On Friday, July 3, 2026, the U.S. National Constitution Center, established by Congress in 1988, awarded the prestigious Liberty Medal to Pope Leo XIV on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. The public ceremony took place on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, literally steps from Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were debated and signed.
The Pope accepted the award via livestream from the Vatican, thanking the American people and emphasizing interfaith dialogue and the pursuit of common ground as defining pillars of the American experience. Yet these concepts are not the constitutional principles upon which the United States was founded. Rather, they are central themes of modern Roman Catholic social teaching, especially as articulated since the Second Vatican Council. Their purpose is to foster cooperation among the world’s religions by emphasizing a shared belief and common witness while setting aside theological differences in the interest of peace and unity.
America’s founding documents do not establish interfaith dialogue as a national mission, nor do they authorize government to unite religions in pursuit of the common good. Instead, they limit the power of civil government so that religious liberty and freedom of conscience remain outside of governmental control. What Pope Leo XIV is actually doing is revising our history to push the Vatican II agenda of dialogue, fraternity, and the common good and move us away from Protestant constitutional principles and into Rome’s model of church-state unity.
This indeed is a historical and unprecedented event, especially when our Founding Fathers viewed the Pope of Rome with deep suspicion because he was a symbol of the union of church and state and of religious persecution. Many early Americans were Protestants whose families had fled Europe precisely to escape Roman Catholic persecution. The Spanish Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition, the wars of religion, and the enforcement of Catholic tradition by monarchs backed by papal authority were events that were contemporary to our Founding Fathers.
Today, Protestant America has honored the very symbol that the Founding Fathers rejected. And they did it from the very birthplace of this nation. The medal ceremony was held at the very site where the American experiment in limited government and separation of church and state was born. This nation deliberately rejected European models in which a religious authority, whether pope or king, could claim both spiritual and political power.
And to honor the head of the Roman Catholic Church with a “Liberty Medal” on the eve of the 250th anniversary is a profound reversal to what America is supposed to represent. Our nation is literally bestowing honor on the very system many had fled many centuries ago. The Pope hasn’t changed. He is still the embodiment of church-state union. In the Founding Fathers’ minds, the Papacy stood for tyranny. The Pope’s claim to universal authority and temporal power remained deeply problematic to our nation at its founding. In fact, the U.S. Constitution was written to keep any such authority — foreign or domestic — from gaining a foothold in our nation.
A Changed America, Not a Changed Papacy
The contradiction arises because America has changed dramatically since 1776. In today’s pluralistic, post-Vatican II era, the United States can honor the Pope for his so-called advocacy of religious freedom without seeing it as a threat to the republic. The Liberty Medal award cites the Pope’s advocacy for religious liberty, a position the modern Catholic Church has strongly affirmed since the Second Vatican Council’s Dignitatis Humanae in 1965.
The problem, however, is that the American and Roman Catholic understandings of religious liberty are not the same. The United States Declaration of Independence describes our rights as “inalienable,” meaning that they cannot be legitimately taken away, surrendered, or transferred because they come from the Creator rather than from the state. By contrast, Roman Catholic teaching affirms religious freedom, but not as an unrestricted or absolute civil right; Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae says religious liberty exists “within due limits,” and the Catechism places rights within the framework of “the common good” and public order. Therefore, the American model emphasizes that rights are absolute and that government exists to protect them, while the Catholic model allows civil authority, in certain cases, to limit individual freedoms in the name of a higher common or moral good.
The current situation reveals one of history’s greatest ironies: America, a nation founded to protect itself from religious establishments, which lead to tyranny, now pays tribute to the leader of one of history’s oldest church-state institutions. In the early days of America, there was a healthy, widespread suspicion against the Pope due to his temporal power. This gesture of bestowing a high honor upon the same Pope—the Medal of Freedom—truly represents one of the greatest ironies of our modern time.
Our Founding Fathers saw the Catholic Church’s hierarchical structure, its claim of papal supremacy over secular rulers, and its history of using state power to suppress “heresy” as completely incompatible with a constitutional republic, religious liberties, and individual conscience. That is why the First Amendment was designed to prevent any church from gaining the kind of privileged and coercive relationship with the state that had existed in Catholic Europe.
Unfortunately, that has all changed today:
“Protestants have tampered with and patronized popery; they have made compromises and concessions which papists themselves are surprised to see and fail to understand. Men are closing their eyes to the real character of Romanism and the dangers to be apprehended from her supremacy. The people need to be aroused to resist the advances of this most dangerous foe to civil and religious liberty” (Great Controversy, p. 566).
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