Any meaningful celebration of our nation’s quarter millennium requires both faith and freedom. Faith that our Founders drew from the Spirit of God underpinned the Declaration of Independence and all that flowed from that document.
Atop the Washington Monument is the inscription “Laus Deo” – “Praise be to God.” In the Jefferson Memorial, we find: “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time,” words the drafter of the Declaration and eventual third president stated in criticizing Britain’s usurping of natural rights. The south wall of the Lincoln Memorial contains the Gettysburg Address, including, “…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” The “new birth” seems to echo the new birth of the Church at Pentecost.
All of these place God as the central and indispensable component of both the founding and the development of the United States.
This year’s calendar has Memorial Day immediately following Pentecost, as it should. The Apostles took a long time to “get” the reality of the Resurrection, but they still had to stay together and pray together (Acts I). Our Founders reflected often on the power of the Almighty in pivotal statements and documents, and promoted prayer and fasting for fruitful outcomes, both on the battlefield and in the drafting of “nation birthing” heritage.
The Declaration’s heart states that we are “endowed by the Creator with unalienable rights… life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” and they flow from the goodness of God and not from the benevolence of government.
Pentecost was a revolution that not only stated God as central but Jesus as risen, now an advocate to plead for his people and “endow” them with gifts that would empower them to preach that life can be transformed through repentance, forgiveness, and sacrifice. That in turn brought forth a faith and freedom unmatched in the history of the world, and a conversion of peoples that is capsulized by
Diognetus: “The Christian is to the world as the soul is to the body.” As the soul directs the physical behavior and even the mind, so do the gifts of the Holy Spirit enlighten, encourage and exemplify the Christian outpouring of the Spirit in a fire that pulls together rather than destroys.
When we honor our brothers and sisters fallen in wars, we honor valor and sacrifice, not easy love, as in the words of Douglas MacArthur in his final address to cadets at West Point : “No physical courage and no brute instinct can take the place of the Divine help which alone can sustain him. However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.”
We ought to include those who may not directly fight wars for the defense of the nation, but stand up to clear and present danger, our firefighters and our blue legions who have fallen from increasing criminal attacks on our streets. The common denominator – whether a religious believer or not – is the awesome willingness to sacrifice for a cause greater than oneself, even at the cost that may ultimately claim one’s life.
While today’s hordes of professionally planned uprisings on our nation’s city streets baffle the mind and stir the anger of many US citizens, one wonders, do those same people carrying their “Hate America” signs think they would be protected in Iran, where more than 40,000 Iranians were recently murdered by that oppressive regime for peacefully rising up to reclaim their rights? Do any of those raging on our streets have any knowledge of the “… firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
The lives of those signers, many of them, were not just fallen in war but like the Iranians were hanged or shot by oppressors. But it is that spirit that allows for the true liberties we still enjoy today, and all are rooted in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, who we call the Lord and Giver of Life in Catholic and other Christian creeds. The Spirit is what Pentecost fire and seven-fold gifts are all about.
Drawing on Jefferson’s “…God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time,” it is LIFE that affords us liberty. He echoed this elsewhere: “The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” Without life being the most essential and guaranteed goal of government, the pillars of defending other rights shake and fall. The violence of the street is an outgrowth of the more subtle yet monumentally more pervasive violence upon the preborn human child. And now chemical abortions far outnumber surgical, driving the mega-slaughter (over a million a year) upwards and the experience held in greater denial, with a deadening of moral conscience.
Church leaders need Pentecost courage to call abortion what it is: Murder. Quite the opposite of the valiant who give up their life for others, abortion instead sacrifices the child for relative convenience or other trivial reasons to throw away a new unique human being whose “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” is flushed away by a government that neglects, and in many elected officials’ cases destroys, the Jeffersonian axiom on “the care of human life.”
Let us also remember Memorial Day for the unborn, over 65 million casualties in the last 50 years, 50 times the 1.3 million estimated fallen in ALL our wars. The war against the unborn is a war against the Lord of Life. The moral dumbing down due to this incalculably catastrophic hidden death-field spills over to the streets and the chambers that promote unborn violence and, in some cases even attack those who would prevent violence in the womb and on the street.
As Lincoln’s brave and noble statements did not gloss over slavery as the culprit that would divide our nation back in the crises leading to Civil War, so we need soberly remember the war against the preborn in our current crisis of national unrest. Pentecost shows a formerly fearful, Christ-denying Peter now fired up and giving the message, which is as true today as ever. Hear this – once again – from the first sermon of the first Pope as Luke records (Acts 37-41), the gift of courage, counsel, fear of the Lord, gifts of the Holy Spirit:
“Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart, and they asked Peter and the other apostles, ‘What are we to do, my brothers?’ Peter [said] to them, ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the holy Spirit. For the promise is made to you and to your children and to all those far off, whomever the Lord our God will call.’ He testified with many other arguments, and was exhorting them, ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’ Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand persons were added that day.”
No small accomplishment. And no small inspiration for the Memorial Day and the Pentecost we share as we move through the 250th anniversary of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” with a freeing and faith-filled conversion again to the “God Who gave us life and liberty at the same time.”
To help Priests for Life fight to end abortion, sign up for our action alerts at StopAbortionNow.org
Fr. Denis Wilde, OSA, Ph.D., is a full-time pastoral associate for Priests for Life. A concert pianist, he was formerly an associate professor of music at Villanova University.
