Celebrate Independence Day as true Americans.
Celebrate Independence Day as true Americans.
Monroe, N.Y. — “You have to love people. And, you know, Americans love people.”
We were standing outside the U.S. Supreme Court. It wasn’t this June’s decisions coming in. It was January 2014. And as I waited outside to get in, to support my friends who were plaintiffs and Catholic University of America professor Mark Rienzi — now the president of Becket, the religious-liberty defenders — we wondered why pro-lifers always wind up cold outside the Court. The Dobbs decision that undid Roe v. Wade in June 2022 did ultimately give us the opportunity for events in and around Independence Avenue in warmer weather. But it was another kind of warmth that lead plaintiff Eleanor McCullen wanted us to focus on, giving an impromptu fervorino to the press gathered for anything they could make news with.
What we always have with Eleanor is wisdom. She is our grandmotherly conscience. Would that we would listen.
Eleanor was fighting a 35-foot buffer zone rule in the Bay State because it was an obstacle to charity. She worked with it, but it was a barrier to communicating with women who were looking for signs of hope.
People say, ‘How can you love the woman and man? You never knew them.’” She was talking about the bewilderment around her service to strangers — pregnant mothers and confused fathers looking for life-giving guidance, more than the abortion way out. So she’d stand outside of Planned Parenthood — at whatever distance she was restricted to — and be an offering of help to young women who might already be scheduled for an appointment to end the lives of their children.
Abortion is, of course, so intimate and emotional. And yet, what McCullen was doing had nothing to do with abortion politics, in a way. It was a charitable dedication to women in need — it was simply American.
“Guess what?” she asked, rhetorically. “What about all of those hurricanes and disasters? The Philippines and Katrina? What did our American people do? They got in planes and trains and buses and they built up the houses for the people.” Her point: “We are a caring country, but the sad part is, we take the life of our young in the womb, but we are a genuine society, we are a loving society. We help people. And that’s all I’m trying to do—help someone who is desperate and abandoned.” It’s not all that remarkable or exotic. We saw it when Hurricane Katrina hit, she said, looking toward a most recent example at the time of Americans being Americans.” This is who we are, McCullen argued. “Aren’t our people always right there to help?” she asked and exclaimed.
“We are generous,” she said.
“But, we do take our children from the womb.”
For the fourth anniversary of the Dobbs decision, which ended Roe v. Wade, I found myself over an hour away from Manhattan, at a convent hidden within a protective shield of greenery. The trees weren’t a fortress from danger so much as noise and distraction — which, of course, is a kind of danger, and a chief one in our day and age. Marycrest is the home of the Parish Visitors of Mary Immaculate. There, Mother Maria Catherine has me thinking about Eleanor and Abraham Lincoln. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln famously concluded with “With malice toward none with charity for all . . .” This is what the first of the Parish Visitors had to say: “Were it not for charity,” she said of the Visitation, when a pregnant Mary visited her cousin, Elizabeth, miraculously with child. Charity made for the in-utero summit between Jesus and John the Baptist. This was a source of joy, a key moment in salvation history.
And it’s to be participants in this grand — and eternal — history that America is called to. Fifty years of legal abortion doesn’t reflect it. Nor do some of the U.S.’s recent postures toward refugees. But there is still time to reflect on what it means for a president to talk about the “mystic chord of memory,” as Lincoln did in his first inaugural.
Regarding charity: In his second inaugural, Lincoln said, “with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
We are surely a nation of walking wounded. Depending on how you look at it, we could even be considered a nation at war — not with Iran, though there is that debacle — but with ourselves.
Over by the George Washington Bridge, back in New York, are most of the remains of Mother Francis Xavier Cabrini. She died in 1917. Mother Tallon died in 1954. Both of them concerned themselves with orphans — Cabrini more obviously, materially, creating homes for orphans. Tallon’s mission focused on spiritual orphans in a more intense way, seeking to be an instrument of revitalization of faith, so that a local parish could be an encounter with the Risen Christ: He with glorified wounds, who invites us to know his mercy.
Were it not for charity, none of us would be here. That’s why Mother Cabrini had a dedication to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Mother Maria Catherine does too — she even moved her position in the chapel recently; now she is the general superior of the community Tallon founded, so she could have a better view of the embrace of Jesus signaling to her from one of the statues on the side of the altar. There the image is, again, above the humble tomb of Mother Tallon.
When the fireworks and cage fights are over, we could afford to see the synergy between a call to firmness from Lincoln and the first U.S.-born pope, Leo.
Just after visiting the birthplace of Mother Cabrini in the Lombardy region of Italy, the Chicago-born Leo emphasized the need for a universal contemplation. He cautioned that contemplative activity is not reserved for monks. “[B]y striving to set aside, amidst the commitments of our daily lives, quiet moments in which to enter into silence before God, to listen to his voice, to entrust our joys and concerns to him and to review our lives with him.”
Contemplation, Leo said, “helps us to have a more firm and conscious faith, and consequently to be credible and free disciples, men and women capable of reflecting the light of the Gospel in every setting and every situation of life, and of bearing witness to it even where its value is not understood or accepted.”
Credibility is the thing Grandma Eleanor wants us to understand. America has been a beacon for freedom seekers because we know what we are stewards of. When we lose this knowledge of our participation with the eternal, even as we face White House ballroom construction, critiques of Usha Vance’s Old Navy maternity wear discounts, midterm elections, and everything else, our politics suffers.
We are here because of and for charity. That ought to be the theme of the 250th. That’s the point of being alive, after all. Therein lies the solution to our sorrows and the healing of our woes. It’s how God does bless the USA — and he still sure does.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.