"[I]f like a scientist you will take the raw materials of your mind and your body and process them through the laboratory of humility, prayer and neighborly love, the result will be a second explosion heard ‘round the world. You will be raised into a life of overwhelming love, great peace, and heroic achievement. And these things no man will ever be able to take from you. And you will have achieved a genuine citizenship, not merely in a political sense, but in fulfilling your highest powers and greatest potential as a human being.”
Our Quote of the Week signals that it is our values and our ability to treat others with care that makes us citizens.
In a rousing 1957 speech about citizenship to young leaders, Sargent Shriver speaks about the potential of Chicago, his home at the time. He asks the audience: “What are we in Chicago famous for? What do we export to the world?”
He suggests that perhaps the city is known for exporting only “material things,” listing the manufactured products for which the city was famous at the time. He then stresses that as citizens, we need to cultivate deeper, more spiritual gifts to give to each other and to the rest of the world, and it is in this context that he speaks of citizenship in terms of values, including faith, service, and, love.
Shriver stresses that thinking of citizenship in this way will, in fact, have a positive effect on the status and influence of the United States in the world:
“True, the world needs [the material things that we produce]. But it needs much more the faith and the idealism which made America unique in the world.”
Sargent Shriver’s insights about citizenship prompt us to reflect on the current debates about immigration and the broader context in which our current leaders are operating as they seek to punish those who presumably do not qualify to be “citizens,” without any regard for their rights. As Shriver reminds us:
“Racially, the United States is a melting pot of every nation under the sun. Geographically we reached our present borders only within the last 100 years. But, by force of an idea—the proposition that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights—the United States has risen to be the most powerful community in recorded history.”
We have to ask, therefore, if we are not following the proposition that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” as codified in our Declaration of Independence, what kind of citizens are we, and how can we judge who may or may not be citizens?
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