The nation’s business is our business.  The true love of country demands from Catholics at this critical stage of our history to throw all their energies into the various social activities.  Society throughout the world is shaken in its very foundations.  This universal unrest in the political, social and economic spheres is a decided mark of the birth-throes of a new social order.  Therefore, we will conclude with Cardinal Gibbons; “The Church cannot remain an isolated factor in the nation.  The Catholic Church possesses spiritual and moral resources which are at the command of the nation in every crisis.”

The reform or remodelling of the social fabric, if it is to be effective and abiding, must ultimately rest on the definite and unchanging principles of morality.  These principles constitute the moral law, as physical principles are the basis of the physical law.  Ernest Fayle, in a very instructive article on “Reconstruction,” in the October number of the “London Quarterly Review,” makes a statement very pertinent to this matter; “The economic, political and social factors in human life are so inextricably entangled that if we accept quality of life and not mere power or wealth as the touchstone of national success we dare not, even in the consideration of economic or political questions, lose sight of the moral issues.”

The Catholic Church has always been the teacher and guardian of that natural moral law which stands as the foundation and buttress of the social edifice.  Her plans of Reconstruction rest on the eternal principles of equity which God has engraved on the human conscience and which the teachings of Christ have sanctioned and perfected.  In the light of Catholic doctrine moral laws are definite and unchanging, for they are the deliberate expression of the necessary and fundamental relations upon which rests human nature.  They are the living, free expression of man’s place in creation.  The most elaborate schemes and powerful organizations are soulless without these basic principles of morality and have but an ephemeral existence.

Is it not, therefore, a great act of patriotism to try to throw into the scales of the nation’s destinies the mighty weight of indestructible and tried principles?  A growing respect is to be found for the soundness, the wisdom and the justice of Catholic social principles, even in circles where our beliefs have not yet found acceptance.  True statesmen have always recognized the influence of the Catholic Church’s doctrine in social matters, although they may not believe in the truth of her teachings.  They always looked upon her principles of social life as the ballast that steadies the ship on heaving seas.  To make the Church a spiritual ally, to recognize her moral power and her far-reaching influence has always been considered good diplomacy and clear-sighted statesmanship.

Catholic’s Patriotism in Public Life