“Father Vaillant began pacing restlessly up and down as he spoke, and the Bishop watched him, musing. It was just this in his friend that was dear to him. “Where there is great love there are always miracles,” he said at length. … The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.” —Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Book I, Chapter 4.

Willa Cather’s great novel, “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” describes the efforts of early Catholic missionaries, in this case in the Southwestern part of our now United States. Here Cather articulates a deeply Catholic understanding of its mission of evangelization. The missionary’s task is to see clearly — to recognize grace already at work in people and cultures — and to help others see it too. And yet contemporary perceptions of the early Catholic missionaries in the western hemisphere — operating in the two centuries before the Declaration of Independence — present a different perspective: one of the message of the Gospel “coming from afar off” to impose a conversion. While undoubtedly there were imperfect realizations of the bona fide Catholic vision of missionary activities, where the dignity of each human person and the missionary instinct to propose the Gospel message is to be freely accepted, I would like to propose that the Gospel message has indeed served as foundational to our nation. That the Declaration of Independence, long after the efforts of the first Catholic missionaries, was able to declare the equality of persons “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” was only possible in the context of the Christian message of Jesus’ incarnation that endowed all humanity with an innate dignity. One does not have to look far across human history to see that few places and civilizations have insisted upon such dignity of the human person.

As a result, the efforts of early Catholic missionaries provided a de facto foundation of the life of our nation, which has pursued, however imperfectly, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” of its citizens. In western South Dakota, we cannot but consider the specific encounter between the Gospel message borne by French and religious missionaries (notably our Jesuits) and the native people of our regions. While generous missionaries have sought to defend the dignity of native persons (as seen in the provision of schools, churches, and charitable efforts), at the same time, we want to accept in honesty that the larger activity of our nation has sought to suppress the cultural riches of our native sisters and brothers, too often under the auspices of a Christian nation.

However imperfectly, the foundation of our “national experiment” is closely associated with the Christian vision of the human person who has been endowed with a supreme dignity because s/he has been created and redeemed by God. Early Catholic missionaries assumed a large role in setting this foundation which, across its now 250 years, we have sought to live more fully. May God “shed His grace” on our nation, that we might live more fully the vision of the dignity of each person created and redeemed by God, first proposed by French and Spanish missionaries in the two centuries before the foundation of our nation.

Next month: The Declaration of Independence (1776)