Pope Benedict XVI Blog

Our Founding Fathers, Our Lady of America and Our Vote

Catholic Exchange
November 1st, 2008 by Dan Lynch

Our Founding Fathers wanted to “insure domestic tranquility” through the Constitution of the United States as the framework of our government. They did this by recognizing our God-given natural right to life in their Declaration of Independence. This was later protected against infringement by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. This right was protected for almost 200 years until the United States Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973.

When the right to life is violated by abortion, contraceptive abortifacients, in vitro fertilization, embryonic experimentation and infanticide, all other rights are at risk. If the mother can kill her unborn child, logically why can’t a child kill its mother by euthanasia? Failure to protect the paramount right to life may lead the United States to what Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI warned us about — totalitarianism and the dictatorship of relativism.

For true freedom and peace in the United States, we must protect the paramount right to life recognized by our Founding Fathers and follow the request of Our Lady of America for purity. She requested our purity and promised us peace and protection. The devotion to her is the only canonically approved devotion based upon apparitions in the United States. To no other country in the world has Our Lady identified herself as its Patroness as she did to the United States. She said, “I am the Immaculate One, Patroness of your land.”

The Founding Fathers

The American Founding Fathers’ statement in the Declaration of Independence that natural rights are endowed by God agrees with the teaching of the Church. The paramount right is to life with its inclusive rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the freedoms of free exercise of religion, speech, press and assembly. These rights and freedoms are bestowed upon us by God and inherent in the nature of all human persons. All of the inclusive rights and freedoms are meaningless if there is no paramount right to life.

We are dignified because we are created in the image of God. We have mortal bodies and immortal spiritual souls that God endowed with intellects to know the truth and free wills to do good and avoid evil in order to reach our end of happiness with Him. These rights, as the Founders said in the Declaration of Independence, are “inalienable” as a requirement of the dignity of the human person and must be recognized and protected by civil authority within the limits of the common good and public order.

Because God is perfectly free, He has instilled in us all the natural rights of freedom so that we can reach our end of eternal happiness with God in heaven. We are called to freely exercise these rights in the pursuit of this end.

America’s Pilgrim Fathers came here for the free exercise of their religion. Their descendants declared independence because they believed that their subjugation under England was immoral and opposed to God’s providential plan for America, which they formulated with His blessing in the United States Constitution.

Our Founding Fathers established the Constitution of the United States to secure the God-given rights that they had recognized in the Declaration of Independence. The relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is crucial. The Declaration is the “why” of American government, while the Constitution is the “how” Each of them should be read and interpreted in the light of the other.

Our individual rights should be protected by the state to enable the individual to express all of his God-given talents to worship, create and achieve, free from unjust government restraint. The Founding Fathers’ recognition that the individual is greater than the state and has natural rights enabled America’s successes in education, business, industry and the arts. The exercise of these rights enabled individual initiative and the protection of individual liberty.

However, the survival of our democratic tradition depends on our fidelity to all of our founding principles, especially for the recognition and protection of the paramount right to life. Our continued failure to recognize this right may lead to totalitarianism and may subject us to what Pope Benedict XVI calls the “dictatorship of relativism” and our ultimate descent to tyrannical rule by the powerful over the weak and the rule of individual men instead of the rule of law.

The Great United States of America

After his recent visit with us, Pope Benedict XVI, like Pope John Paul II before him, complimented our great country and its Founding Fathers and prayed that we will face our future rooted in the faith of our fathers. He said:

In the meeting with the President, in his residence, I was able to pay homage to this great country, which from the beginning has been constructed based on a pleasing joining together of religious, ethical and political principles, and continues to be a valid example of healthy secularism, where the religious dimension, in the diversity of its expressions, is not only tolerated but valued as the “soul” of the nation and the fundamental guarantee of the rights and duties of the human being. . .

In the great and festive Eucharistic celebration in Nationals Park stadium in Washington, we invoked the Holy Spirit upon the Church in the United States of America, so that firmly rooted in the faith transmitted by its fathers, profoundly united and renewed, it will face present and future challenges with courage and hope.

The Pope also spoke to the youth in front of a display of images of American saints and said, “Each responded to the Lord’s call to a life of charity and each served Him here. . . The key to walking the true path of freedom is to follow the way of the saints, who walk in the light of Christ. . . Take courage! Fix your gaze on our saints.” You can fix your gaze on them by reading the book, Saints of the States, which includes the story of the Queen of our States, Our Lady of America. We need to turn to our saints and our Queen for a revolution in moral values in America, especially for purity.

Our Lady of America



The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared in the United States and revealed her title as “Our Lady of America, the Immaculate Virgin.” She appeared to a nun in the United States in several apparitions during the latter half of the 20th century. The nun’s name was Sister Mary Ephrem (later Mildred Neuzil).

On September 26, 1956, Our Lady said, “My child, I entrust you with this message that you must make known to my children in America. I wish it to be the country dedicated to my purity. . . I desire, through my children in America, to further the cause of faith and purity among peoples and nations.”

Remember that this was in 1956, just before the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties. That is why Our Lady of America asked for the practice of purity. She knew what would come from impurity, if her requests were not followed. They were not and we now suffer in our Culture of Death. But it’s not too late to heed Our Lady’s call today. She’s coming again to us through her Image to remind us of her requests and she seems to be giving us a second chance. You may request a Visitation of her Image for An Hour of Prayer for Purity, Peace and Protection with Our Lady of America by contacting our apostolate. She can still teach us, as she said, “to become pure like to [her] heart that [our] own hearts may be more pleasing to the Heart of [her] Son.” For the complete story on Our Lady of America, her requests and promises, read the book, Our Lady of America, Our Hope for the States and see our website at http://www.jkmi.com/.

Warnings for the United States

In April of 1957, Our Lady of America said, “Unless my children reform their lives, they will suffer great persecution. If man himself will not take upon himself the penance necessary to atone for his sins and those of others, God in His justice will have to send upon him the punishment necessary to atone for his transgressions.”

Today, with our Culture of Death and wars, international terrorism, nuclear threats and natural disasters, Our Lady of America’s messages for purity, peace and prayer are more urgent than ever and we are in great need of her protection.

Pope John Paul II warned us at Denver’s World Youth Day in 1993, “If you want equal justice for all, and true freedom and lasting peace, then, America, defend life! America needs much prayer . . . lest it lose its soul.”

Vote Your Catholic Conscience

The skeleton of the United States is our Founding Father’s democratic constitutional framework with a balance of powers in a republican form of government by representatives of the people. But a skeleton needs a body and soul. The body is the sovereign people and the soul is their moral character to follow the law of a sovereign God. We can follow Him by voting according to our correctly formed conscience.

Our Bishops told us that “a candidate’s position on a single issue that involves an intrinsic evil, such as support for legal abortion . . ., may legitimately lead a voter to disqualify a candidate from receiving support.” (Faithful Citizenship #42).
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posted by Dr. Denice Hanley, DPM, M.Div. @ 1:33 PM