Our Founding Fathers believed in the natural law, and for that we should thank God as we celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday. The natural law is man’s rational participation in the Eternal Law of God, which human reason alone can ascertain without the aid of grace or any special divine revelation. Until a few hundred years ago, almost everyone believed in it (at least implicitly), but now relatively few do, including, unfortunately, some who occupy positions of leadership. Thomas Jefferson was referring to this law when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Jefferson said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident”—in other words, These moral truths should be clear to anyone who is thinking rightly. They are not known because they’ve been revealed by a particular religion. They are, in a certain sense, written on the heart of every human person. Thus, even non-believers who are using their faculty of reason properly will admit that these things are true. They will also tell you that killing and stealing and coveting your neighbor’s wife are wrong.
Because the Founding Fathers of our country believed this, they had no problem with teaching the Ten Commandments in public schools and displaying them in public places. They rightly understood that the Ten Commandments did not promote the establishment of any particular religion; they were simply the expression of some of the primary tenets of natural law. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us in paragraph 1955: “The natural law states the first and essential precepts which govern the moral life. . . . Its principal precepts are expressed in the Decalogue [i.e., the Ten Commandments].”
The Church grounds her moral teaching in Scripture, Tradition—and the natural law. Thus, she provides us with clear, objective, reliable norms for human behavior.
To build a morality or a legal code on “subjective and cultural experience” is to build a morality or legal code on shifting sand. The Church has always understood that. So did the Founding Fathers of our country. And for that we should thank God as Catholics—and as Americans.
