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Freedom and Virtue: John Courtney Murray on the Truths We Hold
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18047 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1990 |
5,828 Words |
| Author
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Jude P. Dougherty
Jude P. Dougherty is the dean of the Department of Philosophy
at the Catholic University of America. |
In its cover story of December 12, 1960, Time magazine used John Courtney Murray to symbolize the coming of age of American Catholicism. John F. Kennedy had just been elected president of the United States and would become the first Catholic to hold that office. Significantly, Murray was pictured against the backdrop of a sixteenth-century manuscript of Robert Bellarmine's "disputations de Controversiis Christianae Fidei." A diagonal yellow banner bore the title of the cover essay, "U.S. Catholics and the State." Murray, a theology professor at the Jesuit seminary of Woodstock College, was then a major academic participant in a debate concerning the nature of American democracy and its presuppositions. It was a time of a vigorous and self-confident Catholicism. Issues were sharply defined, as Murray challenged both secular liberal and Protestant social and political thought.
Many things have changed since Murray wrote. In the political order Vietnam was yet to come; in the religious, the culmination of the Second Vatican Council was six years off. Murray never lived to witness the fall of Saigon or to experience a church re-created in the "spirit" of Vatican II. He was sixty-three years of age in 1967 when he was stricken with a heart attack while riding in a taxi in his native New York City. The subsequent collapse of the American will to prosecute to a successful conclusion the war in Southeast Asia would not have surprised him; the dissolution of his beloved Catholic Church into a friendly, mindless, liturgically impoverished religious body would have come as a shock. Murray had more confidence in the Catholic Church than he did in the United States, principally because, in his view, the church possessed a tradition much wider and deeper than any that America had elaborated; and with a history many times as long, it commanded the intellectual resources indispensable to the formulation of a public philosophy. He was under no illusion that the United States could, in fact, develop a public philosophy, but he was convinced that the country needed one. He was confident that the materials required were available in the natural law tradition carried within the Catholic intellectual community. He was pleased to observe that the Catholic Church in America was not divided into Left and Right as was the case in France. With confidence he could represent an essentially unified church, articulating what he took to be a common outlook respect to the fundament of law. That fundament in its ideal formulation is what he called the "public philosophy," and insofar as it was broadly accepted, he was willing to call it the "public consensus."
No doubt World War II had led many public figures to reflect on the difference
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