A joyous Independence Day to all our American readers – this marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America back in 1776. This marks the victory of the then-colony’s struggle for independence from Britain and the monarchy in the American revolution.
They were divided then, and are divided now. There were loyalists to Crown – back then another British colony – and the revolutionaries. The latter won, and many of the former fled to Canada, which is still under the British monarchy, at least legally.
The divisions that now plague America are deeper – it’s not just red and blue states, Republicans versus Democrats, conservatives and liberals, free market versus some sort of socialism and all the rest of it.
What divides America now is what Christ predicted would divide us all: those are for Him, and those who are against Him. Christ and Antichrist. For it was Christian principles – at least implicitly – that held the republic together – in God we trust. As those principles are rejected, the foundation collapses, and as Pope Saint John Paul II predicted in his masterly Veritatis Splendor, we descend into the abyss of Nietzschean nihilism
We can only be ‘independent’ – which is to say, self-governing – as a nation and as a people if we are free, and such freedom only exists in the truth, which ‘sets us free’. As the Didache, the early teaching of the Apostles, echoing Moses, states clearly: there is a way of life, and a way of death, and a great divide exists between the two, as we are tragically discovering. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live. Here’s hoping and praying the way of life wins out in the hearts of many.
As the Founders declared, the Constitution was written for a virtuous people. It would prove but a dead letter, a worthless piece of paper for those who are not. It is custom, not law, which makes a people and a nation, all those mores and values handed on by the traditions of families, churches, local communities.
The ‘experiment’ of America, flawed and divided as she is, has worked better than most other nations on this earth. On this glorious anniversary, may the people of the not-so United States take what is good, true and beautiful, and build thereon for another 250 years, or in whatever time God wills to give us in His merciful providence.
