WHY THE DECLINE OF PATRIOTISM?

by Fulton J. Sheen

There are two reasons, the first reason I believe is that we live in an age of anti-hero’s.  Today the spirit of America is “I’ve got to me” and so if anyone else is above us with the the spirit of sacrifice and dedication, we try to drop them to our level.  He’s a reproach to us that Patriot and hero.  He is one of the reasons I think why the lives that are written about our great Patriots today are almost like gossips.  Look at the recent lives of Washington that shows how much money he spent, Jefferson, that he consorted with a Black woman.  Abraham Lincoln is called a racist, imagine, and now the attacks on Kennedy.  As soon as we find a great man we ask, wonder why he acts that way.  We impugn his motives. So it’s difficult to have a hero and Patriot.

Another reason is, we have been humiliated and we take it out on our country.  We have been brought up on the great American dream; we have more televisions and electric shavers, radios, automobiles, gadgets than any other country in the world.  We believed in definite progress that gets better and better, nothing could stop us.  Then the Arabs shut off the oil and we begin to find dishonesty in high places and low places and we took it out on our country.  We began to demean it, and the result is there is a great decline in Patriotism. 

What is it that makes a Patriot? Well I will tell you one thing that doesn’t make a Patriot, when you have a country that is concerned with the values of people being on a horizontal line.  If people believe that the only important thing is making money or body sense/body pleasures or the love of power, if you believe that you will never have Patriotism.  They are living for themselves. 

What is required of Patriotism?  You have to have a value over and above the horizontal and earthly.  You have to have a realm up here where there is life, the love of honesty, loyalty, justice, sense of responsibility and God, the source of values.  Only when men look to something transcendent do they have Patriotism.  Then when they go up to this higher realm to draw on the divine then they can come down here and then their ready to dedicate themselves and sacrifice themselves. 

George Washing in 1774 was presiding over the Burgess of Virginia and word came down to him about an invasion of the civil rights in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and he said we have been disturbed by what has happened in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  So he said that in order that we may be strong enough to defend these rights I’m going to ask that on the first day of June there be a day of fasting, prayer and reparation.  He appealed to the divine to receive courage to defend the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Incidentally George Washington wrote, and you can look it up, in his diary on June 1^st that he went to church and fasted all day.   That was Washington appealing to the transcendent and therefore a Patriot.  Do you know that for seven years he was unable to visit his own Mount Vernon?  So dedicated to his country he did not see his Grandchildren until after the battle of Yorktown and after he saw them he had to take the duties of being our President. 

Benjamin Franklin at the Convention of Philadelphia said “we have been voting on the Constitution and we have as many I’s and Nay’s.  I think we’re learning the weakness of human nature and I think it is of great value now that we realize that when we were at battle with Great Britain we invoked the Divine and now we have almost forgotten the Divine aid.  I suggest that every day we pray to the Father of Lights and that two Ministers of God be invited to offer prayer at the beginning of this Convention”.  He appealed to the Transcendent, to the Divine.

Abraham Lincoln is the only President of the United States that ever gave us a philosophy of history.  In one of the most beautiful documents in our American life Abraham Lincoln said “we must remember that nations as well as individuals are subject to God’s judgment and that only nations that invoke God are ever blessed.  We have been blessed in this country as no other nation has ever been blessed, and yet we have forgotten God and may it not be that the awful calamity of civil war which now devastates our land be but a just punishment from God for our willful pride.  We have believed that all of our successes have been due to some virtue and powers of our own.  It behooves us then to humble ourselves before the Diving Majesty and to ask for forgiveness”. 

This is the way Patriots are made, their made because they have values above the earthly and human.