E Pluribus Unum: Being Catholic and Being American

My good friend, Fr. Bruce Nieli, CSP, has an excellent July 4th reflection at Busted Halo:

In a cultural climate such as the United States —where the sense of polarization along social, economic, political and religious lines seems to be the default posture— maintaining unity amidst great diversity has become a profound challenge.  As this division grows it can become increasingly difficult to hold onto one's identity while being open to the values, beliefs, and cultures of others.

How can I be a free person while living in community?  This question is a practical application of the age-old philosophical problem of maintaining unity amidst diversity.  How can I retain my uniqueness while belonging to others is a question faced by every family, every neighborhood, every village, and every nation, but it is by no means a new challenge. 

As we celebrate our nation’s independence it is important to remember how this same issue was faced by our forefathers who, during the Continental Congress of 1776, appointed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to create a seal and motto for the newly declared United States of America.  The thirteen colonies, with a highly diverse population, were to be one nation, one free people. The motto Franklin, Jefferson and Adams arrived at was e pluribus unum, the Latin phrase meaning "out of many, one" which can still be found today on the reverse side of the one dollar bill, within the Great Seal of the United States, on the ribbon carried by the bald eagle.

The opening of the “Pauline Year” on June 29, 2008 by Pope Benedict— celebrating the 2000 years since St. Paul’s birth—also reminds us that this same concept of unity out of diversity was taken up by Saint Paul 1700 years earlier. His model of the Church as the Body of Christ is ingenious: "For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and have all been made to drink of the one Spirit." (1 Corinthians 12: 13)

More recently, those seemingly diverse strains of thought—America’s and the Catholic Church's—found their convergence in the thinking of the "Yankee Paul," Father Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819-1888) the founder of the Paulist Fathers. Hecker’s insight— radical for his day—was that Catholicism and the American experience weren’t mutually exclusive, in fact they complemented each other quite well. …

Isaac Hecker, whose cause for sainthood was recently opened, had grappled with this e pluribus unum issue as a twenty-something New Yorker fresh out of the utopian Transcendentalist communes of Brook Farm and Fruitlands.  …  Hecker, in his idealism, would see in his newly embraced Catholicism a spirituality of e pluribus unum when, on July 14, 1844, he wrote in his diary:  "The Catholic Church has preserved unity without encroachment on individual liberty, and has preserved individual liberty without the loss of perfect unity."

For the rest of his essay, click here.