Catholic Republic, page 5
We 21st century Americans bear a share of the blame for forfeiting the house that the founders built, on account of our less-than-stellar vigilance. But this chapter and the next will show how there was a fundamental problem with the American understanding of the source of those rights—the Catholic Natural Law—evident even at the founding and framing, which led us here.
The Prot-Enlight founders failed to understand the rights they fought for (and eventually constitutionalized) as stemming from nature, which would have required a genuine, Catholic belief in the Natural Law. Such natural rights, of course, are the products of a Catholic Natural Law with which the young Prot-Enlight republic could not square itself!3
That is, the founders wanted natural rights without the source. They wanted to enshrine catholic (i.e., universal) liberty without acknowledging the doctrine of Catholic liberty. This cannot happen. Natural rights come only from the Natural Law; universal liberty too comes only from the Catholic view of free will.
Ultimately, only a Prot-Enlight, crypto-Catholic understanding of natural rights could have produced this convoluted American rights regime we see in the 21st century.4
Remember from the Introduction: America is that conspicuous republic wired Catholic, labeled Protestant, and currently functioning secular. Such a cover-up has brought about the devolution from a true to a false republic, a republic-in-name-only. Image perceived is image achieved: despite America’s mostly correct Catholic wiring, its Protestant self-labeling gradually changed the way it functioned.
America sees Martin Luther instead of Thomas Aquinas staring back in the mirror. It shouldn’t.
The Declaration’s Natural Rights Versus Modern Anti-Rights
Let’s get down to it: which American rights has the government taken from its citizens? The answer is comprehensive: government has inverted each of the rights described in the Declaration of Independence. Absolutely crucial to note here is their small number: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”5 The British violation of these three rights instigated the entire American Revolution. And by implication, we can tell that these three violations ought to prompt any just revolution anywhere (for reasons discussed at the very end of this chapter).
The 21st century American startles to hear that he has only three natural or true rights. His very surprise is a symptom of the problem. Not only has government taken and then fabricated three substitutes for our real rights, but to add extra garnish to the plate—to keep us from noticing the removed main course—more and ever more pseudo-rights were tossed our way. We now believe we have dozens of natural rights.
We do not.
The Declaration only lists three natural rights. Here’s the most certain checklist for failing republics-in-name-only. Just ask if the government protects:
The right of life;
The right of liberty (pursuing happiness6);
The right of private property.
That’s the test, which is quite simple.a And any honest, contemporary American response will yield “no” to all three questions. Moreover, what exists in each natural right’s place is a perfect anti-, or pseudo-right. Here’s why.
The Right of Life: As guaranteed by the Declaration, the right of life in modern America is dead on arrival. Presently, it is illegal for any one of the fifty states to uphold the right of life by outlawing abortion. The present abortion jurisprudence of Roe v. Wade (1973),7 Doe v. Bolton (1973),8 and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992)9 collectively requires all fifty American states to sanction and defend the legal murder of young humans. It’s that simple.
In other words, the pregnant mother presently holds a pseudo-right to abort which nullifies the natural right of life. This can be considered a “right to kill.” Think of it this way: not a single American person is conceived with a recognized right of life. Each of us “survived” pregnancy through either good fortune or good maternal choices, but not on account of the protection of life described in the Declaration, which is all but overthrown. Think about that grim fact as crowning evidence of America’s pseudo-republicanism.
By definition, a true republic must recognize and require the right of life.
The American right of life weakens regarding the end of life, as well. Two cases of such a pseudo-right, euthanasia and suicide, further illustrate our country’s fixation with death. Both of these are fast gaining popularity in the culture.
Recall our Indiana Jones analogy: the American right of life was not surreptitiously or furtively removed through Indy’s swift sleight of hand and carefully measured replacement. It was blithely inverted—stood on its head—and turned into an unmasked right of death.
In a parody of this exact scene, the comedy UHF portrays “Weird Al” Yankovic as Indy, carefully assessing the weight of the gold talisman, only to grow frustrated, impatiently shrug his shoulders, toss the bag of sand over his shoulder, and snatch the talisman without replacing its weight on the trap—open and unhidden theft far more like the government’s snatching of the right of life in America.
This is the first symptom that the United States is a republic-in-name-only. And it’s a big one, practically sufficient proof on its own. Just as American Colonists broke away on account of the British violations of the natural right of life, the same usurpation has come to pass under our own American watch.
Next is the right of liberty: In the infamous 1992 Supreme Court decision cited above,
Planned Parenthood versus Casey, upholding Roe versus Wade, Justice Kennedy wrote:
“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”10
According to Kennedy’s Enlightenment-styled mischaracterization of natural rights, a citizen may use his right of liberty to violate another’s right of life. Wrong!!
