By Stephen P. White.

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, February 20th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss Pope Francis' health crisis, the participation of an Anglican woman in the installation Mass of a Brazilian archbishop, and President Trump's decision to speed up approvals and pay for IVF treatments - as well as other issues in the global Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for today's column...

In 2026, the United States will celebrate our semiquincentennial; 250 years is a long time in terms of one human life. But it is not so very long a lifespan for a people, a nation. I say nation, not government, because I take it that there is such a thing as an American nation, which predates our Constitution and the government it established.

Not that it is easy to define a nation as something distinct from its government, particularly in the American case. An Englishman can list the many forms of government under which the English nation has existed. Same for a Frenchman or a Pole. In the latter case, the Polish nation managed to survive more than a century of partition during which no Poland appeared on a map and there was no Polish government.

America is no longer young, but neither is she particularly old, at least not compared to many of our European cousins. A nation young enough to recall its own birthday can't possibly be that old. America is certainly not old compared to some nations of the East, say, China or Japan. A people whose history as a people extends back into legend and myth is an ancient people, indeed.

One wonders if there can ever again be such ancient peoples or have the last of those nations already come into the world. Can a nation whose origins are recorded in contemporary newspaper accounts, whose youth was captured in photographs or on newsreels, ever really be old? Barring some great cataclysm, there can be no new peoples founded in myth and legend, only nations founded in history. We remember too much. We record too much.

We Americans date the beginning of our nation from a particular day in July of 1776, though one could argue that the Declaration of Independence no more created our nation than a birth certificate creates a newborn. It was the announcement of an existing (if disputed and previously unrecognized) reality. But the Declaration was not in itself an act of generation.

America as a nation had already begun to exist as a thing distinct from the British Empire. It was a new nation, but it was already alive - in utero, so to speak - well before its birth into the world.

By contrast, and whatever its aspirations, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, while it undoubtedly led to the alteration of both the French nation and the French government, marked neither the end of the French nation nor the arrival of a new one. One declaration heralded a natural (if difficult) birth after a long gestation; the other ushered in desperate acts of national self-mutilation.

Whether the American nation - again, positing that such a thing really exists - would survive a dramatic change in its form of government (as France underwent in 1789) or through a long partition (as Poland did) is an interesting question. Whether we already have survived such changes, and how many times, is another interesting question.

In his final address as president, Ronald Reagan quoted a letter he had received, in which the writer observed the following: "You can go to liv in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to liv in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to liv in America and become an American."

Ther...