It Turns Out I Am a Patriot, After All

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After my whiny little post the other day about not feeling so very patriotic this Fourth of July, I did some thinking, and some listening, and some reading. It seems, the word 'patriot' has many definitions. And, according to definition by Fr. Stephen J. Brown in his article found at Catholic Culture, I find I am a patriot, after all. I have edited the article down to the parts I find most interesting. You can find the entire article here. It's a great article, but I know you don't have all day. You have to go grill some chicken and pop the top off an icy bottle of root beer. Happy Fourth of July!

"At first sight it would seem to be a very simple thing to define patriotism and to explain its meaning. It is not so simple. A few years ago somebody had the idea of inducing a score of distinguished persons to answer the question, What is patriotism? When they had done so he published the answers in a substantial volume. All that one of the reviewers of the book can say of the result is that the editor 'starts with the laudable intention of clarifying the vexed question of the nature of patriotism, but has not succeeded in riding the editorial horse with sufficient firmness to get safely home.' So it is a 'vexed question' and, apparently, not easy to clarify.

Yet we have always been told that patriotism is love of one's country. Is there anything obscure in the terms composing this definition? Well, in the first place 'love' is one of those words that have almost lost definite meaning owing to vagueness of usage and even positive misuse. 'Country' is a term that has many meanings. It could be translated into French by campagne, pays and patrie. It is this last that is the specific term for the definition of patriotism. And it is somewhat unfortunate that there exists in English no such specific term; fatherland, which is nearest, being really a German word which has never become wholly English. However what is more important than the term is the entity covered by the term 'country' when we speak of love of country. Not that people who are unable to define it may not be thoroughly patriotic. For patriotism, as we shall see, is an instinct almost as natural as the love of kith and kin, which needs no defining.

If then country, fatherland, patrie be what we have described it, can we come at a clearer notion of the nature and consequences of patriotism? It has always been described in terms of love—amor patriae. To have this clearer notion of patriotism must we then define love? I do not think so, if we look at the reality of things. For in point of fact this love varies, like other loves, from a vague sentiment to a passion, from mere complacency to active, self-sacrificing devotedness. We may compare it, as it has often been compared, to family love, and 'country' itself to the family enlarged. 'Patriotism,' writes Mr. John Eppstein, 'is the love of the family and of that human setting from which it is not normally possible to separate a man's conception of his family, namely a place, friends, neighbours, language, traditions—his native land in fact. So a man loves his country because he loves his own home, and the former love partakes of the intimacy and sacredness of the latter.'

St. Thomas Aquinas had already coupled together these two devotions, to parents and to country (Summa Theologica, 2a, 2ae, Q. 101). Dealing with the virtue of 'pietas,' dutifulness, he writes: 'The principles (or origins) of our being and governing are our parents and our country, which have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore, just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to 'pietas,' in the second place, to give worship to one's parents and one's country.' Thus, unlike nationalism, patriotism comes within the sphere of virtue, duty, and moral obligation.

That this is and has always been the teaching of the Catholic Church may be gathered from the pronouncements of the Head of the Church as collected in such a work as La Patrie et la Paix. Textes pontificaux.⁵ Thus we find Pius X, in an address delivered in French to French pilgrims on April 19, 1909, saying in express terms: 'Si le catholicisme etait ennemi de la patrie, il ne serait plus une religion divine' (if Catholicism were the enemy of the country, it would no longer be a divine religion). He went on to say (the translation is mine): Yes, it is worthy not only of love but of predilection that country (patrie) whose sacred name awakens in your mind the most cherished memories and makes quiver every fiber of your soul, that common country which has cradled you, to which you are bound by bonds of blood and by still nobler bonds of affection and tradition.'

Twenty years earlier Pope Leo XIII, in his Encyclical Sapientiae Christianae set forth patriotism as a moral obligation based on natural law. 'If,' writes the Pope, 'the natural law bids us give the best of our affection and of our devotedness to our native land so that the good citizen does not hesitate to brave death for his country, much more is it the duty of Christians to be similarly affected to the Church.'

In view of these and many similar pronouncements, the editors of the work mentioned above include in their synthesis of papal teachings the two following propositions: Country (/a Patrie) is a legitimate and noble institution which is postulated by natural law and consecrated by Christianity; Love of country is one of the obligatory forms of human and Christian charity towards the neighbor, coming in between the love of family and the love of mankind.

A passage which expresses clearly and simply what I believe to be the truth in this matter of patriotism is from a pamphlet of the Catholic Association for International Peace entitled Patriotism, Nationalism, and the Brotherhood of Man, being a report of a Committee on National Attitudes, the chairman of which was the distinguished historian Carlton J. H. Hayes. The passage is as follows:

'Men have always lived in groups. Apparently it is a part of God's plan that they should. And one of the things which have enabled them to live in groups has been the loyalty —the patriotism—which God has implanted in their very nature. This loyalty—this patriotism—this love of country'—involves a triple affection. It embraces an affection for familiar places, an affection for familiar persons, and an affection for familiar ideas. One's 'country' connotes all of these: the land itself, the persons on it, and the traditions associated with it. One's 'native land'—the terra patria, la patrie, das Vaterland—is an extension of hearth and home. It is the soil that has given life to one's forefathers and holds their tombs, and which in turn nurtures one's children and grandchildren. It is a link between generations, between families and friends, between common experience of the past and that of the present and future.' . . .

'The fatherland— 'la patrie'— is first and foremost the soil, the soil with its own peculiar physiognomy, the soil with the contours and undulations that lend it its character. . . . But before all else the soil keeps its hold upon us by the memories it stores up for us, memories whose range is as wide and as varied as life itself, memories that dwell in the intimate depths of our hearts, but more than all that memories the common possession of which links together in a bond of union the compatriots who share them. . . .

'Land of birth, land of cradles and of tombs, in a word, land of the family,—and already there enters into the very idea of fatherland a more living and more lovable reality: the family, of which the fatherland is but the historical flowering, the family, from which the fatherland comes forth as from its prototype and native element. The fatherland is the uniting bond of fathers, the bond of ancestors, the bond of memories and of domestic traditions.

'Let us unite religion with the fatherland, the altar with the hearth. What point of attachment can be more solid? . . . Always do you find those two intimately united. . . . The altar and the hearth —there we have as it were the two historical poles of the fatherland, pro aris et focis."

Source: Catholic culture.org

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