God blessed America... through the Catholic Church

Would the United States be the Shining City on a hill, which it most emphatically is today, without American Catholics? Probably not. Leaving aside the many valuable contributions to our Republic from Catholics over the first 175 years of the American experiment, American Catholics unquestionably have preserved the best features of our culture and traditions for the last 50 years or so.

As William F. Buckley's many friends, opponents, and allies eulogized him with glowing enconia last month, we were reminded of the extraordinary influence that energetic and committed Catholic exercised over the course of recent American history. He built the movement that defeated Communism, made world markets freer, and undermined the dictatorship of relativism.

Five of the current justices on the United States Supreme Court are Catholic, and all of them voted last term, in the landmark case Gonzales v. Carhart, to uphold Congress' partial-birth abortion ban. That decision was the first occasion on which the Supreme Court upheld a ban on an abortion procedure and arguably marks a turning point in the Court's abortion jurisprudence.

One of those Catholic Justices, A. Scalia, J., swam for over a decade against the current of constitutional relativism, and did so with panache. His intellectual courage and witty penmanship inspired the conservative legal movement, and he became the most prominent champion of originalism, which has in twenty short years become the dominant mode of constitutional interpretation.

Two of the three most influential intellectual forces for good in the realm of Western moral, legal, and political philosophy -- Robert George and John Finnis -- are Catholic. The third, Hadley Arkes, is Jewish but identifies himself with the distinctly Catholic intellectual tradition of Thomist natural law philosophy. Indeed, Catholic intellectuals have almost alone preserved the natural law tradition in the United States, and the West generally. For this reason, Catholics laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement, the pro-life movement, and the defense of marriage and the family.

It was a Catholic Pope, John Paul II, who without firing a single shot ignited a revolution in Poland and Eastern Europe, which eventually toppled the Soviet Union. Before evangelical relief and charitable organizations proliferated, Catholics were operating orphanages and soup kitchens. Before evangelicals re-entered the political arena in the 1970's, Catholics were founding political journals and organizing the conservative movement. Before evangelicals discovered Francis Schaeffer and Chuck Colson, Catholics offered a comprehensive view of culture, law, religion, and politics that was informed by the truth and grace of the Word of God.

The United States owes much to its Catholics population. We evangelicals, in particular, owe our Catholic brothers and sisters an enormous debt of gratitude. Despite the obvious trangressions that the Catholic Church has committed in the past several years, it has done far, far more good than evil.

For all of these reasons, this line from a press report today is striking. "Before [Pope] Benedict's arrival [in the United States], polls showed most Americans knew little or nothing about him."

Maybe this is yet another example of American ignorance, much like our infamous inability to locate Iran or South Dakota on a map. But I wonder whether the same would be true of other important world leaders. Do most Americans know anything about Gordon Brown, Osama bin Laden, or Kim Jong Il?