By Michael Pakaluk
The American bishops at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 did not say, in their Pastoral Letter, that the Founders “built better than they knew.” Father John Courtney Murray and many others asserted this. But the claim is false.
Teach your children to take a special interest in the history of our own country. We consider the establishment of our country’s independence, the shaping of its liberties, and its laws as the work of a special Providence, its framers “building wiser than they knew,” the hand of the Almighty guiding them.
Their words were “wiser than they knew,” not “better than they knew.” What is the difference? The phrase “better than they knew” was, at that time, a very well-known allusion to a poem by Emerson. It was widely used to describe the Founding: that is why our bishops put the phrase in quotation marks; they were not inventing the phrase but repeating it.
As popularly used, it meant that things turned out even better than expected. However, our bishops took care to change “better” to “wiser,” precisely in order to give a supernatural interpretation to the Founding, as the work of divine providence. Of course, all who share in divine wisdom do things that are “wiser” than they know.
Let us pause to consider that it is not compatible with this view, of the Founding as providential, that the Founding was vitiated from the beginning by an implicit philosophy of Hobbesian selfishness.
Our bishops, gathered in Baltimore in 1884, were only repeating what the first American bishops believed a hundred years earlier, those who were present at the Founding. Shortly after the election of George Washington as our first president, those bishops wrote to him to express their good wishes: “Your exalted maxims and your unwearied attention to the moral and physical improvement of our country have already produced the happiest effects.”
They added:
By example, as well as by vigilance, you extend the influence of laws over the manners of our fellow-citizens; you foster respect for religion and inculcate, by words and actions, that principle on which the welfare of nations so much depends: that a superintending Providence governs the events of the world and watches over the conduct of men.
They describe Washington as “the principal instrument” of this providence and opine: “we conceive that no human means are so available to promote the welfare of the United States as the prolongation of your health and life, in which are included the energy of your example, the wisdom of your counsels, and the persuasive eloquence of your virtues.”
Those who are blind must trust those who can see. If the corruption of our politicians since then, the greed and self-assertion of our fellow-citizens, and the misinterpretations of our Constitution by unwise jurists have blinded us to the wisdom and divine blessing upon the Founding, we must look to Catholics of an earlier time to see correctly and, seeing, as Catholics, fall in love with our country again.
About the author:
Michael Pakaluk, a specialist in Aristotle and ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is professor of Political Economy at the Busch School of Business of The Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, MD, with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their children. His collection of essays, The Shock of Holiness (Ignatius Press), is now available. His book on Christian friendship, The Company We Keep, is available from Scepter Press. He was a contributor to Natural Law: Five Views, published by Zondervan last May, and his most recent book on the Gospels came out with Regnery Gateway in March, Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew’s Gospel. You can follow him on Substack at Michael Pakaluk.