Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness and the Natural Law

Today we are once again 'engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation, or any other nation, can long endure....'

NAPLES, FL (Catholic Online) - Who hasn't heard these words: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Indeed, they are at the very core of the existence of the USA. How wise were our Founding Fathers: for sure, they got this right!

Today, we need to stop and think seriously about what Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are all about, as our Founding Fathers must have when they so carefully formulated our Constitution--because, in fact, we cannot survive as a nation without adherence to these First Principles. They are also, and pre-eminently, embedded in the biblical teaching of the Catholic Church that we learned in our first grade religion class in our Catholic Schools: "God made me to know Him, to love Him and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in Heaven."

As we may realize, these First Principles (so called in philosophy): Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are at the center of rightly ordered human activity in the physical, intellectual and spiritual realm. In fact, they constitute the ground of the Natural Law implanted in our hearts by God. (From this we can understand how it is that the ancient philosophers had such insight into the Natural Law.)

The Natural Law is further expressed and explained through Divine Revelation--in the Ten Commandment, etc.. But why, we might ask, did God "codify" these First Principles when He had provided the key to them in our heart--in our conscience? The answer is given in the Book of Genesis, in the account of our First Parent's commission of the Original Sin--when they freely chose not to listen to their conscience, rejected the Natural Law and even the expressed command of God.... And why did they do this? Because they wanted "to be like God"--and make their own laws apart from God! (See Gen 2:15-3:14)

Who can deny that these three Life-Principles are falling apart today? Why? Because we are changing our civil laws that have upheld and protected the Natural Law, up until now. We are altering the meaning of fundamental words (like marriage and murder), putting a kind of "twist" on them; other words are banned from our vocabulary (like chastity and morality) so that we can legally choose death over LIFE, substitute license for LIBERTY and drown ourselves in hedonism in a false PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS!

We even go so far off as to contradict our own selves. For example, we may deny that human life exists at the moment of conception because we don't want the baby for one reason or another and, on the other hand, affirm that human life exists when we do want the baby. And so blind have we become that we don't want to hear what science has now confirmed (what we already may have secretly known in our hearts), that human life begins at the moment of conception! Really, growth only occurs when there is life. And if there is life, what other kind of life could "it" be than human life in a human being?

Today we are once again "engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation, or any other nation, can long endure...." The "great war" today is against "negative ideologies." (CiV 14) Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness can only be secured through obedience to the Truth: "Happy the nation whose God is the Lord...," He is "high above all nations." (Ps 33:12; 113:4). Let us cease to be silent; let us profess our obedience to God in carrying out our civil duties. (Cf.: Mk 8:38)

Let us "choose" to stand for LIFE (Deut 30:19). Pope Benedict XVI's new Encyclical: "Charity in Truth" enhances our under-standing of the grave situation we are in and the way out. Basically, it amounts to our adherence to our nation's founding principles: LIFE, LIBERTY, and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS according to the NATURAL LAW and the teaching of the ETERNAL WORD, Jesus Christ. May the Light of Christ shine in our hearts!

-----

Pamela T. Haines received her MTS from the Institute of Pastoral Theology (Ave Maria University) in 2008 and has been a Registered Health Information Administrator since 1997.

---

'Help Give every Student and Teacher FREE resources for a world-class Moral Catholic Education'