In this series on understanding Divine Providence, we see how humans discern the presence of God’s will, particularly through individual experience. As Jean-Pierre Caussade teaches, God is at work in all historical events—not just on the level of the individual, but collectively as well. His will, His plan for salvation, encapsulates the entirety of humanity.
If so, then why does God allow so many tragic events to occur? Each death is a tragedy, and collective deaths even more so. How can we make sense of the 9/11 terror attacks or school shootings? The loss of life appears so random. Why is one person’s life taken when another’s is spared? These events fill us with confusion and fear.
Often our greatest leaders at such times of war and disaster are those who accept the will of God. George Washington, for example, was praised during the American Revolution thus: “A man is never more truly noble than when he is sensible that he is only a secondary instrument of bringing to pass God’s great designs.” Washington’s characteristics included humility before God, realizing that Divine Providence, the will of God, was the ultimate reason for American success during the American Revolution.
Abraham Lincoln likewise could not understand why America was being destroyed during the Civil War, but he accepted it as God’s will and put himself, as president, in God’s hands. The Gettysburg Address was his most profound statement in this regard.
In other revolutionary events, such as the discovery and colonization of America, the one who relies on God’s will and serves as an instrument of that will—such as Christopher Columbus—are most remembered. Pope Leo XIII praised Christopher Columbus for his devotion to God’s will, quoting the explorer as saying, “‘I trust that, by God’s help, I may spread the Holy Name and Gospel of Jesus Christ as widely as may be.’”
There is overwhelming evidence that the United States was formed by Christians who were sure that God’s will was behind the European discovery of America, the colonization of the east coast by the British, and the emergence of an independent United States in the late eighteenth century. Today, this idea is often derided as “American exceptionalism.” Like it or not, history shows convincingly that the founders of this country did believe in American exceptionalism because they believed that God was behind the founding and success of the U.S.
Among those who believed this was America’s first bishop, John Carroll, who wrote that America is “so blessed with civil and religious liberty” that Americans have “the wisdom and temper to preserve” this liberty such that “America may come to exhibit a proof to the world, that general and equal toleration, by giving a free circulation to fair argument, is the most effectual method to bring all denominations of Christians to an unity of faith.”
The many Roman Catholics who came to America over the course of the past five hundred years believed that God had blessed this land and its people.
Fr. Louis Lambert, a priest and writer at the turn of the century, explained that “God sometimes uses men as instruments in works they do not fully understand the import of” in “the shaping [of] the course of events out of which this republic grew. He used as instruments men who were unconscious of or adverted not to His designs, and yet they did their parts to the consummation of the result as surely as Moses did his in obedience to the Voice from the burning bush.” This fascinating comment informs us of the mysterious way in which God works in human events.
For centuries in North America, the drivers of historical change, hence the actors upon God’s will, were the missionaries who came to America from Europe in response to the Great Commission. Thousands upon thousands of missionaries—Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Jesuits, and others—followed in Columbus’ wake, bringing the Good News to the indigenous people of America. During the nineteen and twentieth centuries, God used missionaries, priests, and laypersons to carry out His will; one example among many was Fr. Michael Portier (1795-1859).
After the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, the United States annexed Florida; the resident bishop, Louis-Guillaume-Valentin Dubourg, recruited Fr. Portier of Lyons, France. Fr. Portier traveled to America, was ordained in 1818, and began to serve as a missionary out of Mobile, Alabama. In 1826 he became “Vicar Apostolic of the Vicariate of Alabama and the Floridas.” In 1827 Fr. Portier sought to travel through northern Florida, from Pensacola in West Florida to St. Augustine in East Florida. The land was still very much a wilderness, in part because of the inhospitality of the Seminole Indians.
Fr. Portier was responding to an appeal from the Catholics of St. Augustine, who explained how the state’s history of political discord had led to a lack of organization and instability of political and ecclesiastical affairs. Portier determined, he recorded in his journal, to brave the journey across Florida to help “people deprived of religious joys and consolation, . . . pining amidst the darkness of ignorance,” in part because of the growing presence of evangelical Protestantism throughout America.
He set forth in June of 1827, traveling with a farmer and a postal carrier. The three engaged in much conversation. Fr. Portier was an astute student of human affairs, and picked up on American history very quickly, such that he was able to ascertain:
[The] American husbandman is a wanderer. Providence seems to urge him incessantly towards the wilderness in order that it may be peopled. There is a continual change of farm, dwelling, State, without concern or provision for what is to follow. Vast territories are crossed; the children are carried forward in the farm-wagons with the provisions; many weeks are passed in camping out; at night the wagons are turned into beds. . . . The result of all this moving is that to-day one encounters a Methodist exhorter, tomorrow an Anabaptist; and with each successive day new doctrines and new practices, of the most contradictory kind, are offered to the choice of a shifting people. How can one become fixed amidst this confusion of opinions?
This was part of Portier’s calling, to reach out to such people to inform them of the truth, the standards and traditions of Christianity carried through centuries by the Church, which does not sway in the winds of change or uncertainty, providing an anchor of faith.
Fr. Portier himself had experienced this uncertainty on the voyage across the Atlantic to America, during which his reliance upon the will of God enabled him to fear not when the winds and waves threatened to overwhelm the ship. He wrote:
While in the wilderness he is alone with God, and his stray, fluctuating thoughts warn him continually that his only strength and his only help are to be found in the consolation of religion. Then it is that the minister of the Gospel grasps the full meaning of St. Paul: “I can do all things in Him who strengtheneth me.” It is easy then to pray, and the lifting of our hearts to God becomes a positive necessity. No matter what may be the perils that menace us, their only effect upon the soul is to stimulate it anew. Our onward march is for Jesus Christ; we take part in the work of the earliest promoters of the Faith; we feel proud to suffer as they did in the same cause, and like them, above all, to hand over our feeble existence to the mercy of Him who entrusted it to us.
Portier’s words and example inform us that no mind can grasp the infinite wisdom of our God and His plan for humanity, and yet God wills us to contemplate and act upon it, for the story of salvation history continues to play out in our individual and collective lives, past, present, and future.
Editor’s Note: This is part 7 in a series on understanding Divine Providence as revealed to us by God and interpreted by man throughout history. Catch up on the series here.
Photo by Yanny Mishchuk on Unsplash
