In God we trust and rest and renew.
In God we trust and rest and renew.
Philadelphia, Pa. — “Proclaim liberty throughout the land (Lev 25 :10).”
It’s not every morning that you happen to wake up looking down at Independence Hall. It just happens to be the room you got as the cheaper option on a hotel discount app when swinging by the Constitution Center for the Becket Fund’s annual dinner. For the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this is the place to be for an organization — a ministry, really — dedicated to keeping America free, defending religious liberty in court, fighting for the rights of Americans to believe or not to believe.
The biblical quote is on the Liberty Bell, less than 500 feet away from my laptop as I type. Our nation is an embarrassment of riches — so much so that not only do we take it for granted that we are free, we tend to forget in our superabundance of opportunities of free speech. We pontificate and complain, but do we remember we are still the best the world has to offer?
Last night, before former solicitor general Paul Clement (who has argued more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court) spoke for Becket, I was at an old reliable daily Mass in town (St. John the Evangelist in Center City — Franciscans tend to be reliable in major cities in these parts of the US of A for weekday Eucharist and Confession opportunities. At the same time, not too far from Walt Disney World, the Catholic bishops of the United States were consecrating the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Save for the Mickey part, that was one of the most Catholic sentences I could write (not in Latin) — consecration, devotion to an organ of Christ — throw in a relic and a nun and we might as well be at the Vatican.
Well, these are the early days still of our first pope from the United States, so perhaps this is a new era for Catholics here.
Once unwelcome and untrusted, persecuted — former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse recently went on a side rant about how public schools and truancy laws were established to punish Catholics; “The spread and rise of American public schools in the factory model was overwhelmingly about separating Catholic kids from their parents and their parish,” he said at a recent Trinity Forum event in D.C. “That’s what it was for.” Now, come November, when a new communications chief takes over at the Vatican, Becket Fund alumna Montse Alvarado — the two most public-facing Catholics in Rome will be Americans.
But back to the Heart of Jesus.
“We must have recourse to him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. We have gone astray and we must return to the right path; darkness has overshadowed our minds, and the gloom must be dispelled by the light of truth; death has seized upon us, and we must lay hold of life.” Leo XIII said this when consecrating the human race to His Heart June 11, 1899 — 127 years to the day that the U.S. bishops met at the Basilica of Our Lady Queen of the Universe in Orlando.
“The Savior’s Heart invites us to return to the Father’s love, which is the source of every authentic love,” that Pope Leo said at the time. He quoted from St. John: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). And said: “Jesus ceaselessly receives from the Father, rich in mercy and compassion, the love which he lavishes upon human beings. His Heart particularly reveals the generosity of God towards sinners. God’s reaction to sin is not to lessen his love, but to expand it into a flow of mercy which becomes the initiative of the Redemption.”
The feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a moving feast in the Catholic Church, although always occurring on a Friday in June. Four years ago, it also happened to be the day that the Dobbs decision that ended Roe v. Wade was issued by the Supreme Court, authored by one of the Catholic justices, Samuel Alito. Nothing could be more fitting.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart stems from apparitions of Jesus a French nun, now known as Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, had of Jesus in the 1670s. She reported Him saying: “My divine Heart is so inflamed with love for men, and for you in particular, that, no longer able to contain in itself the flames of its ardent charity, it must pour them out through you and be manifested to them, in order to enrich them with its precious treasures which I now reveal to you.”
If we are ever going to even come close to ending abortion in America, we have to live out of that love, united to that love. That’s the stuff of miracles. And it’s why we pray — we need miracles!
“The ultimate test of your greatness is the way you treat every human being, but especially the weakest and most defenseless ones,” Pope John Paul II said at the Detroit airport, as he was about to leave the U.S. in 1987. “America the beautiful! So you sing in one of your national songs,” he said. “Yes, America, you are beautiful indeed, and blessed in so many ways,” including, he said, “in how you serve, and in how you keep alive the flame of hope in many hearts.”
There are at least 22 babies born (so far) because of the work of Bella Health and Wellness in Colorado, which the Becket Fund defended when the state tried to stop them from using a simple abortion-pill-reversal-hormone protocol. These particular children are alive because their mothers heard about Bella through the court case. God writes straight with crooked lines, they say, and so it is. And so, too, in our imperfections as stewards of the gift of religious liberty.
“Do not forget what took place here over two centuries ago,” Pope Francis said while at Independence Hall in September 2015. “Do not forget that Declaration which proclaimed that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that governments exist in order to protect and defend those rights.” Those renewed prayers to the Heart of Jesus can’t hurt us in this cause. No natural means can be more powerful in showing us the love that saves. The love that God bled for us. The love we need to be who we are as a nation — with the right to believe or not to believe.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.