High on a hill overlooking the city of Pittsburgh is Saint Mary’s Church. Outside, the church that once looked down on the steel mills that supplied the war has a monument to the men who went overseas to win it.
The American Catholic Church loves her country. This is evident by the flags inside our sanctuaries, a sight you would be unlikely to see in, say, a British cathedral, which has its own competing national Church.
Patriotism, however, has fallen out of vogue with many young Americans, and I’m not quite sure why. It could be that we hold a grudge for the discrimination against Catholics in years past, a grudge that our grandparents certainly didn’t hold. It could also be an intellectual reason: a knowledge that there are certain values of the American founding that run antithetical to traditional Church teaching when taken to their extreme, to a heresy Leo XIII called out in Testem Benevolentiae.
