Question:
Answer:
You ask a good question and one on which books could be and have been written. The short answer is “yes” and “no.”
For example, provided morality is upheld in exercising our God-given rights, the Church can wholeheartedly affirm the U.S. Declaration of Independence when it says,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Here we see the Founding Fathers’ affirmation of the natural moral law, which is man’s participation in the eternal law of God, and that our rights come from God and not mere human leaders who can arbitrarily change them. In his Modern Catholic Dictionary, Father John Hardon, SJ, elaborates further on the meaning of the natural law:
As coming from God, the natural law is what God has produced in the world of creation; as coming to human beings, it is what they know (or can know) of what God has created. It is therefore called natural law because everyone is subject to it from birth (natio), because it contains only those duties which are derivable from human nature itself, and because, absolutely speaking, its essentials can be grasped by the unaided light of human reason.
In addition, the Declaration of Independence implies correctly that human leaders are to uphold the unalienable, God-given rights of mankind in their administrative, legislative and judicial decisions.
The Church would disagree with some Founders, including Thomas Jefferson, who were Deists and thus didn’t see God as intimately concerned with the daily affairs and struggles of mankind. From these Founders’ deistic beliefs stemmed, in part, their Enlightenment rationalism, which proposes that mere human reason is superior to the tenets of man’s religious belief and thus should be the final arbiter in U.S. law, instead of being docilely informed by the right religious beliefs of Catholicism, particularly moral doctrine, which in some cases transcends but does not contradict reason. As Father Hardon affirms, rationalism holds that “human reason is self-sufficient and does not need the help of divine revelation to know all that is necessary for a person’s well-being.”
In part because of the rationalism that guided our nation’s founding, problems arose. For example, despite the aforementioned provision of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution originally permitted slavery and recognized slaves as only three-fifths of a person. In addition, there were anti-Catholic laws in a number of states, given the common view that Catholics had a warped understanding of freedom and patriotism, including because of Catholics’ allegiance to a “foreign power,” i.e., the Pope and the Holy See. The Founders largely and unfortunately did not see the Church’s Magisterium as the safeguard and authentic interpreter of the natural moral law, upon which the laws of states should be based.
In addition, the Church can affirm the religious-liberty provision of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment to the extent that it has allowed the Church and her members freedom to practice their faith, although this has not always been the case in practice, as we have seen over our country’s 200-plus-year history.
Further, given the secular nature of America, as well as the plural forms of Christianity and the practice of other religions in the U.S, the Church can understand the implementation of the First Amendment’s “Establishment Clause,” which limits our government from favoring one religion in particular. On the other hand, in ideal governing circumstances, the Church would advocate that national governments favor Catholicism, because to do so would benefit a nation’s populace, properly understood and implemented.