America is a country of noble ideals. The hand of Thomas Jefferson sketched these words on July 4th, 1776, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.”

When we discussed the idea of a presentation on America for our Tri-State summer vacation, it was these ideals that came to our minds. We pondered them, discussed them, and in the discussion that followed, we considered these ideals of America in light of The Religious Sense and In Search of the Human Face.

“Our nature is a need for truth and fulfillment—that is, for happiness. All human movement, whatever it might be, is driven by this urgency that constitutes us.”

We found the truth of these words in our journey into America’s history, from its discovery, by accident, of the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492. Seeking another trade route to the Indies, in service to the Spanish crown, Christopher Columbus changed history with his discovery of an unknown land across the Atlantic. It was called the New World.

The Pilgrims, the first American settlers, had that same urge for truth and fulfillment. Seeking to establish a colony where they could escape corruption in England, Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in the harsh winter of December 1620.

Alexis De Tocqueville in Democracy in America wrote “(to go) to the New World not to improve their situation or to increase their wealth, but they left behind the comforts of their homeland to obey a purely spiritual need, exposing themselves to the inevitable hardships of existence in order to make an idea triumph”.

In their own words, “We were not driven out by persecution, for in fact, the Church thrives under persecution. The true danger we feared was corruption, the loss of purity, and with it, the inability to pass our faith on to our children in its original integrity.”

The Pilgrims believed they could create a new civilization out of the wilderness, untainted by human corruption. This instinct is what Fr. Giussani refers to in his book In Search of a Human Face when he says “We need to keep in mind the decisive influence of what the Gospel called “the world” which shows itself as the enemy of a stable, dignified, and consistent formation of the human personality. There is an incredibly strong pressure from the world that surrounds us.”

We see, in these first American settlers, the birth of the American ideal; the emphasis on moral purity, the struggle to conquer oneself and one’s environment, and above all, the ideal of freedom, as the ability to fulfill one’s destiny.

These ideals became years later the rallying cry of a colonial nation in defiance of the English crown. The long and difficult Revolutionary War was animated by these high ideals of our founding fathers. One thinks of the patriot Nathan Hale, who when captured, declared on the point of death, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” When freedom was eventually won, gloriously on the battlefield, a new American nation was born. The struggle for independence gave birth to a definition of American nationhood and national mission that persists to this day—an idea closely linked to freedom, for the new nation defined itself as a unique embodiment of liberty in a world overrun with oppression.

It is only when we turn the pages of history we discover, painfully, some limits to that freedom, for some five hundred thousand slaves were in those colonies at the time of the American revolution, who so nobly clamored for freedom from the English crown. One can only imagine the lament in the hearts of so many souls; but I too am an American and I too want freedom.

This limit on freedom shows from the earliest moments of our country’s history the danger of reason, when not purified by grace and not illumined by Faith. In The Religious Sense, Fr. Giussani writes “the deterioration of reason’s flight path by a kind of gravitational force, lies in the claim that reason can measure the real, identify, and thus define what the meaning of everything should be. In the final analysis, what does it mean to claim to define the meaning of everything? It means to claim to be the measure of everything, or, in other words, it means to claim to be God”.

A country founded on ideals, always pursuing those ideals, with daring and boldness, yet also falling into the idolatry of self and declaring themselves the measure of all things.

St. John Paul II in Redemptor Hominis writes, “Man remains a being that is incomprehensible to himself, his life is senseless if he does not encounter Jesus Christ. This is why Christ the Redeemer fully reveals man to himself.”

Over the course of her history, it has been a distinctly Christian witness to the truth, that America has been recalled back to her ideals. Harriet Tubman’s faith sustained her risking her own life to help many slaves escape to freedom on the Underground Railroad. Abraham Lincoln’s faith counseled him to mercy in the aftermath of the Civil War. As he stated in his second inaugural address, "With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Yet a hundred years passed and still those wounds were not healed. For there were men still languishing, not in the bonds of slavery, but in chains of stifling discrimination, the whips not of the slave master, but of the sheriff.

America’s ideals were again called into question and so Martin Luther King Jr. founded the civil rights movement to make America worthy of her ideals again. Tutored in the natural law of St. Thomas Aquinas and committed to the nonviolence of Gandhi, he preached, “With this faith we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last.” One such Jewish leader who joined hands with Dr. King was Rabbi Joshua Heschel, who remarked, “For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.”

Our journey through America history reaches its summit with Christian witness as the embodiment of America’s ideals. In response to the brutality of Indian raids and the savage massacres of the American settlers, the lives of St. Isaac Jogues and St. Jean de Brébeuf and companions gave eloquent answers in their martyrdom. In a slavery that obscures the very image of God in men, the lives of venerable Fr. Augustus Tolton and Pierre Toussaint speak. They were born slaves and yet free. In the westward expansion and a nation teeming with millions of immigrants, the lives of St. Catherine Drexel and St. Francis Xavier Cabrini testify that we are indeed E Pluribus Unum.

Reflecting on all this, we would do well to ponder the words of Fr. Giussani, "You see ... America is like a teenager, full of energy, desire, constantly in action, always following her dreams. And, like a teenager, she does damage in the process...But that is why we love America.

It's the centrality of the person, the desire to always build, the continuous attempt to reach out for the stars. Like us, just like us. There is only one thing missing, Jesus, the recognition of His presence. This is the testimony you are called to bring there.”

As we closed the history book of our presentation, we note that there is still a page to be written in America’s story; still a wilderness of opinion to be conquered, still warring tribes of natives ready to make war at a moment’s notice. There is still an America to be won.

In Roland Emmerich’s epic war drama The Patriot, Benjamin Martin also remains haunted by his past; the times of life when he betrayed his ideals. Then when grief and despair visit, he is tempted to abandon these ideals altogether. It is only in the witness of another that he rediscovers his why; the belief in a just cause. Providentially, he finds an old American flag, and he sees that it was once tattered, but was now mended. Reflecting on this, he begins again in hope.

As the prophet Isaiah comforted Israel in her affliction, so we should also take comfort, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”