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The Church and the Garrison State
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
IN Declaration of Independence the Fathers of this Republic declared that there are certain self-evident truths and that man is endowed by his Creator with inalienable rights. The idea of natural law and its consequent natural rights was stoutly maintained and to this natural law American Revolutionists appealed against the injustices that a written law would not redress. Above the state and its constitution and written enactments was a higher law of divine origin and purpose. That law was universal, unalterable, and immutable. It was as fixed and certain as die mathematical propositions of the multiplication table or the simple arithmetical statement that two plus two equals four.
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1939
References
1 .Orations, Boston, in Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America. 1822Google Scholar. Also Dickenson, “Our liberties do not come from charters; for these are only the declaration of pre-existing rights. They do not depend on parchments or seals; but come from the King of Kings and Lord of all the earth.” Or John Adams who declared that men's rights are founded “in the frame of human nature, rooted in the constitution of the intellectual and moral world,” derived from the “Great Legislator of the Universe.”
2 Beginning with Bodin and running down through the legalists Austin, Maine, Burgess and others, one notes in the theories of sovereignty propounded by these writers an increasing emphasis on state absolutism. For an excellent discussion of the state and sovereignty see Wilson, F. G., Elements of Politics, Part II, Chapter iii. 1936Google Scholar.
3 See Principality of Monaco v. State of Mississippi, 292 U. S. 313 and other Supreme Court decisions on these points.
4 As early as 1826 Dr. Cooper of South Carolina declared in his Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy, “The universal law of nature is force. By this law the lower animals are subdued to man, and the same law governs the relations between men.” See also Burgess, , Political Science, 1, 88. 1890Google Scholar; Willoughby, , The Nature of the Stale, 109, 1896Google Scholar; Abbott, Lyman, The Rights of Man. 1901Google Scholar.
5 See American Democracy and Catholic Doctrine, Sylvester J. McNamara.
6 Efficiency in administrative techniques and improvements in personnel, however, were especially in evidence in Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century and in the United States and France in the Twentieth Century.
7 This was true of many people whose spiritual heritage should have given them a nobler ideal of civic patriotism.
8 Note the Anarchist Kropotkin's statement: “The revolutionary anarchist will use every means and every effort to increase and intensify the evils and sorrows which must at last exhaust the patience of the people and excite them to revolution…. The only revolution that can do any good to the people is that which annihilates every idea of the state and overthrows all traditions, orders, and classes. With this end in view the Anarchist has no intention of imposing upon the people any organization whatever coming from above…. Our task is destruction, terrible, total, inexorable, and universal.”
9 See Russell's, Bertrand work. Proposed Roads to Freedom. 1919Google Scholar.
10 See Elliott, , The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. 1928Google Scholar.
11 See the very interesting chapter by ProfessorLerner, Max, “The Patterns of Dictatorship” in Dictatorship in the Modern World. 1935Google Scholar.
12 “Public Concerns of an American Catholic”, Social Problems, Vol. I, No. 7, pp. 75–76.
13 See the Encyclical of Pius XI, Divini Redemploris, in which the Holy Father states that an exterior fight against Communism is not sufficient.