WASHINGTON (OSV News) — President Donald Trump June 11 called the U.S. Catholic bishops’ consecration of the country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for its 250th anniversary “a powerful moment in our national story and a poignant reminder that America has always been guided by the loving hand of God.”
Consecration Mass
“(First lady) Melania and I join in prayer with Catholic Bishops gathered in Orlando, Florida,” he said in a statement issued as the bishops celebrated a Mass of consecration at the Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe in Orlando.
The Mass was celebrated after the bishops concluded the second of two days of public sessions during their June 10-12 spring plenary.
“Even in the centuries before the United States was conceived in nationhood, America was a land of prayer, a place of miracles, and home to some of the most faithful and devoted Christians to ever live,” Trump said.
“From the heroic bands of Christian missionaries, settlers, and explorers who tamed the unknown to spread the Gospel to the priests, chaplains, and churchgoers who forged our spirit in every generation since, the love of Jesus Christ has stood at the center of our identity and way of life,” the president continued.
He noted the role of Catholics in the formation of this country, particularly Bishop John Carroll, the first Catholic bishop in the United States, who “consecrated our young Republic to Mary, the Mother of God,” and his cousin Charles Carroll, one of the Founding Fathers and the only Catholic to have signed the Declaration of Independence.
St. John Paul II and Reagan
Trump invoked the memory of St. John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan, contemporaries whose “moral leadership” in their respective church and state spheres of influence, vanquished “the godless forces of Soviet communism” so the “human spirit” could triumph.
The feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, on June 12, “fittingly marks the anniversary of one of the most momentous days in Western civilization’s long twilight struggle against atheistic communism,” Trump said.
On June 12, 1987, in a historic address at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany, Reagan “famously implored Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” Trump said.
On the same day, St. John Paul addressed youth in his native Poland, recalling the Battle of Westerplatte and the Polish soldiers who resisted Nazi Germany in 1939. They became a national symbol of courage and fidelity, Trump said. A force of just over 200 Polish soldiers held out for seven days against over 3,000 German soldiers.
The pope challenged the Polish youth to each find their own personal “Westerplatte,” which he described as “some rightful cause for which one cannot avoid fighting. … A just cause that you cannot simply fail to fight for.”
“Nearly four decades later, our Nation and our culture confront a new set of menacing ideologies seeking once again to cast God out from our society,” Trump said.
Commitment to faith
As the bishops consecrated the U.S. to the Sacred Heart of Jesus “in this 250th year of our Independence, we recommit ourselves, like President Reagan and Pope Saint John Paul II, to defending our spiritual identity and great civilizational inheritance,” Trump said.
“Above all, we pray that America will continue for the next 250 years, and beyond, to be a land of faith, a country of miracles, and a light and glory to all nations,” Trump concluded.
