Loving the ‘Red, White, and Blue’

By Chris Sparks

With these sentiments of love and hope for America, I now say goodbye in words that I spoke once before: "Today, therefore, my final prayer is this: God will bless America, so that she may increasingly become - and truly be - and long remain one Nation, under God, indivisible. With liberty and justice for all" May God bless you all. God bless America! — St. John Paul II, Farewell Address, Washington, D.C., 1979.

The colors of the flag of the United States of America are also the colors of key parts of the Marian Fathers’ charism.

  • Red — the color of the Precious Blood that poured out of Christ’s side on the Cross.
  • White — the color of the first habit of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, and the color of the garments of the saints, washed clean by the blood of the Lamb (see Rev 7:13-14).
  • Blue — the color of the Blessed Mother’s mantle.

These are the colors of the Divine Mercy, and of Mary Immaculate. They are the colors of the Blood by which all sin is washed away, and of the waters of Baptism. These are the colors of our salvation, of the New Adam and the New Eve, the Patriarch and Matriarch of the new and everlasting kingdom of the Son of David. These are the colors of our Christian life, of our sweetness, of our hope. These colors mean more than just the life and community of one single nation on earth, but rather of the signs of our hope for all time.

And so it’s right and fitting that we should make July a time of special prayer for our nation using the devotions given to us by Jesus and Mary. It’s fitting that we intercede on behalf of the United States of America, born on July 4, 1776. And it’s fitting that we do it in a uniquely Catholic way.

The modern world has taken two key elements of our Catholic faith and wrenched them apart. Either, says modernity, the past was great, blessed, and beautiful, and so we should honor our ancestors, honor the founding fathers of our country … or, modernity continues, the past was bad, full of evil people doing evil deeds, and we should repudiate it utterly, draw nothing from it, cast it all behind us.

Either we honor our father and mother, or we repudiate their sins and make reparation.

But the Catholic faith calls us to a different path.

It is essential to our faith that all generations of humankind have been fundamentally good, for God said so from the very beginning. He looked at what He had made, and He called it good (see Gen 1:31). It is also essential to our faith that our first parents, Adam and Eve, sinned (see Gen 3). The consequences of that original sin have impacted every generation since then, and will continue to have an impact till the end of time.

It is essential to our Catholic faith that we both honor our parents and all those who have come before, and also that we pray for the dead, that we offer suffrages for the sins of past generations. Our God is merciful and just, and so we know that even if past generations have been saved by Jesus, they may well still be enduring the temporal punishment due to sin in Purgatory. We know that human beings are more than just a collection of individuals, but rather members of a natural family because of our common parentage. We also know that God calls us all to membership in His family, in the Mystical Body of Christ, and that our sins or our sanctity does have an impact on the life of the rest of the Body.

So when the modern world attempts to confound us, demanding we choose either to believe in a simply heroic past or a simply sinful past, that we either celebrate our forefathers as heroes or damn them as criminals and sinners, Christ demands of us a different path.

We must honor our father and mother, honor our ancestors, honor the nations from which we’ve sprung and the history that makes us who we are. We are to honor the societies that have formed us, the people who handed down the language, the culture, the folkways in which we grew up.

And we must pray for them. We are to pray for our ancestors, for our nation, for those who have gone before because “all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23).

“My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober” — G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (1901), from the chapter, “A Defence of Patriotism.”

We are to know our history, both good and bad, both the genius of the Founding Fathers (manifested in the Declaration of Independence and in the U.S. Constitution, for instance) and the sins of our past (slavery; the many betrayals and slaughters of the Native Americans; Jim Crow; etc.). We are to be honest about the sins of the past while never ceasing to honor our forebears, never ceasing to be grateful for the gifts of life, of culture, of civilization we’ve received from those who’ve gone before. We are to celebrate the true, the good, and the beautiful in our history, and work to correct the historic injustices still impacting our neighbors in the present day. We are to pray in thanksgiving for the gifts we’ve received from past generations, and we are to pray in reparation for the sins of those who’ve gone before, offering suffrages in order to speed them through Purgatory.

We see this love of country and spiritual reparation for the sins of country in the life of St. Faustina. She records in her Diary:

One day Jesus told me that He would cause a chastisement to fall upon the most beautiful city in our country [probably Warsaw]. This chastisement would be that with which God had punished Sodom and Gomorrah. I saw the great wrath of God and a shudder pierced my heart. I prayed in silence. After a moment, Jesus said to me, "My child, unite yourself closely to Me during the Sacrifice and offer My Blood and My Wounds to My Father in expiation for the sins of that city. Repeat this without interruption throughout the entire Holy Mass. Do this for seven days." On the seventh day I saw Jesus in a bright cloud and began to beg Him to look upon the city and upon our whole country. Jesus looked down graciously. When I saw the kindness of Jesus, I began to beg His blessing. Immediately Jesus said, For your sake I bless the entire country. And He made a big sign of the cross over our country. Seeing the goodness of God, a great joy filled my soul (39).

We know from Fr. Sopocko’s other writings that the sin for which Warsaw was to be punished was abortion. Elsewhere, St. Faustina recorded:

1934. On the day of the Assumption of the Mother of God … After a short time, I saw the Mother of God, unspeakably beautiful. She said to me, My daughter, what I demand from you is prayer, prayer, and once again prayer, for the world and especially for your country. For nine days receive Holy Communion in atonement and unite yourself closely to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. During these nine days you will stand before God as an offering; always and everywhere, at all times and places, day or night, whenever you wake up, pray in the spirit. In spirit, one can always remain in prayer (325; see also 714, 1251).

As St. Paul VI wrote in his 1972 message for the World Day of Peace, “If you want peace, work for justice.” Praying for our nation and doing reparation for the sins of our past and present is a crucial part of that work of justice, one that only faithful, practicing Catholics can really perform. Who else has the Mass, the Eucharistic sacrifice to which we can join our prayers, our works, and our needs and intentions? Who else has the Rosary and the Divine Mercy devotions? Who else knows to turn to the Communion of Saints for their powerful intercession, or to ask the Holy Souls in Purgatory to pray for us on earth?

This month, as we celebrate the Fourth of July, let’s rededicate ourselves to remembering the founding of our nation, taking inspiration from the eternal principles and truths that undergirded it, and making spiritual reparation for all the times and ways in which we’ve fallen short over the years. Let’s celebrate the ringing reaffirmation of self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and seek to ensure that our nation’s laws reflect those self-evident truths, deriving from the laws of nature and nature’s God a truly just government. Let us learn from the past, making a searching examination of national conscience, and recognize the ways in which we’ve fallen short, then seek to live our nation’s principles to the full in the present so that we may have a future full of hope.

Let us once again commit ourselves, as our Founding Fathers did, to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Let us earnestly devote ourselves to Divine Mercy and Mary Immaculate with the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, trusting in the loving intercession of the patroness of the United States, the Immaculate Conception, and pray for those who made our country what it is today, whether their contributions were for good, for ill, or both. Let us pray for our country, and for our neighbors, serving the Church and the world where the need is greatest with the mightiest resources at our disposal: our prayers.

We must love our country, and so celebrate the good in her as well as do reparation for her sins.

God bless America.

Photo by Štěpán Vraný on Unsplash

Chris Sparks serves as senior book editor for the Marian Fathers. He is the author of the Marian Press book How Can You Still Be Catholic? 50 Answers to a Good Question.

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LAMDVD

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