It gives me a few days off of work in the warm weather, during which I may or may not have a barbecue, and may or may not sit outside to enjoy some fireworks, but none of which is done in specific commemoration of this day. At no point do I tell my children that we're celebrating the glorious foundation of America, or the defeat of an oppressive tyrant or some such thing, and I do not fly (indeed, do not even own) an American flag.
There was one part of your post, Charlemagne, that I found particularly insightful and relevant:
Speaking of Independence Day, should we celebrate it? The Irish in me says yes, because the colonists broke away from tyrannical England, and no one of Irish ancestry would argue against that normally. The Catholic part of me, however, hesitates to celebrate it because this new republic, I believe, was a creation of Satan, as I think many of us are starting to realize (in my case) or have known for a long time.
I too am half Irish. And I've mentioned it in other threads, but whenever I speak of the prophecies of the Great Catholic Monarch to the Irish half of my family, they balk and show a distinct discomfiture. One even pleadingly queried "Couldn't these prophecies about a 'monarch' actually be referring to a Catholic elected official?" Hatred of British Monarchy has given the Irish a pathological mistrust and dislike of Monarchy per se, and, as Monarchy is the one and only form of civil government given official approval by the Catholic Church, I think that that's a particularly virulent pathology for any primarily Catholic ethnic / national group to suffer from.
The Irish were the first Catholic national group to arrive en masse in America, and, despite a rocky start, were the first to assimilate, being, as they are, English-speaking and fair-skinned. Their blinding hatred of England gave them a skewed view of America as a friend merely for being their enemy's enemy. Better still, America had defeated the hated English at her very birth, and so I think good old fashioned schadenfreude, and a desire to partake vicariously in the defeat of an ancient nemesis who otherwise could never be vanquished, led to the Irish becoming Americanized too quickly, too uncritically. The Irish soon became master politicians in the US, and that includes clerics as well as laymen. A genuine spirit of gratitude at being allowed to be left alone and practice the Faith also pervaded, and the result was an embrace of the Masonic error of "religious liberty" which afforded them that peace. That peace came at a terrible price, namely the heresy of Americanism, the blame for which, I think, rests upon Irish Americans more than it does any other single group.
Being half Irish and half Maltese gives one a pretty schizophrenic view of the English monarchy. The Irish half reviles them and hates them to the bloody core as a pack of empurpled murderers and oppressors sent from the pits of hell to plague the sons of Eire. The Maltese half regards them with admiration and gratitude as the (at least nominally) Christian crown that came to the defense of embattled Malta, rescuing our beloved homeland from the clutches of the godless Napoleonic French, who ousted the Knights, looted the Churches, and (literally) trampled upon the Blessed Sacrament.
The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. England was cruel to the Irish, and kind to the Maltese, for one and the same reason: political expediency. They were an heretical monarchy (I say "were" because I'm not sure if they qualify as Christian monarchs anymore, even in an heretical sense), but still a legitimate monarchy, with legitimate authority over their colonies, including the 13 in America. A just and licit overthrow of British authority over the colonies would have possible, if it were a Catholic one that wanted to establish the rights of the One True Church definitively in the New World. As it is, however, "taxation" does not meet the criteria for a just war, and the American Revolution was little different from other evil rebellions like the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, in that it was motivated by the greed of a small, wealthy cabal, and imposed upon a largely unwilling populace (certainly the Catholics of the colonies were largely loyalists, as Charles Coulombe has pointed out).
So, no, I do not celebrate the waging of an unjust war against a legitimate monarch for the establishment of the world's first Secular Masonic Republic. I do not feel any swell of pride over being a citizen of a nation which refused to acknowledge Our Blessed Lord in its Constitution, and which refused to amend that Constitution accordingly in 1863, even when the nation was torn in two and more in need of God's Grace than ever. Patriotism is a Catholic virtue, yes... a minor virtue. It is a good and natural thing to love the land where one grew up; to love what is local and familiar. There's a world of difference between that and celebrating a nation which, as a nation, has been one of the great forces for evil in the world in the modern age - the elevation of Sodomy to the level of matrimony being only the most recent and glaring example. Our duty as Catholic patriots is to pray for and work for the Catholic America that ought to be, not to celebrate the Jєω-serving, godless, Masonic America that is now and ever has been.
Topic: Do You Celebrate Independence Day (and America in General)? (Read 1269 times)