It
was a pleasure recently to perform the marriage rites of two
of our fine parishioners at Old St. Mary’s Church in
Philadelphia, which at the time of the American Revolution
was the third-largest city in the British Empire. Members of
the Continental Congress attended a celebration of the third
anniversary of the Declaration of Independence there in the
presence of George Washington himself. The priest chaplain
of the French ambassador, Conrad Alexandre Gérard,
sang a solemn Te Deum. Catholics were still a small
minority in the new country, but the Founding Fathers were
well aware that the Catholic Church had been the mother of
western civilization before the discovery of the New
World.
Washington showed his regard for the Catholic
troops at Valley Forge and helped to support a Catholic
church in Philadelphia. He kept a devotional image of the
Virgin Mary in his dining room at Valley Forge. Generations
later, based on inherited information and sentiment, St.
Katherine Drexel was certain that he had become a Catholic
on his deathbed. While there is no substantial evidence for
that, Washington knew that the natural-law theory enshrined
in the Declaration of Independence had roots older than the
Founding Fathers, and he would not have blanched to hear the
names of Augustine and Aquinas among them.
On October 9, 1774, in Philadelphia, John Adams
went church shopping with Washington and attended a service
in a “Romish chapel,” which was either St.
Joseph’s or St. Mary’s. He described in a letter
to his wife Abigail what seemed to him exotic: “. . .
the poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not
a word of which they understood; their pater nosters
and ave Marias; their holy water; their
crossing themselves perpetually; their bowing to the name of
Jesus, whenever they hear it; their bowings, kneelings and
genuflections before the altar.” There was nothing
like that in his Puritan world, but he found it all
“awful and affecting” —and awful then
meant awesome. The sermon was “a good, short moral
essay upon the duty of parents to their children, founded in
justice and charity, to take care of their interests,
temporal and spiritual,” and “the assembly
chanted more sweetly and exquisitely.” He wondered how
Luther ever “broke the spell.” Adams himself was
enough under the spell to donate a generous gift to the
building of Holy Cross Church in Boston in 1800. A
Protestant friend of his said, “no circumstance has
contributed more to the peace and good order of the town,
than the establishment of a Catholic Church.”
The peace and good order of our whole nation
hang on how we vote. Catholics can keep faith with the
Fathers of the Church and the Founding Fathers of our Nation
only by voting for those who defend the fundamental right to
life and the First Amendment guarantee of religious
freedom.
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