Msgr's Little 4th of July Visitation

Hello Everyone,

              This is my first appearance on “the blog.”  I think “the blog” was conceived as a way for the parish staff to electronically communicate with you.  The rest of the staff seemed sort of unsure about penning a Fourth of July message, so I said I would give it a shot (pun intended).  I am comparatively well fixed to do it because I just finished reading a 660 page book on the American Revolution.  It was among the better books I have read in recent months.  I decided to navigate it because my heart needs a diversion from its intensely melancholy habits and I should know more about the American Revolution.

              They tell me “the blog” will not admit of long discourses, so let me leap to the point:  The peculiar thing about the 4^th of July is that it is not the day the Declaration of Independence was written.  It is certainly not the day our country’s independence was achieved.  The 4^th of July is merely the day the Declaration of Independence was formally adopted by the young, tender, and fractious Congress.  The war for independence began at the Battle of Lexington with the “shot heard around the world” on 19 April 1775. Independence for the United States from Great Britain was not formally achieved until the signing of the Treaty of Paris on 3 September 1783!  You see then, the whole bloody, scattershot process took a little more than 8 years.

              During that time, Britain persevered in rusticated policies and well-worn political intrigues that kept it from making intelligent choices about armies, naval fleets, their commanders, their supply, and weapons technology.  If Great Britain had been even a little less hidebound to its doctrinaire myopias, it is very doubtful the United States could have succeeded in its quest for separation.  On the other hand, it would be hard to overstate the chaotic nature of the mess that passed for the government of the United States.  Congress was so broke and so disparate that it failed to provide for even a modest amount of material support for the revolutionary army.  The American revolutionary forces had few weapons, few vessels, few soldiers, few experienced officers, few uniforms, little shelter, little food, and little success, but little as it had it was ultimately enough to beat General Cornwallis at Yorktown and make King George III cry, “Uncle.”  Almost certainly the cause of independence would not have succeeded but for three factors:  The person of George Washington, the political, material, and military assistance of the Kingdom of France, and widespread passionate, personal devotion to the idea of personal freedom that endured from beginning to end.  To be sure, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it took another 89 years to even begin to extend the “inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to people of color.  Those rights are often still denied to the poor, the powerless, and the unborn.    

              What was enshrined on 4 July 1776 is an idea whose time had come:  The rule of monarchs and autocrats would be replaced by the rule of law.  Human beings would no longer be subjected to the vicissitudes of powerful personalities, their lives would be protected and enhanced by laws determined and interpreted by elected citizens.  It should be no wonder that such an ambitious new way of living would take many generations to evolve into something more reflective of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence vision.  Even Thomas Jefferson was not up to living out of it in 1776.  The ideals of our species routinely outrun the performance on our species.  But does that diminish the value of the ideals?  I do not think so.  Many other people also do not think so.  Perhaps that is why the United States continues to annually accept more immigrants (legally) than any other nation on the planet.  Indeed, I have read that the United States annually accepts more legal immigrants into itself than all the other nations of the earth put together.  If that is true, it is remarkable and more than suggests that the 18^th Century soldiers, who routinely slept in the snow and boiled tattered shoes to eat, midwifed something precious and worth maintaining.  On Independence Day, we would do well to honor the workaday people who established this nation and the sacred character of their cause.

 

In our Holy Communion,

Msgr. Bradley S. Offutt