EWTN News reports on a symposium held at The Catholic University of America titled “Endowed by Their Creator: Catholicism, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Experiment at 250,” co-hosted with the University of Notre Dame. The conference featured Catholic academics, jurists, and public intellectuals, including a video address from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who praised the American founding as a testament to the “eternal truth of our faith.” Panelists such as Russell Hittinger, Ken Grasso, Ryan Anderson, and Sarah Gustafson discussed the relationship between Catholic social teaching and the American experiment, referencing figures like Father John Courtney Murray, SJ, and themes including religious liberty, human dignity, and the family. The event essentially baptizes the American Revolution and its secular, Enlightenment-rooted founding principles as compatible with, and even inspired by, Catholic doctrine — a profound betrayal of the Church’s immutable teaching on the social reign of Christ the King and the errors of liberalism condemned by the Magisterium.
The Heresy of Religious Liberty Dressed in Catholic Garb
The entire premise of this symposium rests upon a foundational lie: that the American experiment, born from the Enlightenment and the Masonic-inspired Revolution of 1776, is somehow compatible with Catholic social teaching. This is not merely an error; it is a direct repudiation of the solemn condemnations issued by the true Popes of the Church. Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned as proposition 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.” Proposition 78 further condemned the idea that “persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship.” Proposition 80, the final and most comprehensive condemnation, declared: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” This last proposition is precisely what the conference participants are doing — reconciling the Church with the liberal experiment and calling it “Catholic social thought.”
The panelists, particularly Ryan Anderson, speak of “tensions” between Catholic teaching and the Declaration of Independence but emphasize “surprising overlap and harmonization.” This language of “tension” and “harmonization” is the hallmark of Modernism — the very heresy that St. Pius X condemned as “the synthesis of all errors” in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907). The Modernist does not outright deny dogma; he reinterprets it, stretches it, and harmonizes it with error until it is emptied of its supernatural content. When Anderson notes that James Madison’s Memorial and Restriment Against Religious Assessments contains a “nice rejection of any secularism” because Madison speaks of duties to the Creator, he commits a grotesque act of eisegesis. Madison’s deistic, Enlightenment conception of the “Creator” is not the God of Catholic revelation, and his framework of religious liberty is built upon the indifferentist premise that the state has no duty to recognize the one true religion — a proposition Pius IX explicitly condemned.
The Ghost of John Courtney Murray: Architect of Dignitatis Humanae
Ken Grasso’s presentation centered on Father John Courtney Murray, SJ, whom he describes as “a celebrant of the American experiment” who “admired the Founding Fathers.” This is the same Murray who was silenced by the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII for his erroneous views on church-state relations, only to be rehabilitated at the Second Vatican Council, where he became the principal architect of Dignitatis Humanae — the conciliar declaration on religious freedom that directly contradicted the prior Magisterium. Grasso presents Murray as a prophet who saw that America was “in deep trouble” because “the very moral tradition which made American democracy compatible with Catholicism no longer lives in the minds and hearts of Americans.” This framing is revealing: it assumes that American democracy was ever compatible with Catholicism, and the problem is merely that Americans have abandoned the moral consensus. The truth, which Grasso and his fellow panelists cannot utter, is that the American founding was incompatible with Catholicism from its inception, being rooted in the Enlightenment’s exaltation of human reason apart from divine revelation, the Protestant heresy of private judgment, and the Masonic principle of religious indifferentism.
Grasso recounts Murray’s three dimensions of approach: the historical (the Church’s role in creating “the Western liberal tradition”), the sociopolitical (limits of pluralism), and the theological (the crisis of secularity). Each dimension is infected with the virus of Modernism. Murray’s “Western liberal tradition” is not the tradition of the Church — it is the tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and the French Revolution, a tradition that the Church has always opposed. Pius IX’s Syllabus condemned the proposition that “the Church is not a true and perfect society, entirely free — nor is she endowed with proper and perpetual rights of her own” (proposition 19), and that “the ecclesiastical power ought not to exercise its authority without the permission and assent of the civil government” (proposition 20). Murray’s project — and the project of this symposium — is to subordinate the Church’s divine authority to the framework of liberal democracy, treating the American constitutional order as a given to which the Church must accommodate herself.
