Happy Constitution Day! Venerable Fulton Sheen pray for us. "So careful is our Constitution of the rights of man that the first ten amendments to the Constitution, called the Bill of Rights, protect the sovereignty of the people against the encroachment of Federal powers, and Article Nine reminds us that when rights are conferred by the Constitution it must not be assumed that these are the only rights which man enjoys. The danger to America from the outside lies in the infiltration of Fascist, Nazi, and Communist ideologies which deny these sacred, inalienable rights of human personality... ...Thomas Jefferson wrote that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deserving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Jefferson knew and said the ideas to which he was giving form were not his own. Jefferson had Filmer in his library. It was his custom to score the passages in books which he liked. It is interesting that the only passage marked in Filmer was the above quotation from Cardinal Bellarmine. Dr. Scott concludes “If we of the United States were to have a patron – and in our case a political saint – (Protestant though we be) we might indeed do well to choose the Cardinal and sainted Bellarmine, who, strange as it may seem, has perhaps the greatest claim to the gratitude of the people of the United States, because he stated and defended in advance those principles of government which the United States have made their own and upon which their government firmly rests.” The Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence are not the sources of the doctrine of the intrinsic value of man, but only its confirmation. They are merely the sanction of a traditional doctrine, and the affirmation that these natural rights are also civil rights. If we scrap the basic principle that man is of inherent worth, and set up the class, for example, as supreme, then only the class has a right to survive and purging is justified; then the moral conscience is abolished for class conscience; then we have a government of men which is subject to psychological aberrations instead of a government of men subject to law which is the guarantee of liberty. Against such dangers from the inside, Washington warned us, and it might be well to recall the warning once again. “Toward the preservation of your government, and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite not only that you steadily discountenance irregular opposition to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation on its principles, however specious the pretexts. One method of assault may be to effect, in the form of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance, in permanent evil, any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield.” -Venerable Fulton Sheen, "Freedom Under God" (1940/2013)
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 21:12:15 +0000
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