The Pope’s 2015 Speech to Congress: Essential Aspects of American Catholicism

By Michael Patrick O’Brien

On a late September morning in 2015, I sat in my car in the parking lot of a physical therapist’s office, and listened with excitement to the radio, as Pope Francis gave the first ever papal address to the United States Congress. I thought then that it was one of the most important moments in the history of the American Catholic Church. Reading and remembering the speech again, two years later, I am certain my first reaction was correct.

The Pope’s Congress speech expressed essential aspects of what I was taught, and have always thought, it means to be an American Catholic. Indeed, the Pope rather masterfully did what so many Catholics strive to do every day in the United States. He blended together, into a coherent philosophy of life, the great principles enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, and the values expressed in hundreds of years of traditional Catholic doctrine about social justice.

The Pope’s speech highlighted the lives and works of four Americans, two Catholic and two not: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton. You can read the whole speech here:https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/september/documents/papa-francesco_20150924_usa-us-congress.html The speech explained that these four persons “shaped fundamental values which will endure forever in the spirit of the American people.”

How did they shape those fundamental values? The Pope summarized: “A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did, when it fosters a culture which enables people to ‘dream’ of full rights for all their brothers and sisters, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton.”

Non-Catholics like Lincoln and King gave real and true meaning to the statement in the great American Declaration that: “all men are created equal.” Their words, actions, and martyrdom powerfully illustrated Catholic teaching on the same topic, for the church holds that inequality mocks the mandate from Jesus that we treat our neighbors as ourselves. As the American Catholic bishops have described, “racism is more than a disregard for the words of Jesus; it is a denial of the truth of the dignity of each human being revealed by the mystery of the Incarnation.”

Just as Lincoln and King illustrated Catholic teaching by giving life to the words of the Declaration of Independence, Day and Merton illustrated the values of the Declaration, i.e. that all “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” by giving life to Catholic teaching. Day devoted herself to the poor, in the model of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, trying to construct a society based on Gospel values, including fellowship. She wrote: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” Merton, a Trappist monk in Kentucky, devoted himself to the contemplative life, but from his quiet monastic hermitage he spoke out powerfully against racism, war, and nuclear weapons, and in favor of inter-religious dialogue and peace.

The Pope’s speech shows how all these concepts, principles, and declarations are quintessentially Catholic and, at the same time, quintessentially American. In weaving them together so seamlessly and so eloquently, he has helped all of us better understand what it means to be an American Catholic. And he has revealed for us a path we can follow in order to live as an American Catholic.

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The Boy Monk blog celebrates its launch, and marks the two year anniversary of the Pope’s landmark speech and trip to the United States, by devoting the entire blog this initial week to remembering the historic 2015 papal visit.