Rothermere American Institute

This study argues that Aquinas’ account of tyranny grants citizens a surprisingly wide ambit for resistance to tyrants but that such actions demand a tall order for even the most virtuous citizens: knowledge of the hierarchy of ends in politics and the prudence to apply it under the pressure of a tyrannical government. We consider sections of the Summa Theologiae and De Regno, Aquinas’ most sustained discussion of tyranny, to demonstrate the theoretical illumination that the former provides of the latter. De Regno, we argue, presents a negative teaching of the best regime and citizen, one in which citizens are shown the need for their own virtue in discerning the roots of tyranny and their remedy. With the Summa, we show how such prudential decisions fit within the orders of charity and piety: the citizen must come to see love of country as intrinsically ordered to love of family and God. Ultimately, Aquinas’ resistance theory rests on a hierarchy of ends for civil government that orders both ruler and citizen to God.

Conventional understandings of Catholicism, especially the claim that the pope held temporal power over all civil rulers, presented a signal challenge to early American Catholics’ civil and religious liberty. Yet reform-minded Catholics in the North Atlantic world asserted their independence from the temporal powers of external authorities, including the pope. Catholics who participated in the American founding, such as Charles Carroll of Carrollton and John Carroll, drew from an intellectual tradition of conciliarism that was rooted in Catholic thought yet compatible with republicanism. The Carrolls’ public support of the nation’s foundational documents and their development of the American Catholic Church presented to the broader political and religious public a Catholic tradition that advocated not only a republican view of temporal independence but also a juridical, nonhierarchical understanding of church and state. Catholics of this sort were not a foil to American religious and political arrangements; instead, they fit their beliefs within the ideologies of the American founding and thereby answered Protestant charges that Catholics should be legally penalized. These conclusions offer compelling reasons to include the conciliarist tradition within the “multiple traditions approach” of American founding historiography.

This paper argues that the two warnings against internal factions and external alliances in George Washington’s Farewell Address—often considered separate admonitions—are instead a unified rhetorical strategy to imagine a nation. In both his text and context, Washington constructs an “imagined community” specifically though his discourse on patriotism. While Washington’s stark contrasts between “true” and “false” patriotism would only widen the division of current U.S.
politics, Washington’s conception of patriotism ought to be emulated in the modern Presidency in order to advance a transcendent form of patriotism.

An unavoidable task in historical writing is beginning and ending within particular time periods, dates, or moments. But while a published article denotes its end—the publication date—historical writing often does not admit of a beginning. The genesis of an article, like the history that it tells, is multifaceted, yet can reveal the complex relationship between history and historian.

How early American Catholics justified secularism and overcame suspicions of disloyalty, transforming ideas of religious liberty in the process.

In colonial America, Catholics were presumed dangerous until proven loyal. Yet Catholics went on to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped to finalize the First Amendment to the Constitution. What explains this remarkable transformation? Michael Breidenbach shows how Catholic leaders emphasized their church’s own traditions—rather than Enlightenment liberalism—to secure the religious liberty that enabled their incorporation in American life.

Catholics responded to charges of disloyalty by denying papal infallibility and the pope’s authority to intervene in civil affairs. Rome staunchly rejected such dissent, but reform-minded Catholics justified their stance by looking to conciliarism, an intellectual tradition rooted in medieval Catholic thought yet compatible with a republican view of temporal independence and church-state separation. Drawing on new archival material, Breidenbach finds that early American Catholic leaders, including Maryland founder Cecil Calvert and members of the prominent Carroll family, relied on the conciliarist tradition to help institute religious toleration, including the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649.

The critical role of Catholics in establishing American church–state separation enjoins us to revise not only our sense of who the American founders were, but also our understanding of the sources of secularism. Church–state separation in America, generally understood as the product of a Protestant-driven Enlightenment, was in key respects derived from Catholic thinking. Our Dear-Bought Liberty therefore offers a dramatic departure from received wisdom, suggesting that religious liberty in America was not bestowed by liberal consensus but partly defined through the ingenuity of a persecuted minority.

