University of Dallas News

Issue date: 10/12/05 Section: News

Media Credit: John Schuler/University News During his lecture, Scott McDermott, from Vanderbuilt University, pointed out several Catholic influences in America´s founding. He said that Charles Carroll, a Catholic, played a key role in establishing and guarding democracy.

Contrary to the common view of the American founding and its influences, America was not only founded by protestant Enlightenment-educated thinkers, but was also subtly influenced by Catholic doctrine, Scott McDermott of Vanderbilt University said.
"I do not claim that the other colonial leaders consciously drew on the Catholic political thought," he said. "It is fair to say that they unwittingly reinvented the medieval ideas of popular sovereignty and the natural law tradition, and that they also structured their new governments in a way consistent with Catholic political thought."
Only one Catholic, Charles Carroll of Carollton, signed the Declaration, but as the last surviving signer he was a "national icon of his day," McDermott said.
Carroll was educated in France by Jesuits since Catholic education was illegal in his home state of Maryland. In that time-period, Jesuits were known for their teachings that man had a right to resist tyranny and they undoubtedly influenced Carroll's political thought.
Two other major influences in Carroll's life were his study of law and of Montesqueiu's writings. Caroll preferred Roman and civil law to the chaotic English common law made by judges in response to particular cases.
McDermott explained that before the Reformation, common law was understood to be based on natural law. St. Thomas taught that if a law 'conflicts with the law of nature it will no longer be law but rather a perversion of law.' He and others also held that when a ruler becomes a tyrant and forces his citizens to act contrary to natural law he abdicates his sovereignty and sovereignty reverts to the people who must then delegate a new sovereign.
However, after the Reformation, Henry VIII introduced the doctrine of the "Divine Right of Kings." Some post-Reformation commentators like Coke and Blackstone maintained the principle that laws not in accord with the natural law were null and void, but English judges rarely held to that concept in their rulings, McDermott said.
Carroll first entered the political arena in 1773 in a newspaper debate with lawyer Daniel Dulany, Jr., a proponent of the English system. However, Carroll insisted on looking beyond the common law to what he called the "clear and fundamental" principles of the English constitution.
McDermott explained that this insistence led John Adams to identify Carroll as part of the "mental revolution" that swept the colonies just prior to the Revolutionary War. Colonists no longer asserted their rights as Englishmen but their natural rights as human beings.
"The culmination of the American rediscovery of natural law and natural rights is, of course, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, with its appeal to the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," and its listing of the self-evident natural rights to justify resistance to tyranny," McDermott said. "Anglo-American republican liberalism embraced the natural law, not the general will, as its liberating principle."
When Carroll wrote Maryland's declaration he drew on Catholic corporatism, the theory that there is something called a "corpus mysticum republicae" - that is, a mystical body of the commonwealth - maintained the traditional natural rights of life, liberty, and property, and appealed to "that Almighty Being, who emphatically styled the Searcher of Hearts" for the declaration's truth, McDermott said.
In 1776, after returning from a commission to Canada with Benjamin Franklin, Charles Carroll, Fr. John Carroll, and Samuel Chase wrote to John Adams highlighting the need for independence and foreign alliance.
Soon after, Franklin was named ambassador to France, marking a turning point in separating American identity from its Protestant English origins.
McDermott said Carroll's election to congress on July 4, 1776 also helped clear the path for the alliance by convincing the body politic that Catholics could be patriots too.
Although Montesquieu revived the idea of a senate, Carroll made it his own while helping draft Maryland's constitution to create a strong senate guarding the body politic from the politicians of popular will.
Carroll also proposed an Electoral College to insure the Senate would remain independent of popular pressure, and was praised for doing so by James Madison in Federalist 63. The same concept was later used by the Constitutional Framers to elect the president.
In Carroll's commentary on the Constitution he wrote, "that government is the best which unites in its composition and frame the energy of monarchy, the wisdom of the aristocracy with the integrity, common interest, and spirit of democracy.'
McDermott said, "Here he echoed St. Thomas' account of the ideal state, in which "one is set in authority on account of his virtue, to rule over all; and under him are others ruling on account of their virtue; and nevertheless such governments belongs to all, both because the rulers can be chosen from all and because they are chosen by all."
McDermott concluded by saying that if Americans go back to the ideals that sparked the Revolution and reclaim the natural moral law, they can potentially unite the vast majority of citizens for political purposes as long as they can accept a divine personal lawgiver.
"The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God, still inscribed in our republican institutions, and still clearly legible on American hearts is the best earthly inheritance our ancestors left us," he said.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools