Michael Knowles Joins Scholars to Discuss Catholicism and the American Founding

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, citizens anticipate celebrating our country’s history and the principles on which the nation was founded.

The Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights.”

As one popular podcaster, and several policy experts, noted last month during a Heritage Foundation forum on “Catholicism and the American Founding,” this is one of the main principles of Catholicism.  

The forum, held on March 19, featured popular Catholic podcaster Michael Knowles and a handful of scholars and academics. The speakers discussed the links between America’s founding principles and ideas found in earlier theological works.

“The government that they established is … very closely in accord with the ideal regime laid out by St. Thomas [Aquinas] in ‘Summa Theologica’ and also in ‘De Regno,’” Knowles said.

Knowles, a commentator, author and host of “The Michael Knowles Show,” was joined by Jay W. Richards, vice president of social and domestic policy and the William E. Simon senior research fellow in American principles and public policy at The Heritage Foundation.

The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, Knowles said, influenced American political thought by defining the best regime as having the aspects of a king, a monarchy, an aristocrat and a democracy.  

The president is “the last monarch of the ancient regime,” he said, while the judicial branch and Congress are the aristocratic and democratic elements. 

Richards noted that America’s Founding Fathers read Reformed and Lutheran scholastics, and that those treatises read like Aquinas.

Knowles added that America, founded mainly by protestants, ended up resembling the ideals of Aquinas and the Thomists.

In a later discussion, Brenda Hafera, assistant director and research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies, noted that the idea of being “created equal” is another key element of Catholic thought.

Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, senior fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, agreed with Hafera: “I was thinking on that, too, because all men are created equal. That’s so very Catholic.”