The Catholic virtue of Patriotism

[Ederico]

National Patriotism in Papal Teaching

by

Most Reverend John J. Wright, D.D.

Bishop of Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Extract from Part One, The Nature and Object of Patriotism, I, The existence and nobility of the Virtue of Patriotism, text in blue are my personal notations.


That patiotism is a powerful force in modern society no one who has access to a newspaper can doubt. That there exists a considerable confusion as to whether this patriotism, especially in the form it has taken in an era of nationalism, is a good or bad force, no one who reads two papers can long deny. A single rack in a Public Library displayed simultaneously an issue of Scribner's featuring an article that sand “The End of Nationalism”, and an issue of The Living Age containing a review of the trend “Back to Nationalism”. Both editors evidently considered their articles topical and true.


Unlike the school of extreme humanitarians, the Popes, concerned with social forces insofar as they represent the action of the moral powers of men, make no effort to deny the existence of a legitimate sentiment of patriotism, a sentiment the Popes relate to the vritue they call “patriae caritas”; neither do they deny its great dignity in the the hierarchy of virtues. Thus, Pope Leo XIII, writing on the third centenary of Peter Canisius, declared it no reproach to a people that they should labor for the advancement of their fatherland's glory (patrium decus provehendum), but rather one of their chief titles to praise (Pope Leo XIII). So, too, Benedict XV declares that while we are bound to love all men, not excluding our enemies, in holy charity, we are bound to love with a special attachment (peculiari modo) those with whom we share a common fatherland. With religion itself, patriotism is the other of “two duties of the first order from which no man, in this life, can exempt himself” (Pope Leo XIII). This concept of patriotism as a virtue comparable in dignity to religion is frequent in the pronouncements of the Popes; we need only to cite the phrase of Pope Benedict (XV), who praised those who “are led by the twin virtues of religion and patriotism” (Religio et Patria).