Clearly, the government and the popular culture in America have inverted the right of liberty, such that its common understanding is now liberty’s complete opposite: license. Whereas liberty, out of the Catholic tradition, is defined as the “freedom to pursue the good,” license is just freedom with no moral purpose (or constraints).
As if rebutting Justice Kennedy from 93 years before, Pope Leo XIII wrote:
These dangers, viz., the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world, have so wrapped minds in darkness that there is now a greater need of the Church’s teaching office than ever before, lest people become unmindful both of conscience and of duty.11
License, or freedom for its own sake, sounds much more like Justice Kennedy’s expression of American relativism. Commentators have long noted that this is just the difference between freedom directed (at a moral purpose) and freedom undirected—which more starkly shows the contrariety between the two terms. Liberty and license tend to sound more like synonyms.
Once more, the universal recognition of the right of liberty is a necessary condition of the true republic.12 As stated in the Introduction, republics comprise the one form of government aimed at Catholic Natural Law morality. When the true sense of liberty is absent, one should feel confident calling his country a republic-in-name-only.
Next up is the right to pursue happiness: Thomas Jefferson called this the third natural right in the Declaration. But as the reader may now see, the right to pursue happiness is actually the same thing as liberty. True happiness, as disclosed by the Catholic Natural Law, means fulfilling human existence by freely choosing the moral good.13 This should strike the reader as nearly identical in meaning to the true definition of liberty: freedom to pursue the good. In both the ancient Greek and the Catholic sense,b happiness and the good end up being the same thing.
Man is truly happy when he acts how God intended him to act—morally. But in a failing or a failed republic, populated by immoral people, the pursuit of happiness is misunderstood as the immoral pursuit of pleasure. (Moral cultures, by definition, do not allow immoral government. Plato wrote that “the penalty that good men pay for their indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by wicked men”14 who create such misdefinitions.)
Once again, pleasure-seeking is an utter misconception of liberty.
This does not mean that no one in America honors the higher sense of happiness. It just means that the popular understanding fails to do so.
Sometime after the founding era, American culture stood the natural right of pursuing of happiness (liberty) on its head, yielding the pseudo-right to pursue pleasure (license).
Perhaps now the reader can see the high degree of similarity between the two rights of liberty and pursuit of happiness. Both of these terms, when rightly understood, designate properly ordered freedom; license and the pursuit of pleasure designate, conversely, wrongly ordered freedom. For the remainder of this book, we will assume: Liberty=License; Pursuit of happiness=Pursuit of pleasure.
The takeaway principle is simply that true republics require citizens who pursue bona fide (moral) happiness, not just materialistic pleasure. A republic is a government of self-rule, after all. And it is a hopeless dream without a self-possessed, virtuous citizenry.
The Right of Private Property: The third and final right indispensable to republics is that of private property. This was John Locke’s third right, changed by Jefferson. A nation cannot be called a republic unless its government protects the private property of its citizens. In America, the current jurisprudence of private property, stemming from Kelo v. City of New London (2005),15 allows the government to transfer private property not only to the public domain, but also to other private property owners as well.
In short, today’s America honors an unjust pseudo-right of public property running beneath the surface of private property ownership. People are now thought to have a right in property that is not their own.16
Owning real estate is not the full extent of the natural right of property.
Further, there is financial property ownership. Any system of taxation that does not enact a simple equality of proportionality (e.g., flat tax), requires too much tax revenue from some and too little from others. And this has the same effect as transferring property from a deserving to an undeserving owner: as Aristotle writes, “Awards should be according to merit: for all men agree that what is just in distribution must be according to merit, in some sense.”17
Both Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas follow Aristotle by acknowledging that a government which overtaxes its citizens immediately becomes a thief. Thomas Aquinas18 and Augustine19 (rejecting egalitarian redistribution) agree that it is not only properly legal, but also moral, for man to keep what he earns. Thomas Aquinas asserts that “if possessions were equalized among families … [it] would lead to the corruption of the polity.”20 For his own part, Augustine asks: “If justice is taken away, what are kingdoms but massive robberies?”21
In America, of course, we do not have the flat tax—the simplest mathematical way to honor the equality of proportion. Certain taxpayers are discriminatively taxed at higher rates than others. How much we are allowed to retain from our earnings is dictated arbitrarily to us by the government. Therefore, the right of financial property is widely inverted in today’s society. And this too violates the Catholic Natural Law.
