Romano Guardini on the Role of the Nation

In the face of a powerful globalist movement, whose siren songs are as anthropologically dubious as are those now undermining the human family, Romano Guardini offers a healthy reminder:

“The real and actual place of history is the nation, the state, and the individual only insofar as he enters into a people or state. The event of history is constituted there: in the situation in which the individual is placed, together with his duties, his responsibility, and his fate. In the community of the nation, the individual encounters humankind as a whole. Not humankind as such, but humankind qualified by a specific nation. Only in his nation does humankind become concrete to him. He sees the nation as humankind’s living link, distinct, charged with its proper task and its own fate. He stands in relation to the whole of mankind but lives as an extension of the enrichment of his relation to his own nation and state.”*

*Romano Guardini, Liturgy and Liturgical Formation, (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2022), 45.