A very odd thing happened to me the other day in Prague. Now Prague – like the other cities of the former Austria-Hungary – is a city I love to visit and never feel homesick in. Indeed, apart from missing friends, family, and very specific places, I rarely feel any homesickness on this side of the water. But they were having a Sokol parade – Sokol is a Czech athletic movement made of groups of Czechs located all over the country and across the planet. Suddenly, a group carrying the shield of the First U.S. Cavalry Division and wearing a variety of uniforms marched down the street, closely followed by a group carrying a banner saying, “Saddle River, NJ” and clutching little US flags. I waved my hat, and one man ran out of formation and handed me a flag, which I then waved with gusto – my eyes almost teary over that little star-spangled banner.
This might strike some as rather odd coming from me – and never more than in this month of July, opening as it does with Independence Day. For those who follow my writings, it will be apparent that just as I favour the Cavaliers over the Roundheads and the Jacobites over the Whigs, so too do I believe the Loyalists were in the right in the 1775-1783 conflict. From that war, final Catholic Emancipation in the British Empire was delayed by decades; the defeat of George III’s attempts at constitutional reform set the stage for the figurehead Monarchy of to-day in Britain and the Commonwealth Realms; the bankruptcy resulting from French intervention in the conflict set the stage for the 1789 revolution in that country which would engulf all of Europe and continue to poison Church and State until to-day. Ultimately, the revolution produced a government whose disastrous interventions in Hispanidad in 1898, Central Europe in 1918, Yalta and Potsdam in 1945, and various Third World nations from the end of World War II to the present have caused untold suffering abroad. Its more recent embrace of infanticide, perversity, and euthanasia have done the same at home. Why then, the tears of joy at seeing “Old Glory?”
In a word, because there is so much more to the United States of America than those undeniable evils. To me, celebrating the 4thof July is not an approbation of revolt against a rightful Monarch (who, incidentally, gave my French-Canadian ancestors the Quebec Act, and Catholics in the rest of the Empire the first Catholic Emancipation Act of 1778). Rather, it is a celebration of the country of my birth; regardless of how dodgy its origins may have been, it is the land God chose for me to be born in. If the Constitution has undeniably non- and even anti-Catholic ideology in it, it also allowed us the freedom to evangelise these United States. If we did not do so, it was not the fault of the government, but of ourselves – it was Catholics who punished such as Frs. John Thayer, Michael Mueller, and Leonard Feeney for converting so many of our non-Catholic brethren.
Governments aside, what a marvellous country it is! I have strayed into all 50 of the United States. Their colonial, revolutionary, and civil war sites remind one constantly of the sacrifices of both sides in our various internecine conflicts. God has certainly given us incredible scenery of every kind, as well unimaginable natural and manufactured wealth. From the Indians, Blacks, and various colonial settlers to immigrants of every decade since independence, every nation on Earth has contributed to our peopling; on our soil are scores of subcultures with innumerable folkways of their own. As in the other settler countries of the Americas, Australia, South Africa, and so on, most of those who came here from the Mother Continent and elsewhere were those who did not fit in in: religious, political, and social eccentrics; economic visionaries – justified or otherwise; or simply the difficult.
From that mix has emerged quite a culture, indeed! Antebellum America gave us the prose of Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, and Poe; the poetry of Longfellow; and the music of Stephen Foster, to name just a few. After the Civil War, the arts and sciences blossomed: the Golden Age of American Illustration; the Great American Songbook; the City Beautiful Movement; the Colonial Revival; the American version of the Arts and Crafts Movement; Vaudeville; and latterly the Golden Ages of Radio, Hollywood, Broadway, Pulp Fiction, and Comic Books. The settling of the vast frontier, the coming of railroads, telegraph, telephone, the automobile, the aeroplane – all the many inventions which America shared with the world or perfected after stealing them from someone else have transformed the entire planet.
If we Catholics failed to evangelise, we did build. Every State boasts beautiful Catholic cathedrals, shrines, basilicas, and even parish churches that would be envied by the Europeans if they did not have so many of their own. For all that so many of these have been shut down and destroyed in the past few decades and more shall be, there remain still a large number of them. Each State has its own Catholic Conference and there is of course the national one that occasionally do good work; the Knights of Columbus and those of Peter Claver endeavour to help bring the Faith into the public sphere, while the Military Archdiocese looks after the Catholics in our armed forces. The American branches of the Orders of Malta and the Holy Sepulchre are quite active. Certainly, Catholic Traditionalism is alive and well in the USA.
All of this is encompassed in our United States. For all of the ill that certainly flourishes within them, they remain lovely places. We have still the freedom to evangelise, even though wokery and cancel culture take their toll. We have an obligation to seek out the best of everything that remains within our given towns, counties, states, and the union as a whole, and nurture it according to our ability. Our efforts to preserve the natural, built, and intangible heritage of our country can serve as a means of evangelising those with whom we share these efforts.
But for any of this to happen, we have to cultivate a true and loyal patriotism. Not the sort that is based on some “American idea” – and ceases to love if the country as it is fails to live up to some abstract ideal. Nor the kind of patriotism that equates the country with its political institutions. No, we need to see the great land whose patroness is Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. The country whose best days may well be far ahead of her, especially if she is converted with her peoples to the true Faith.
Living here in the wreckage of the Habsburg Monarchy, it has been brought home to me again and again that a multinational state cannot only work but become an organic reality to its peoples if it is indeed governed by supranational principles. In the United States, the American religion of freedom played that role – but it is now dead. In Central Europe it was shared loyalty to the Catholic Church and the House of Habsburg – both of which our president Wilson successfully shattered in 1918. It is blessedly ironic that the cultus of Bl. Emperor Karl is growing so rapidly in the United States, to the point to where there are at least 30 shrines to him across the 50 States. On his death bed he declared himself to be suffering “that his peoples might come back together.”
As the parade marched by me that day in Prague and I saw the Stars and Stripes, I could not help but be overwhelmed by love for that flag and the peoples it represents. Bereft of both altar and throne, both the United States and the once and perhaps future Habsburg realms resemble each other. But just as the Emperor died loving the countries whose leaders had betrayed him, so we must love the country whose leaders have so far betrayed us and the land over which they rule. It is not about them, but about us. So let us conclude this July 4th and its aftermath with this prayer:
O Mary, mother of mercy and refuge of sinners, we beseech thee, be pleased to look with pitiful eyes upon poor heretics and schismatics.
Thou who art the seat of wisdom, enlighten the minds that are miserably enfolded in the darkness of ignorance and sin, that they may clearly know that the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church is the one true Church of Jesus Christ, outside of which neither holiness nor salvation can be found.
Finish the work of their conversion by obtaining for them the grace to accept all the truths of our Holy Faith, and to submit themselves to the Supreme Roman Pontiff, the Vicar of Jesus Christ on earth; that so, being united with us in the sweet chains of divine charity, there may soon be one only fold under the same one Shepherd; and may we all, O glorious virgin, sing forever with exultation: Rejoice, O virgin Mary, thou only hast destroyed all heresies in the whole world.