This chapter investigates the two non-establishment clauses in the U.S. Constitution: the no-religious-test clause in Article VI, and the no-establishment-of-religion clause in the First Amendment. Since religious tests were the clearest manifestation of state sovereignty over religion, their prohibition in Article VI elided any notion of a “Church of the United States” even before the First Amendment. The federal oath-Congress’s first act-no longer required a denial of Catholic beliefs as previous oaths had, yet loyalty remained a prerequisite to securing religious liberty. The chapter then contends that the First Amendment establishment clause was based on what Congress had stated in 1783: that powers in “purely spiritual” matters were “reserved to the several States, individually.” Congress had declared this principle in response to the Holy See’s request for it to approve a Catholic bishop, and had thus renounced one of the rights of patronage that governments traditionally held over ecclesiastical affairs. This context adds to the original meaning of the establishment clause, for simply prohibiting a national church did not necessarily forbid this right of patronage.

In her gracefully written and impressively researched Elizabeth Seton: American Saint, Catherine O'Donnell exhumes the life of an American saint from the shallow grave of hagiography and places her within the rich context of the Atlantic world. In five parts, O'Donnell narrates the life of Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774-1821), the first American-born Catholic saint. This biography casts a spotlight on a Catholic woman-wife and widow, mother and Mother-whose story complicates American republican notions of freedom and authority. As a story of the currents influencing Seton's faith, moreover, Elizabeth Seton also demonstrates the importance of religion and belief for understanding the development of the Atlantic world. The book begins in part 1 with Seton's early life in late eighteenth-century New York, where she experienced a precarious prosperity in a commercial republic that harbored new ideas, goods, and diseases. She wed William Magee Seton, a Manhattan merchant whose business knitted their family to an Italian trading house, the Filicchis, who sought to convert Seton to their Catholic faith. When William died during a fateful journey to Italy in 1803, Seton, aged 29, was left a widow with five young children. The second part of the biography relates her spiritual turmoil after that tragedy, turmoil that was both soothed and stirred by the counsel of high-profile Episcopalian and Catholic clerics. In part 3, O'Donnell details Seton's conversion to Catholicism and its ambivalent effects on her personal relationships, social standing, and economic stability, while part 4 concerns the founding of her religious order, the Sisters of Charity of Saint Joseph. The final section of the biography presents a portrait of Mother Seton: her life as a religious superior, the development of her sisterhood, and the continual reinterpretation of her legacy. Though previous biographers have traced the broad contours of Seton's life, O'Donnell's analysis-based on an extensive archive of primary sources and enlivened by lyrical prose-renders Elizabeth Seton the definitive biography. The genre of biography presents certain challenges, especially when concerning the lives of saints. Its religious counterpart, the hagiography, does not let modern standards of historical evidence hinder its goal of increasing readers' piety. Recognizing this challenge, O'Donnell makes explicit how previous hagiographies have shaped Seton's story. For example, she notes that an unauthorized 1817 reproduction of one of Seton's private diaries by a sympathetic Presbyterian printer nearly led Seton to burn her writings, but her confessor, Reverend Simon William Gabriel Bruté de Rémur, mercifully prevented her

Many academics, policymakers, non-governmental organisations and other observers of the North America relations have been historically critical of the Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and especially of the rules of Chapter 11. It is widely believed that the inclusion and implementation of Chapter 11 ‘opened the floodgates’ for foreign investors to sue national and sub national governments when the policies of the latter affect the economic interests of the former. However, these critiques are not well-founded. As the outcome of the case vs. Apotex United States demonstrates, the rules and arbitration mechanisms of Chapter 11 have strengthened, not weakened, the ability of North American national and sub national governments to create, maintain and improve public policies aimed at ensuring public welfare.

General David Petraeus attempts to lessen our concerns about the state-of-affairs of regional integration in North America and be cautiously optimistic about its future. I argue, however, that this might be a counterproductive position. It might prevent us from realizing that the limited institutional framework that sustains growing trade and investment in North America is not suitable for addressing the socioeconomic impact and environmental externalities that have resulted from such increased exchanges.