4th Sunday After Pentecost (2025)

Sermon of Father John A. Perricone on the 4th Sunday After Pentecost given Sunday, July 6th, 2025 at Our Lady of Sorrows Church, Jersey City, New Jersey. Father affirms that true freedom and human rights, as proclaimed in America’s founding ideals, are deeply aligned with Catholic teaching when rightly understood as gifts from God ordered toward goodness and virtue. Media courtesy of Cantantes In Cordibus. Please like the video, subscribe to the channel, and share with your Catholic Friends! 

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

It is well on this 4th of July weekend that we call to mind the words of our founding document, the Declaration of Independence.

You know it all by heart.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among which is peace and the pursuit of happiness.

Wonderful words.

It's very sad that in these days some overly zealous Catholics would take issue with them by virtue of their authors.

We all know that while Thomas Jefferson wrote those words, he borrowed their philosophical sentiments from the 17th-century philosopher John Locke. Some Catholics are queasy over the fact that both of these men were deists and had a loathing for Roman Catholicism.

But be that as it may, the words stand meaning what they do, and they have been the reason why generations of generations of Americans have been able to share the blessings of freedom in this country for now almost 250 years.

And the Roman Catholic Church has probably experienced more freedom to grow and to be herself in this country, than in many countries on the face of the earth.

It seems as though the truths of that declaration are torn right from the pages of the Church's Magisterium.

So for one, rights. Mother Church has always taught that all of our rights come from God.

And because God has designed them, we only have a right to understand them as God gave them to us.

And so in sum, to understand the real meaning of rights, simply put means we only have the right to be good.

Of course, we have the ability to be very bad, but that's not a right.

That is a trampling of rights.

Mother Church then teaches, and it's clear in the Declaration and in the Constitution, that the state, which is essential for the flourishing of any man, the state is merely the guarantor of the rights of the people given to them by God.

It is the state which must protect with the blood of its citizens as has happened in this country over 250 years so that freedom may be enjoyed, so that virtue may flourish.

And so Thomas Jefferson, for all his hatred of the church, for some reason by God's providence, understood the teaching of the church without probably adverting to it explicitly when he wrote that “the state which governs least governs best.”

That seemed to be taken right off the pages of Pope Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno.

And then there is the notion of freedom.

Mother Church has always taught that freedom is merely the capacity of a man to be himself, and that means that to be ourselves means to please God, to be in conformity with what God intended for us.

Freedom is not the right to be bad.

When men are bad, we take away their freedom because they have misused it.

And our final consideration is this, that while there are many Americans today who want freedom to merely be the arena for vice, that is not the fault of America, that is the fault of certain Americans.

Yes, on this weekend of Independence, all of us will heartily sing "America the Beautiful," the "Star-Spangled Banner," and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

We do not sing these songs as Nazis sang them because the state is above God.

We sing them because God has given us this beautiful nation where all men of goodwill are summoned to flourish.

And my dear Catholic friends, isn't that the beginning of charity?

God bless you.