The Declaration of Independence: A Document of Naturalistic Humanism
Marco Rubio’s video address set the tone by declaring that “to look upon the history of this golden land is to see the face of God.” This is not Catholic theology; it is civil religion, the deification of the nation-state — an idolatry that the Church has always condemned. Rubio quotes George Washington’s 1790 letter to Bishop John Carroll, in which Washington speaks of “the patriotic part” American Catholics played in the Revolution and anticipates America’s rise to “an uncommon degree of eminence.” Washington’s letter, while courteous, reflects the Enlightenment optimism that the panelists uncritically embrace. The Declaration of Independence’s assertion that men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” invokes a deistic “Creator,” not the Triune God of Catholic faith, and grounds rights in nature rather than in divine revelation and the Church’s teaching authority. This is precisely the error of naturalism that Pius IX condemned in proposition 1 of the Syllabus: “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself.”
The symposium’s title itself — “Endowed by Their Creator” — borrows the Declaration’s language as though it were a Catholic principle. But the Church teaches that rights come from God through His Church, and that the state has the positive duty to profess and protect the Catholic religion. Pope Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei (1885), taught that “the Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, each supreme in its own kind” — but he also made clear that the civil power must be subject to the divine, and that “to wish the Church to be subject to the civil power in the exercise of her duty is a great folly and a sheer injustice.” The American experiment was founded on the explicit rejection of this principle.
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church: A Modernist Instrument
Ryan Anderson invokes the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church as though it were an authoritative expression of perennial Catholic teaching. This document, published in 2004 by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace under the authority of the conciliar sect, is saturated with the Modernist principles of Vatican II. It speaks of “human dignity,” “the common good,” “subsidiarity,” and “solidarity” in abstract terms that can be harmonized with virtually any political system — including liberal democracy. This is precisely the problem: the Compendium has been stripped of the sharp edges of pre-conciliar Catholic social teaching, which insisted on the necessity of the Catholic state, the condemnation of religious liberty, and the social reign of Christ the King.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), taught unequivocally: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” He further declared that “rulers of states therefore [should] not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but let them fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness.” The American experiment was founded on the explicit refusal of this duty — and the symposium participants, far from condemning this, celebrate it.
The Abortion Discussion: Pragmatism Over Principle
Anderson’s discussion of abortion reveals the bankruptcy of the conciliar approach to moral issues. He laments that “public opinion has gone really, really badly for the pro-life side” and discusses “next steps” in terms of federal legislative strategy, the 14th Amendment, and reinstating “safety provisions for the abortion pill.” His analysis is entirely within the framework of American political pragmatism — what can be achieved through legislation and executive action. What is entirely absent is the supernatural perspective: the reality of mortal sin, the necessity of baptism, the eternal damnation of those who cooperate in the killing of the unborn, and the duty of the Catholic state to suppress this evil as a crime against God.
Anderson’s statistic — that a child conceived outside of marriage faces a 40% chance of abortion versus 4% for one conceived within marriage — is presented as an argument for promoting marriage as a social institution. But the Catholic position is not merely that marriage is “the best protector of the unborn” as a sociological fact; it is that contraception is a mortal sin, that sexual relations outside of marriage are gravely sinful, and that the state has the duty to uphold the divine law. Anderson’s framework is that of a secular ethicist who happens to be Catholic, not of a Catholic theologian who understands that “the state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men” (St. Augustine, quoted by Pius XI in Quas Primas) — and that this harmony can only be achieved under the reign of Christ the King.
The Silence That Condemns
What is most damning about this symposium is not only what was said, but what was not said. There is no mention of the social reign of Christ the King. There is no mention of the Syllabus of Errors. There is no mention of Immortale Dei, Quas Primas, or Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio. There is no mention of the condemnations of liberalism, religious liberty, and indifferentism. There is no mention of the duty of the state to profess the Catholic faith. There is no mention of the American founding’s roots in Freemasonry and the Enlightenment. There is no mention of the true nature of the Church as the one true society instituted by God, with full authority over all nations and peoples.
Instead, we hear of “Catholic social thought” as though it were a body of principles that can be harmonized with the American experiment. We hear of “human dignity” as though it were a self-evident truth of reason rather than a truth known through divine revelation and the teaching of the Church. We hear of “religious liberty” as though it were a Catholic principle rather than a heresy condemned by Pius IX. We hear of the “pursuit of happiness” as though it were compatible with the supernatural end of man, which is the vision of God — “for man consists of soul and body, and the external celebrations of feasts are meant to move and stir him in such a way that through the variety and beauty of sacred rites he may more fully draw from divine truths” (Pius XI, Quas Primas).
The conference at The Catholic University of America, co-hosted with the University of Notre Dame — both institutions long since captured by the conciliar revolution — is not a Catholic event. It is a gathering of men who have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, who worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator, and who seek to baptize the American apostasy as though it were the work of the Holy Spirit. “They have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13).
Source:
Catholic scholars reflect on the American experiment at 250 (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 14.04.2026