Toward a Catholic "regional patriotism"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Katerina recently posted a good piece on Patriotism and Importance of Memory. As one of the Vox Nova contributors who has written on the subject of\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2007\/07\/18\/toward-a-catholic-regional-patriotism\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Toward a Catholic "regional patriotism"\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Katerina recently posted a good piece on Patriotism and Importance of Memory. 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{"id":657,"date":"2007-07-18T15:42:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-18T15:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/voxnova2.wordpress.com\/2007\/07\/18\/toward-a-catholic-regional-patriotism\/"},"modified":"2007-07-18T15:42:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-18T15:42:00","slug":"toward-a-catholic-regional-patriotism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2007\/07\/18\/toward-a-catholic-regional-patriotism\/","title":{"rendered":"Toward a Catholic “regional patriotism”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Katerina recently posted a good piece on Patriotism and Importance of Memory<\/a>. As one of the Vox Nova contributors who has written<\/a> on the subject of patriotism\/nationalism regularly, I didn\u2019t want her post to go by without highlighting it. The type of patriotism she describes \u2014 rooted in authentic community, solidarity, and memory \u2014 is one that I can indeed recognize in myself, only not so much as a citizen of the United States, but as having most of my history rooted in the region<\/i> of the United States called Appalachia.<\/p>\n

Why one and not the other? I tend to agree with thinkers like Alastair MacIntyre, Benedict Anderson, and William T. Cavanaugh<\/a> who all assert that the United States is, in Anderson\u2019s words, an \u201cimagined community\u201d more than a real community. The United States, mostly because of its sheer size, is held together as a \u201ccommunity\u201d by something other than an authentic communal memory. Or, drawing from the political theology of Fr. Johann Baptist Metz, one could say the United States is held together by a selective<\/span> memory and a narrow<\/span> solidarity. Last term wrote a paper<\/a> (.pdf) on Metz\u2019s theology of memory comparing it to the U.S.\u2019s theology of memory, especially after 9\/11. I\u2019m wondering if I shouldn\u2019t adapt that paper for a series of posts here, as I find his fundamental theology helpful for reflecting on these issues.<\/p>\n

In light of this critique of the nation-state\u2019s potential to be an authentic community, I\u2019m wondering what Katerina, our readers, and our other contributors think of the idea of a \u201cregional patriotism.\u201d After all, although I have my suspicions of \u201cnation-based\u201d patriotism and have expressed them here a number of times, our Church nonetheless calls us to patriotism of a patricular kind, expressed in the John Paul II quote that we have seen here on the blog a number of times:<\/p>\n

Patriotism is a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, its natural features. It is a love which extends also to the works of our compatriots and the fruits of their genius. Every danger that threatens the overall good of our native land becomes an occasion to demonstrate this love\u2026I believe that the same could be said of every country and every nation in Europe and throughout the world. (John Paul II, Memory and Identity<\/em>, 65-66)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A \u201cregional patriotism,\u201d as I am defining it here, would take the best elements of JPII\u2019s thinking on patriotism, as well as the emphasis on solidarity<\/span> and subsidiarity<\/span> in Catholic social doctrine, and a more recent emphasis on localism<\/span> as articulated so strongly in the two pastoral<\/a> letters<\/a> of the Catholic bishops of Appalachia. A regional patriotism \u2014 rooted in the social doctrine of the Church and linked with contemporary critiques of nationalism \u2014 has the potential to punch gigantic holes in the myth of the nation-state that I have so fiercely opposed while holding on to what Americans seem so afraid to lose if they reject the notion of patriotism altogether. Thinking in terms of local regions rather than of the nation could also bear fruit for ecclesial praxis (and not only our theory!) in assisting a return to authentic and sustainable local communities in a nation that, ironically, continues to rely on the cancer of individualism in order to survive.<\/p>\n

I write this as someone who comes from a region of the United States with a strong, but diverse, sense of identity. What of those who do not come from such a place? What if all they can \u201csettle for\u201d is the patriotism of the nation-state (with these crtiques in mind, can we call it anything other than nationalism?) whose authenticity can be easily critiqued?<\/p>\n

Catholics would do well to remember that, although the Church encourages a patriotism of a certain type (described well by JPII and his interpreter Katerina), the nation-state concept has only been with us for about two-hundred years, while the Church has been with us for two-thousand years. Catholic teaching on \u201cpatriotism,\u201d the love of the gift of our land and the authentic communities that inhabit them, can and must transcend the fleeting and false community of the nation-state and sink its toes into the soil of real authentic, local solidarities.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"