Creeds: A Meditation

A reasonable person would be right to assert that, though God may be mentioned here and there in secular constitutions and charters, without lively Christian populations national charters alone are not capable of effecting the civilisation of societies.

Constitutions require people of faith - Christian Faith - to realize the grand ideas rehearsed in documents heralding the supremacy of Almighty God. Secularists - among them social radicals and the indifferent - engage only to the degree that their own self interests are able to dominate. By contrast, people of conscience model charity and justice. Without a lived Christian Faith to sustain and vivify a country, the body politic withers.

Australia

An Act to constitute the Commonwealth of Australia

WHEREAS the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established(.)

Canada

Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:

Guarantee of Rights and Freedoms

1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. 

Fundamental Freedoms

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: (a) freedom of conscience and religion; (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; (c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and (d) freedom of association.

Governments of Western lands that claim a foundation upon God are almost without exception occupied by people who grudgingly accept their societies' inclusion of God or some approximation thereof in their national charters. Consequently, instead of being the public servants they are elected and required to be, many if not most politicians of militantly secularized democracies behave as if they are our masters to a degree that concern for the common good is defined in their own confused image instead of affirming the natural law and man's natural rights. Barbarians consuming innocence, they are harbingers of chaos. How much longer will God tolerate - if that's the right word - our indifference and malice?

Fiji

WE, THE PEOPLE OF THE FIJI ISLANDS, seeking the blessing of God who has always watched over these islands: RECALLING the events in our history that have made us what we are, especially the settlement of these islands by the ancestors of the indigenous Fijian and Rotuman people; the arrival of forebears of subsequent settlers, including Pacific Islanders, Europeans, Indians and Chinese; the conversion of the indigenous inhabitants of these islands from heathenism to Christianity through the power of the name of Jesus Christ; the enduring influence of Christianity in these islands and its contribution, along with that of other faiths, to the spiritual life of Fiji: ... WITH GOD AS OUR WITNESS, GIVE OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION(.)

Greece

In the name of the Holy and Consubstantial and Indivisible Trinity.

Hungary

God bless the Hungarians

We recognise the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood. We value the various religious traditions of our country.

We, the Members of the National Assembly elected on 25 April 2010, being aware of our responsibility before God and man and in exercise of our constituent power, hereby adopt this to be the first unified Fundamental Law of Hungary. 

Will we come to our senses and live out the meaning of our creeds? We are reminded that God abhors lip service.

So, for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’ - St Matthew 15:6-9

What of our embrace of the Creed of the Mass? If we mutter beautiful words but our hearts remain hard or indifferent and those same words never blossom into living faith, are we not part of the problem? Are we no different from our hedonistic fellow citizens?

Ireland

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, We, the people of Éire, humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial, (...) do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution.

Philippines

We, the sovereign Filipino people, imploring the aid of Almighty God, ... do ordain and promulgate this Constitution. 

The Creed of the Church is armor; it is a skin of orthodoxy that protects souls from spiritual harm. The Creed is a manifesto binding us to the Gospel. It is air to our spiritual lungs that we can breathe in to purify our hearts and minds and free us from idolatrous tendencies, and life-giving counsel that we can breathe out to refresh those around us who lack hope. The Creed is an embodiment of the Faith that is the reason for the hope that is within us (cf. 1 Peter 3:15). The Creed identifies Who God is, and is a summary identifying the gift of salvation that God offers in Christ Jesus. It is the Catholic's triumphal song of praise. The Creed accompanies us to the Holy Eucharist, Jesus Who is the reason for our hope.

Each and every person is a word of God conceived by God the Word. The Christian knows that, and his life is enlivened by conforming his will to the will of God. The Creed of the Church is an icon of the Christian's origin, present place, role and future.

The State of Florida

Preamble

We, the people of the State of Florida, being grateful to Almighty God for our constitutional liberty, in order to secure its benefits, perfect our government, insure domestic tranquility, maintain public order, and guarantee equal civil and political rights to all, do ordain and establish this constitution.

The State of Pennsylvania

Preamble

WE, the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, grateful to Almighty God for the blessings of civil and religious liberty, and humbly invoking His guidance, do ordain and establish this Constitution.

So then, what of those constitutions and national charters? Are they merely epitaphs on the graves of earlier generations when men sought to honour their Creator? Are they now irrelevant? Have they become an annoyance, a hindrance to man achieving his potential? 

The religious acts whereby men, in private and in public and out of a sense of personal conviction, direct their lives to God transcend by their very nature the order of terrestrial and temporal affairs. Government therefore ought indeed to take account of the religious life of the citizenry and show it favor, since the function of government is to make provision for the common welfare. However, it would clearly transgress the limits set to its power, were it to presume to command or inhibit acts that are religious.

4. The freedom or immunity from coercion in matters religious which is the endowment of persons as individuals is also to be recognized as their right when they act in community. Religious communities are a requirement of the social nature both of man and of religion itself.

Provided the just demands of public order are observed, religious communities rightfully claim freedom in order that they may govern themselves according to their own norms, honor the Supreme Being in public worship, assist their members in the practice of the religious life, strengthen them by instruction, and promote institutions in which they may join together for the purpose of ordering their own lives in accordance with their religious principles.

Religious communities also have the right not to be hindered, either by legal measures or by administrative action on the part of government, in the selection, training, appointment, and transferral of their own ministers, in communicating with religious authorities and communities abroad, in erecting buildings for religious purposes, and in the acquisition and use of suitable funds or properties.

Religious communities also have the right not to be hindered in their public teaching and witness to their faith, whether by the spoken or by the written word. However, in spreading religious faith and in introducing religious practices everyone ought at all times to refrain from any manner of action which might seem to carry a hint of coercion or of a kind of persuasion that would be dishonorable or unworthy, especially when dealing with poor or uneducated people. Such a manner of action would have to be considered an abuse of one's right and a violation of the right of others.

In addition, it comes within the meaning of religious freedom that religious communities should not be prohibited from freely undertaking to show the special value of their doctrine in what concerns the organization of society and the inspiration of the whole of human activity. Finally, the social nature of man and the very nature of religion afford the foundation of the right of men freely to hold meetings and to establish educational, cultural, charitable and social organizations, under the impulse of their own religious sense. - Declaration On Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, on the right of the person and of communities to social and civil freedom in matters religious promulgated by his Holiness Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965

Lest anyone should doubt what happens when man turns from God and deposits himself among godless ideologies, the entire 20th Century should serve as an obvious warning. The twin catastrophes of communism and national socialism - the two headed Orthrus - that destroyed tens of millions of people and, in the case of communism, continues to ruin cultures, cannot be anything less than a device of Satan, the devil, who hates all that is good and noble in man.