At Washington D.C.’s National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, a Call to Remember America’s Catholic Roots in the Year of Freedom 250
The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, held on the March 19 Feast of St. Joseph, unfolded with a tone both reflective and urgent, as if the gathering were less a routine annual event and more a waypoint in a much larger national story. With the approaching 250th anniversary of the United States on the horizon, speakers returned again and again to a central theme: America’s founding spirit is deeply intertwined with a Catholic vision of freedom, order, and the common good—and recovering that vision may be essential for the nation’s glorious future.
Headlining the event were Michael Knowles, Jonathan Roumie, Dr. Brad Birzer, Vince Haley, Speaker Mike Johnson, Congressman Steve Scalise, among others, each bringing a distinct voice but converging on a shared message: the American experiment cannot be separated from the moral and spiritual traditions that helped shape it.
Throughout the event, America 250 shaped the speeches and conversations in unmistakable ways. With both historical references and theological reflections, the audience was left with a message that the United States cannot understand itself fully without acknowledging the Catholic religious and philosophical currents that helped give it life. Figures such as Bishop John Carroll, who consecrated the U.S. to the Immaculate Conception, and Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, were emblematic of the Catholic imprint on the founding era. The “First Citizen” debates in Maryland are just one example of how Catholic thought was present not at the margins, but near the center of America’s experiment in ordered freedom. Even Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations about religion’s stabilizing role in democracy were invoked as a reminder that faith was never meant to be sealed off from public life.
Dr. Brad Birzer from Hillsdale College reached even farther back to America’s inheritance in Europe- a lineage that extended through figures like Alfred the Great and events like the signing of the Magna Carta. These are milestones in a developing understanding of liberty under God. The Magna Carta’s insistence that the Church be free from political domination was framed as a foundational principle, one that helped shape later Western ideas about limited government and human dignity. Alongside this was a recurring moral claim: that true freedom requires responsibility, and that those in power must honor the rights of those below them.
It would hardly be a Catholic event without invoking the great St. Thomas Aquinas, whose writing about the “mixed regime”—a form of government ordered toward the natural law, common good and drawing from multiple structures of authority—was presented as a striking parallel to the American system.
The unmistakable figure of Jonathan Roumie, who portrays Jesus in The Chosen, brought a more personal and spiritual reflection of what is at the heart of our faith: God’s suffering out of love for us, and his mercy that is present and personal. Roumie led everyone in praying the Divine Mercy Chaplet after talking about his moving experience portraying Christ during the scenes of His Passion. Later on, in a letter read aloud to the audience from Pope Leo XIV, attendees were reminded that even the tradition of praying for one’s own nation stretches back to biblical times, when St. Paul exhorted early Christians to pray for those in positions of authority. The programming also featured testimony of Jimmy Lai’s daughter, reflecting on her father’s imprisonment, framing suffering itself as a form of grace.
Other moments from the morning reinforced this sense of spiritual grounding. The Hallow team spoke about being drawn together by the Holy Spirit, while reflections on St. Joseph emphasized the dignity of work and silent fidelity. The announcement of the designation of May 17 as a National Day of Prayer and fasting received enthusiastic applause. Throughout the event, there was a persistent insistence that America’s story is not self-sustaining, and that our country will thrive only if its animating spirit is the Christian saints and values.
Consistent with this year’s theme of “A nation Under God: Celebrating the Catholic Contribution to America’s 250 Years,” the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast offered a robust proposal for our Nation’s future: as the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary, it must look not only to its founding documents, but to the deeper moral and spiritual traditions that made those documents possible. For many of the speakers, that meant a renewed engagement with Catholic thought—not as a historical chapter, but as a living resource for a nation pioneering its way forward.
By Kristen Ziccarelli
