A WORK OF SPECIAL PROVIDENCE

 

A Work of Special Providence

Robert Royal

Monday, January 20, 2025

 

This is a red-letter day for the United States of America. We come to the end of a deeply divided, often bad-tempered – someone might even say venomous – national contest. The Constitutional order held, the vote was clear, and today there will be yet another peaceful transfer of power between two parties, despite little love for one another.

“Democracy,” in short, did not die.

Anyone who believes that our Constitution is an outdated eighteenth-century document inadequate for dealing with modern conditions – as a recent former president has suggested – might be asked: What, in such contentious circumstances, might have worked better?

At the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, our bishops debated the pros and cons of America’s Constitutional order. But Archbishop James Gibbons, speaking on behalf of his fellow bishops, concluded:  “We consider the establishment of our country’s independence, the shaping of its liberties and laws, as a work of special Providence, its framers ‘building better than they knew,’ the Almighty’s hand guiding them.”

A just judgment, except that the framers – including Charles Carroll, the Maryland Catholic who signed the Constitution – knew quite a lot about how states had succeeded and failed in the past. They did their best in terms of institutional structure, designing a democratic republic, to avoid such disasters on these shores. For the rest, as Franklin famously remarked, it would depend on the people to keep it.

The very people who think they could build better than the founders are the last ones we should consult about our circumstances. Things like enumerated powers, the electoral college, and much else were put in place precisely to limit government, and thereby to protect freedom from the kind of majoritarianism and power grabs and ultra vires behavior we’ve seen lately among our politicians, courts, and federal agencies.

The new administration is aiming at making America great, good, prosperous, and efficient. It’s attracted some excellent people. Godspeed in all that. And let’s hope it can at least return the Federal government to basic competence.

But let’s also hope – on sound Constitutional and Catholic grounds – that we are about to move towards much smaller, much more modest government.

And for even more urgent reasons, to a reduced and realistic vision of politics itself and its place in human life instead of the pseudo politics-as-religion of many people in recent years.

 

The Inauguration of Washington by Currier & Ives, 1876 [The MET, New York]

 

The State typically can only provide a few things well: defense from outside threats, a just and peaceful order within, and a sound economic system. It’s not only a political error but a deeply anti-human, idolatrous one when a governing class or a people comes to think that the State should provide for virtually all human ills.

We were almost there in America. And it’s understandable that the incoming administration is enthusiastic and eager to lead on some glaring problems that the Federal government itself has created. It’s also imperative that it not feed into those very false expectations of omnicompetence that have led to the explosion of the federal government. (Those of us who live in the Washington area see it every day even in the tangle of traffic on streets never meant to handle so many people.)

When I myself first arrived in Washington as a callow youth during the Reagan administration, there was a lot of talk at the bishops’ conference and among liberal Catholics warning against the minimalist “nightwatchman state,” which Reagan was allegedly seeking to create. As we know in light of history, he did recenter the federal system for a while, but only succeeded in slowing its growth by a few percent. That’s a sobering perspective well worth keeping in mind.

The challenge for the Trump administration is that our situation is much more perilous:

• It can solve the border crisis fairly easily, though it will be painful and there will be much weeping and the gnashing of teeth.
• The crime problem will require deep reform, starting with the Justice Department and an FBI that has even sent undercover agents into Catholic churches and regarded parents as “domestic terrorists.” (Whatever happened to the ethnic Catholics who used to flock to the Bureau?) And who these days can trust the Secret Service?
• The “woke” culture is collapsing, showing the house of cards it always was. But the new administration cannot assume that the struggle is over. It draws on some deep and persistent errors in Western culture and will not go quietly without relentless pressure.
• The federal deficit alone is not only a financial burden but an indication of a moral imperative that will have to be faced if we are not going to passively allow ourselves to go bankrupt and take the next couple of generations down with us.

Still, reducing government is not impossible. A Washington friend with long experience of how the government has been working at home and abroad pointed out that, during the COVID lockdowns, maybe one-sixth of staff were active in our embassies and D.C. agencies. And everything basically continued to function.

In the end, however, an even greater issue needs to be tackled amid the lesser ones. One of our TCT founders and a regular columnist, the late, great James V. Schall S.J., often reminded us of a fundamental truth that helps to order our sense of the properly political. He begins his essential book, The Politics of Heaven and Hell: “Aristotle had said that if man were the highest being, politics would be the highest science. But he likewise held that man was not the highest being.”

Schall concluded that, far from denying the importance of politics, that perspective crucially frames politics, allowing it to “remain subject to the kind of being man is created to be – from nature in Aristotle, from God in Aquinas.”

So, let us pray for President Donald J. Trump, his cabinet, and all who will work with him over these next years that they will see both the great opportunities – and proper role – of authentic political life in each of us individually, in America, and in the world.

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2025/01/20/a-work-of-special-providence/