EWTN Celebrates Americanism: 250 Years of Masonic Republic Exalted as Catholic Triumph
The EWTN News portal reports on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, presenting a list of twelve “Catholic Americans” whose lives allegedly demonstrate that “love of God and love of country can go hand in hand.” The article, authored by Francesca Pollio Fenton, enumerates figures ranging from the first bishop John Carroll and the only Catholic signer of the Declaration Charles Carroll of Carrollton, through the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, the foundresses Elizabeth Ann Seton and Frances Xavier Cabrini, the journalists Daniel Rudd and Dorothy Day, the naval commander John Barry, the Americanist Archbishop John Ireland, the convert Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the Black priest Augustus Tolton, to the media personality Fulton J. Sheen. The piece functions as a hagiography of the Americanist synthesis, canonizing the Masonic republic itself under the guise of Catholic patriotism. This celebration of the United States’ semiquincentenary by a putative Catholic media outlet constitutes a formal adhesion to the condemned heresy of Americanism, substituting the Social Kingship of Christ with the idolatrous worship of a nation conceived in rebellion against the Catholic order.
