The Catholic Role in the American Founding

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 28, 2025

Picture a medieval city in Europe, with the cathedral at its center, the people gathered outside on the piazza. Or think of ancient Rome, where leaders gathered at the Forum to discuss public affairs or offer sacrifices to their gods. In early New England villages, the church on the town green also served as the meetinghouse. In these communities, political debates were never far removed from religious principles.

Against that background, the late Rev. Richard John Neuhaus lamented, in his 1984 book, The Naked Public Square, that in contemporary America, religious beliefs were unwelcome in the discussion of public affairs. The secular resistance to religious influences, he argued, was a serious flaw in the American political system. But it was also a challenge to believers: an opportunity to re-introduce that crucial missing element.

The public square was naked, Neuhaus observed, because there was no fixed set of principles against which contending claims could be measured, no ultimate truth that could be invoked. The corrosive effects of the Reformation, with its exaltation of individual choice, had stripped the community of any essential organizing authority.

The problem was not a new one in 1984, although it was more evident then than it had been a generation earlier, and is still more evident today. In 1951 Chief Justice Fred Vinson had written: “Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes…all concepts are relative.” From that (self-contradictory) statement there is a straight line to the claim by Justice Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

A nation with the soul of a church

How did we reach this awful situation, in which our highest court declines to take any stand on the meaning of life, and celebrates the individual’s unlimited right to create his own reality? Had the American public square been naked all along, and the Supreme Court took more than a century to notice?

The United States is a historical anomaly: a nation that has always been (at least until recently) strongly Christian, but never Catholic. Unlike European nations it could not bank on the inherited authority of foundational Catholic beliefs. The American Founding was, in fact, based on a deep suspicion of authority: the authority of the Crown and of the established church.

More specifically, and positively, the American republic was based on the belief that “all men are created equal.” The belief, stated in the Declaration of Independence and memorably confirmed in the Gettysburg address, has been upheld with as much vigor as any religious principle. Indeed Calvin Coolidge remarked, “In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document.” The historian Gordon Wood said: “To be an American is not to be someone but to believe in something.” G.K. Chesterton thought of America as a nation with the soul of a church. And before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, with typical penetrating insight, saw the essence of the belief:

American Catholics have absorbed the free-church traditions on the relationship between the Church and politics, believing that a church separate from the state better guarantees the moral foundation as a whole. Hence the promotion of the democratic ideal is seen as a moral duty that is in profound compliance with the faith.

The Catholic sources of the Founding

Where did it come from: this quasi-religious belief that all men are created equal? Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration, of course, and his phrasing unmistakably reflected the influence of John Locke. But the argument that all men are equal before the law had been powerfully defended about 150 years earlier by St. Robert Bellarmine.

Contrary to a widespread belief, the Catholic Church was not the source of the claim that kings ruled by divine right; that was a Protestant invention. The bloody religious wars of the Reformation era gave rise to the curious principle of cuius regio euis religio, with the king choosing the nation’s faith, and the rise of state churches backed by religious authority.

The Orthodox churches, too, have organized themselves along national lines. Vladimir Soloviev wrote, in The Russian Church and the Papacy:

No amount of argument can overcome the evidence for the fact that apart from Rome there only exist national churches such as the Armenian or the Greek church, state churches such as the Russian or Anglican, or else sects founded by individuals such as the Lutherans, the Calvinists, the Irvingites, and so forth.

The Roman Catholic Church is the only church that is neither a national church, nor a state church, nor a sect founded by a man; it is the only church in the world which maintains and asserts the principle of universal social unity against individual egoism and national particularism; it is the only church which maintains and asserts the freedom of the spiritual power against the absolutism of the state; in a word, it is the only church against which the gates of Hades have not prevailed.

In Catholic countries (back when they were Catholic), church and state were not intertwined. They coexisted, each claiming authority within its own sphere. The Catholic tradition saw “two swords” of authority: one to govern secular affairs, the other religious—one concerned with the temporal, the other with the eternal.

That old tradition, admittedly weakened by the Reformation and the Enlightenment, still bore enough weight to influence the Protestants who settled in the New World. Particularly in New England, the Puritan settlers would have been appalled by Justice Kennedy’s antinomianism, as would their successors at the time of the Revolution. Thomas Jefferson may have been seduced by the rhetoric of French Revolutionaries, but John Adams was not. Like most of the Founders, Adams took it for granted that the American republic would be based on a moral consensus derived from Scripture. Thus his insistence: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Sharpening the right sword

If our Constitution is inadequate to the challenges of today, then—if the centrifugal forces unleashed by unlimited individual choice have torn that moral consensus asunder—maybe the fault lies not with the Constitution itself, but with the religious authorities who should have kept our moral foundations intact. Perhaps it is not the political, but the religious “sword” that needs sharpening.

Richard John Neuhaus was a Lutheran when he wrote The Naked Public Square. But his next book was entitled The Catholic Moment, and not long afterward he was a Catholic priest himself. He recognized, in the wisdom of the Church, a tradition of grappling with church-state issues, and with the nature of authority. He saw that the crisis of the American republic was at its base a crisis of faith, and the crisis of faith must be addressed and resolved by the Church.

In his important book We Hold These Truths, Father John Courtney Murray made the same argument. Writing in 1960, he predicted that if the philosophical understanding that supports the American experiment ever failed, then “… guardianship of the original American consensus based on the Western heritage, would have passed to the Catholic community, within which the heritage was elaborated—long before America was.”

So this truly is “the Catholic moment”—the moment in American history when a vigorous Catholic Church might restore the moral structure on which the Founders built.