for it was a love of glory that predominated in their souls, a misdirected self-love.
In short, ancient patriotism needed a corrective, which Christianity provided. The highest love and source of all true virtue is the love of God who so loved man he sent his son to redeem them. That love is an architectonic love, superintending all of the “lower” loves, including the love of country. Charity is not and cannot be identified with the love of country or kingdom, for the heavenly kingdom Christ inaugurated is “not of this world” (John 18:36). At the same time, Christ mandated due respect for Caesar’s power to tax and commended the faith of the centurion, who we can presume performed his military duties to Rome (Matt 22:21; 8:5-13). Paul taught that lawful authorities derive their authority to bind in conscience from God (and Peter added the caveat that the power of the civil authority to bind does not extend to violation of God’s laws) (Romans 13:1-7; Acts 5:29).
Hence, Thomas Aquinas clarified that the virtue of pietas is most fundamentally rooted in the relationship of men to God, from whom all being and existence derive. The order of piety flows from the indebtedness one has for one’s being from God, country, and parents. Hence, the specification of piety in relationship to country, what we call patriotism, is a relationship of justice. It is the respect, honor, and loyalty owed to one’s polity as a debt for the benefits it has bestowed. The well-functioning polity is the source of extensive blessings, a range of background conditions for the pursuit of happiness, like security of one’s person from external and internal threats, facilitation of movement of persons and goods within and without the polity, enforcement of contracts and just laws, and provision of education and a minimum social safety net, to name just a few. To grow up in (or choose to immigrate to) such a polity thus entails a baseline duty of patriotism—love of and loyalty to one’s polity—as a requirement of justice.
A Catholic patriot’s love of his country, inasmuch as it is undergirded by his love of God, burns the brighter and truer.
The meaning of loyalty to one’s polity obviously varies according to the nature of one’s country. We can speak of a country’s “matter”—the actual people who make it up—and so a special love of one’s countrymen is an aspect of patriotism. We can also speak of a country’s “form” or the kind of political order it is. For Americans, they are uniquely bound together by the form of a constitutional republic, a constitutional form defined by a set of moral propositions (those outlined in the Declaration of Independence) and a fundamental higher written law expressing the terms of their life together (the original Constitution and its Amendments). So American patriotism means loyalty to one’s fellow Americans and our basic ideals and institutions.
From the Founding forward, there was a question of whether Catholic Americans could be both faithful and patriotic. On an incompatibilist view, America was a fundamentally Protestant and/or a modern liberal state, which affirmed principles of liberty contrary to Catholic doctrine. I have personally noticed a real decline in patriotic feeling in recent years among some younger traditional Catholics, who have bought into narratives that the American founding was a project that was radically subversive of traditional faith.
I have argued elsewhere why I think such narratives misunderstand the Founding. I will not belabor those arguments here. I would only point out that there is a lot of evidence of the influence of Christian ideas on not only the (big C) American Constitution but also the (small c) constitutional order and its patriotic customs. To take just one example: Our Pledge of Allegiance broadly reflects the Christian corrective of pagan patriotism by placing our love of country under God.
It is also noteworthy that for nearly two hundred years before the Second Vatican Council, Catholics in fact have been lovers of their country. From Charles and Daniel Carroll (signers of the Declaration and Constitution, respectively), to American saints Elizabeth Ann Seton and Katharine Drexel, to public intellectuals and social reformers like Orestes Brownson and Dorothy Day, to bishops like John Ireland and Fulton Sheen, to military officers like Union General Philip Sheridan in the Civil War and first Chief of Naval Operations during WWI Admiral William S. Benson, and judges and statesmen like Chief Justice Roger Taney and Governor Al Smith: Catholic Americans have expressed a love for country tutored by their Catholic faith. Indeed, as their stories illustrate, a Catholic patriot’s love of his country, inasmuch as it is undergirded by his love of God, burns the brighter and truer.
The history of Catholic American patriotism also illustrates how healthy patriotism is not mere rah-rah jingoism that ignores American injustices or mere reverence of the status quo. As political theorist Steven Smith has correctly pointed out, American patriotism has always had an essentially aspirational component, of loyalty to what America could be and seeking to advance beloved ideals like equal justice for all. In this respect, American Catholics have had a unique capacity and responsibility to love their countrymen, for willing the genuine good of one’s neighbor requires knowledge of the truth.
Catholic patriotism doesn’t merely consist in loving America as she could be in the abstract. It consists in working to bring it about through sacrificial gift-love of one’s fellow Americans. Indeed, some of the most admirable advances in equal opportunities for marginalized Americans were the fruit of American Catholics’ love of their countrymen. For example, St. Katharine Drexel showed that “patriotism” was not the preserve of the KKK when she defied them and built Xavier University, which provided the opportunity for black Americans to pursue higher education. And one’s commitment to the dogmas of the Catholic faith did not mean one could not take the oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, as New York governor and 1928 democratic presidential nominee Al Smith argued when critics contended he could not be loyal to America as a faithful Catholic.
Nor does Catholic patriotism forfend the Catholic’s right and duty to criticize the actions of one’s government when she perceives them to be contrary to the natural moral law. Such was the conscientious conviction of Dorothy Day when she criticized Truman’s authorization of the use of nuclear weapons.
Each generation of American Catholics in our history has had distinct struggles, combined with unique opportunities, to express their love of country. On our 250th anniversary, American Catholics should be proud of their country and how much their predecessors have contributed to making it worthy of our love.