"Repair My House" -- On This 4th, Freedom Begins At Home

The 4th of July in the West's Cradle of Liberty....

Always and everywhere, this Day is one to celebrate freedom's march and seek renewed strength to continue it onward. Yet for the first time in a good while, perhaps that's truer for no place more than this.

Tempting as it is to explain, after a Fortnight's worth of stabs at recounting a 16 months whose equal no American Catholic community has experienced in the last half-century, that story will have to wait.

For starters, the demands of a 24-hour news cycle fail any sound piece on the 181 years which laid the landmines of this period, or said history's upending in a matter of weeks. Even closer to home, meanwhile, it's just going to take a good, long coma to begin to recover from the experience... and with nothing either impending or ongoing on the scene that matters most for the first time since February 9th, 2011, only now is a quality breather finally possible.

Well, almost.

All that said, any original feed was only intended to set the stage for returning the Last Word -- at least, in the immediate frame -- whence it rightly belongs.

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As ever, the eyes of many will be on Independence Hall later this morning for the traditional rites just outside the Assembly Room where the Declaration was signed and the Constitution subsequently approved, just next door to the first halls of Congress from which the Bill of Rights would be sent for the ratification of the states.

That's the Philadelphia story everybody knows -- and, for most, it tends to end there.

These days, though, given the realities around, two other key threads relevant to recent history would later come to erupt here, and these streets speak powerfully and painfully of them both in ways no others can match.

In the earlier instance, the generation that heard Independence and its promises first proclaimed in daylight as children likewise lived to see nights when burning torches wielded by heirs to the Revolution destroyed Catholic churches -- plural -- within blocks of the Old State House, an act grown from a belief that the truths and freedoms declared there for "all men" did not extend to the newest immigrants who followed their own fathers to these shores.

A century later, meanwhile, another blaze would be set inside the church. Left to spread far longer and wider, this second inferno ended up inflicting even more devastation, a toll owed in large part to its source -- not the instruments of external persecution, but of internal failure on a scale that, by comparison, makes the paranoid, hate-filled, riotous Marchers of 1844 seem almost innocent.

Indeed, to a degree without parallel elsewhere, both these fires came to pass in this place. In their time, each scorched this earth, made hope difficult to find and caused seemingly irreparable wounds to individuals, families and the wider community alike whilst driving as many or even more innocent souls of good faith and goodwill to scatter. Yet as it was before, so it is now that another fire has begun to spring up in the wake of an epic collapse -- the Fire that will raise, unite, heal and purify this people anew, and restore to this place something it haven't known in quite some time: newness of life, and the fullness of truth.

In the mysterious design of Providence, the decision which would secure that future was made in Rome a year ago today. So in that Spirit -- and with his most candid assessment to date of the state in which the Church in this rocked Cradle, and well beyond, currently finds itself -- the Ninth Archbishop of Philadelphia delivered the following keynote (fullaudio) over recent days at the Catholic Media Convention in Indianapolis....

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As the capital's Cardinal Donald Wuerl does celebrant's duty, Archbishop Charles Chaput OFM Cap. will preach the closing Mass of the national Fortnight for Freedom, slated to begin in Washington's Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception at 12.10pm Eastern today, following the coast-to-coast ringing of bells sought at Noon by the US bishops.

The liturgy will stream live via EWTN (iPhone/iPad feed) and CatholicTV.

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