A national Catholic Thanksgiving examen

As we Catholics join our fellow Americans in marking Thanksgiving 2023, let me sound a contrarian note: I have doubts about just how thankful we really are.

The greatest single gift human beings have is the gift of life. “In [God] we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Our very existence—both its beginnings and its continuation—is God’s gift. We would simply not have come into existence without God and, absent His sustaining presence, we would lapse back into nothingness.

We are not self-sufficient. We are not “autonomous.” None of us is responsible for our existence. For that, we owe gratitude to at least two—really five—persons.

In the natural realm, none of us would exist without our father and mother. And, when one considers this-worldly natural factors that could have impeded our existence—the few days of the month a woman is fertile, the half of sperm that travel the wrong Fallopian Tube, whether dad was working or mom had a headache—my existence even on a natural plane is almost miraculous.

But, apart from the biological, the truth is that no man and no woman—separately or together—can create a soul. Only God can breathe life “and thus man became a living being.” So, there is no child—absolutely no child—whose existence was not wanted at least by three Persons called the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Life is something never “taken” but always “given.” It is always a gift to be received with gratitude. And, for the believer, it is to be received with piety—that is, reverent gratitude—because the giver is no less than the Lord and Giver of Life, in whom we Catholics each week make at least a lip service profession of faith.

The U.S. bishops speak of life as the “preeminent issue” and, indeed it is: no other right means anything if you are not alive. The “quality” of your life is meaningless if you are not alive. The “existential” challenges of “climate change” are irrelevant if you lack existence. The “seamless garment” of life unravels rather quickly if it is a shroud enveloping a corpse.

So, while we might give thanks for lots of theoretical “blessings” (“for our country,” “for liberty,” “for freedom” etc.) and even personally practical ones (“for my family,” “for my job,” etc.) the most basic—the “preeminent”—reality for which gratitude is due is life.

Now, reading the “signs of the times,” let us honestly ask ourselves: is that last statement true?

It’s been a year and a half since the curse of Roe v. Wade was lifted from our land. A regime that enabled 60,000,000+ deaths has been put aside. Individual states are now capable of protecting life.

About a fifth of the population of Ohio is Catholic. About a quarter of Wisconsin is Catholic. Catholicism is the largest, single Christian denomination in both states.

On November 7, Ohioans enshrined abortion-on-demand through birth into their state constitution. In April, Wisconsinites put a pro-abortion judge on their state Supreme Court. It seems what the Supreme Court laid aside, many of us want to don.

While certainly there were many Catholics who, faithful to their faith and their political obligations to bear witness to that faith in the public square, worked to protect life. But the results in both states also indicate that there were many Catholics who did not. They did not, either by omission—sitting out their civic duty and not voting—or, worse, by commission, by supporting a culture of death.

It is time to end the pretense of “diversity of Catholic opinion” and schizophrenic divisions between “public responsibilities” and “personal beliefs.” The Catholic is to be “light to the world,” and that means bearing the wisdom both of natural law and revelation into the public square. As Paul did when he spoke of the “unknown God.” As Thomas More did when he told a wife-abusing Henry who fancied himself a Peter on whom a church could be built and a marriage dissolved, that he was “God’s servant first.” As Jerzy Popieluszko did when he defended people’s rights to organize work as they, not the state, saw fit.

Our fidelity to defending what should be the “preeminent” focus of our gratitude is the acid test of the reality of our “Thanksgiving.”

Because if we can sit down at a Thanksgiving table—whether it be the temporal table of turkey or the supernatural table of the Eucharist (which means “thanksgiving”)—believing that gratitude to God for the gift of every life (unborn, ill, aged, infirm, handicapped, unwanted, poor, the outcome of violence) is a matter of my “choice,” not God’s right, then “we deceive ourselves” (see 1 Jn 1:8).

Because, in the concrete conditions in which we as Americans “live and move and have our being,” this is the real crux where genuine Christianity versus resurgent paganism is at stake. Our idol may not be a stone-carved Moloch, but we willingly sacrifice our children to it just the same.

The historical origins of Thanksgiving for us Americans come from the Pilgrims who, observing their first Thanksgiving in 1621, expressed gratitude that they were the remnant—less than half of those who set sail the previous year on the Mayflower—still alive.

If we go back in history, we see that those Pilgrims (and the Puritans who later followed them) not only marked days of Thanksgiving but also days of Penance. That pattern, given a new lease on life in the “American civic religion” that became a kind of common Protestant Christianity of the 18th-, 19th-, and even 20th-century Americans, was perpetuated by our earliest Presidents. They proclaimed both days of Thanksgiving and days of Prayer and Fasting.

If, on this Thanksgiving, at this moment in history, we are willing to carve out exceptions to those whom God has invited to the banquet of life, then we might instead recognize we need to observe the other kind of days.