The Supreme Court has added lots of pseudo-rights to the short list of three true natural rights (life, liberty, property). Presently, the Supreme law of the land holds that individual American states cannot outlaw the following pseudo-rights: the “right” to purchase and use contraception;22 the “right” to pornography;23 the “right” to sodomy;24 the “right” to gay marriage.25
And further, the Court recognizes a whole litany of entitlements which are not in any sense natural. These pseudo-rights have been created out of whole cloth in order to distract the citizenry from the thievery of our true, few, natural rights. Just because the Court has rendered these takings legal, it does not follow that they should be considered moral.
In summary, only three rights comprised the basis for the Declaration of Independence and the ensuing American Revolution. “Odd” or “curious” are not strong enough terms to express the perversity of the proposition that: 1) these three rights have been supplanted by their opposites; 2) and that Americans enjoy scores of additional “fundamental rights” which turn out to be pseudo-rights. Both of these are, of course, egregious symptoms that America, the former republic—if it ever qualified as a true republic at all—is now dead.
This is the recipe for revolution. Let’s have a look at how the American founders worked it out.
Revolution: The Spirit of ’76 and Reclaiming Natural Rights
On that muggy Philadelphia morning in July when the Declaration of Independence was signed, all that was really being expressed was the set of ideas contained by the pages appearing above: the British government had violated life, liberty, and property rights.
And this, in turn, signified to the American founders that they no longer lived under the laws of the republic of England,26 which itself had been restored after a revolution during the previous century—the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
So, the American founders broke away from England.
The American Colonists came to see that they were essentially being treated as outlaws, or people with no rights. Obviously, the Colonists had not violated any laws at all; the English government had in its offences against Colonial rights violated the Catholic Natural Law. On this basis, a revolution was justified. The British citizenship of the American Colonists, in other words, was already dead whether they liked it or not.
Thomas Jefferson and the eventual signers of his document had, in the first place, to convince their fellow Colonists of the somewhat obvious tyranny afoot. Afterward, Jefferson in the Declaration expressed that the violation of these three natural rights led to a fourth, fundamental, but contingent right: revolution.
Revolution must be called a natural right because it pertains to citizens of all countries. But it must be distinguished as a contingent right, because it only activates upon violation of life, liberty, and property. And, as Thomas Aquinas had long before urged, it must be implemented in proportion to the state’s violation of those rights. One does not have the right to revolt simply because he happens to suffer a minor or temporary lapse in his rights.
To connect with the spirit of the preceding pages, the reader should ask: If this book’s argument is consistent, then shouldn’t the fourth fundamental right—revolution—have been perverted, as well?
Of course! Presently in America, the right of revolution finds itself inverted because it is popularly understood as a one-time, non-repeatable proposition from 1776. Such inert reasoning should not be applied to natural rights, which are always with us.
To qualify as a right, revolution must be widely observed as a default option for all ages, but especially for the future. In its very nature, that’s what a right is—future oriented! Thomas Jefferson wrote of the Shays’ Rebellion:
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion … If [the people] remain quiet … it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had thirteen states independent eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms … What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.27
One cannot even begin to apply Jefferson’s reasoning to America today: it’s simply unfathomable according to most Americans. While Jefferson hoped that America “should never be twenty years without” rebellion—which verifies his belief in it as a natural right—the modern patriot ardently relegates rebellion to the pages of 18th century history. For the modern-day American, who apparently would suffer any amount of tyranny rather than revolt, revolution is a one-time proposition.
Once more, what in the world is going on here!?
We’ve been taught the republican theory that the American founders were thoroughly and clearly resolved as to these four rights—life, liberty, property, and revolution. The English violations of these led to the breaking with the British regime and the making of the American one.
But, as we saw in the Introduction, the Prot-Enlight reasoning of the founders and framers acknowledged as truly natural none of the rights they pressed. The philosophy of the founders therefore cannot have been perfectly square with a proper natural rights regime. What would that proper natural rights regime have looked like?
Well… it would have looked more Catholic.
Thomas Aquinas: True Champion of Limited Government
We have all been led to think of small government as a new invention in the late 16th and early 17th centuries by the Enlightenment and/or by Reformation Protestants. But in reality, neither of these Prot-Enlight halves could sustain the regime of natural rights upon which small government must be based. As the Introduction to this book shows, both the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation were centrally based on the rejection of Catholic Natural Law!
Thus, any claims by them to support limited government must be faulty.
Take a brief moment and absorb that thought. Prot-Enlight rejects the Catholic Natural Law. I am hardly the first to “ask how human beings, without using reason, can form moral judgments about the many particular [political or ethical] questions on which the Bible is silent or unspecific.”28 Without using the natural intellect described by Thomas Aquinas, one cannot navigate even the most basic political or ethical questions. It’s that simple. But Protestants (and certainly Enlightenment thinkers) stop short of absorbing this implication, especially when it comes to the American founding, which they gladly count among their achievements.
