Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers virtual address at CIT’s Conference, Endowed by Their Creator: Catholicism, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Experiment at 250

On Thursday, April 9th, Catholic Law’s Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, together with Notre Dame’s Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government and Catholic University’s Carroll Forum for Citizenship and Public Life, co-hosted a symposium celebrating the nation’s semiquincentennial. The day brought together leading scholars and public intellectuals from across the country to explore the relationship between the Catholic intellectual tradition and the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and to reflect on how both Catholicism and the Declaration continue to shape America’s experiment in constitutional self-government, 250 years after its founding.

Marco Rubio on Catholicism:

In 1895, Pope Leo XIII penned an encyclical to the Catholic Church in the United States. 

“All intelligent men are agreed,” he wrote, “that America seems destined for greater things. Now, it is our wish that the Catholic Church should not only share in, but help to bring about this prospective greatness.” 

But, as the Holy Father noted, the Church had already been here from the start. Four centuries prior, one Catholic explorer ventured out into the great unknown and returned home with the story, as he wrote in one letter, “of a land more richly endowed than I know or am able to say.” 

Few moments in history have carried more consequence. Christopher Columbus renewed the West’s confidence in itself and launched that great age of discovery, exploration, and expansion from which America was born. 

Some have claimed that the Catholic faith is a foreign import to our country. Only one of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence was Catholic—Charles Carroll of Maryland, for whom one of this conference’s hosts is named. Just two Catholic names appear on our Constitution itself. 

But the Catholic faith has always been part of the American story. The first Christian service on our soil was a Catholic Mass. The oldest permanent settlement in the United States is the town of St. Augustine, planted by Spanish Catholics on the coastal sands of my home state of Florida. 

Catholic saints were martyred on American soil well over a century before the Revolution began. In missions and settlements, wilderness forts, and trading posts stretching from the first colonies to the distant frontier, Catholic explorers, soldiers, priests, and pioneers consecrated this new world to their ancient faith and christened its land with Catholic names—Maryland, St. Louis, San Francisco, Santa Fe. Almost every region of what is now the United States was first explored and mapped by Catholics. 

This is no coincidence. Christianity taught the West to think in continents and centuries, rather than villages and seasons. The Church calls us, as Christ told St. Peter, “to duc in altum,” to put out into the deep. Catholics across time have answered the call—from the forests of pagan Europe to the wilderness of North America—to bring new worlds to Christ. 

This is the inheritance which has shaped our pioneer nation: the spirit of expansion and discovery which would conquer continents, unlock the mysteries of the universe, and eventually transcend the limits of Earth itself. It is the same spirit that led 56 Americans to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to each other in the cause of independence two and a half centuries ago. 

Catholics in the colonies flocked to join them, enlisting to fight for the patriots at a rate far exceeding their share of the population. In 1790, George Washington wrote to the Roman Catholics of America to thank them personally “for the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishments of the revolution.” 

It is popular today to claim the founding was merely a brainchild of the Enlightenment, but the Revolution was not a radical rupture with the past. It was a renewal of an older inheritance fitted to the unique experience of a free, Christian people in the new world. 

That inheritance draws upon the ancient liberties of the English Constitution and common law, but it roots these traditions upon a fixed and unchanging moral order governed by the laws of nature and nature’s God. This fundamental truth endows man with not just rights, but with duties. It conceives of freedom and virtue as inseparably linked. 

We see this in the structure of our political order itself, built not to sanction license, but to restrain passion, check ambition with ambition, and secure the common good. 

It is true, of course, that most of the men who wrote our founding documents were not Catholics themselves, but the system they gave us belongs to the same civilizational tradition that produced the towering cathedrals of Rome and the philosophy of Augustine and Aquinas. 

America was a gift where the Church and the civilization it made was reborn, discovering itself anew in the wilderness. It is at once modern and ancient. The men who settled and founded our country were the architects of a great rebirth, renewing the deferred dreams of the old world and the possibilities of a virgin continent. 

It has been 250 years since a new people declared themselves to the world. At the time, less than 2% were Catholic, but the nation they built would come to serve as one of the proudest and most enduring testaments to the eternal truth of our faith. 

To look upon the history of this golden land is to see the face of God.