JOHN COURTNEY MURRAY: BELATED HERO

...All the women in Kopple's film give this impressionmthe impression of a subterranean rage bursting forth at last...

...No dedication of his first major work...

...Murray was American enough to realize that the question was genuine...

...We certainly feel that the reason Kopple became so directly involved in the strike, instead of just documenting it, was the identification she had with these Harlan County women...

...And Murray is one of the more important things we know...

...4 March 1977:152...

...He said, "To you, Phil...

...Stoic," yes, and "enduring...

...One's feeling that Father Murray was an isolate figure would not depend, of course, on a single circumstance such as that of his silencing...

...O ne can only be grateful that this book has appeared...

...They were the ones who seem, often, to have sustained the picket lines...

...A work of careful research, it recreates a dramatic segment of recent Roman Catholic history, and rescues the pr~atagonist of that drama from the near-oblivion which seemed about to enshroud his memory...

...Or perhaps it was just that the women originally felt their actions were less significant than the men's...

...One can only hope that Christian theologians below the age of forty will read this book, and not regard it simply as a chronicle of "old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago...

...Just five years before, his Jesuit superiors in Rome had quietly ordered him to end all public statements on ChurchState relations, since his earlier writings on the subject had stirred the active animosity of Cardinal Ottaviani and the Holy Offw.e...

...MARTIN E. MARTY teaches at The University of Chicago, edits at The Christian Century, and recently published A Nation o/ Behavers (Chicago...

...As a paradoxical result of Pelotte's flat, factual presentation, his study of Murray as a "theologian in conflict" revived in memory what I had always felt him to be--an embodiment of the lonely American hero, not in literature, but in life...

...All she cares about now is overcoming for her kids the misery and oppression of their lite...

...He neither stormed nor sulked, but like Natty Bumppo after the loss of Judith Hutter, quietly turned the current of his life into writing and lecturing about the roles Catholicism might and should play within American life...

...As Catholics entered prominently into American life, many of their fellow-citizens publicly questioned whether one could be both a Catholic and an American without denying or at least diminishing one of the dual loyalties...

...Murray accepted the command not to rock the Ark, but if he expected strong public support from his fellow American Jesuits, he received very little...

...And in this regard Harlan County is, like Lumi#e, an act of self-discovery by a woman, a documentary of the self...

...and therefore, thinking they had less to hide, they were less self-conscious, more open, with Kopple...

...I t is certainly safe to conjecture that he would have been among the first North Americans to see the values of liberation theology as it developed in Latin American...

...No future historian, or even journalist-commentator, can approach this period of Church history or the figure of John Courtney Murray and remain ignorant of this book...

...An intensely private person almost to the point of shyness, he had many friends but apparently few intimates...

...Had he lived on, with even his lacework health, his contributions to these new areas of inquiry and profound human concern might well have proven as great as his work on religious liberty...

...There is a great degree of stoicism built into Jesuit spirituality, with its emphasis on Ignatian indifference and unquestioning obedience...

...As American editor of Sheed and Ward, I searched out every article Murray had ever written (including one he had published as a Jesuit scholastic teaching in the Philippines), and selected those which seemed to make an organic work centered around "Catholic Reflections Upon the American Proposition," the sub-title of the eventual book...

...Foreword by Martin Marty Paulist Press, $9.95 thought theology the art of writing glosses upon glosses...

...In Bumppo, Lawrence saw a depiction of "the essential American soul--isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...That the women at first thought of themselves as auxiliary and peripheral seems likely, for Harlan County makes us feel that they grew a lot during the time Kopple was filming them...

...Pellote is not a man to be seduced into a gossipy paragraph or even into a well-founded conjecture...

...J o h n Courtney Murray: Theologian in Conflict opposition, misunderstanding, official disfavor and a constant pushing of his perilous health...

...Several months later, as the book was moving into page proofs, I asked Father Murray to whom he wished to dedicate it...

...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MICHAEL J . BANDLER regularly reviews books on Jewish and general subjects for a number of newspapers and magazines...

...In covering the leadership that such a woman provides, Kopple gets shot at herself in one sequence, and her people are knocked down, kicked and beaten in another...

...But not every Jesuit, obviously, could have accepted with Murray's near equanimity a decision of his superiors "to close the door on the past ten years...

...Unfailingly kind, a good companion, he moved affably and urbanely through many circles, but he did seem to move through them...

...With no one, including himself, able to discern it at the time, Murray was earryin,g much PHILIP SCHARPER:, former associate editor o/Commonweal, is editor-in-chie...

...We realize that this woman has just made a greater leap than any of the miners themselves are likely to be able to make through their strike...

...LOIS SPEAR, O.P., teaches history at St...

...of Orbis Books...

...In fairness to his memory, I would not wish to strain the analogy of Father Murray to "the essential American soul...

...He had gone out on a limb, and while none of his brothers handed him up a sharp saw, at best they kept moving beneath him with a fireman's net...

...In a basic sense, Murray did not choose the themes of Church-State relations and religious liberty which would occupy the last twenty years of his life...

...After Vatican Council II, theelegy found so many new channels: the death of God, the Secular City, theology of hope, the Christian-Marxist dialogue, liberation, black theology, political theology...

...quicker and quicker into her throat and the breath between them becomes ever more compressed, until we see that the explosion in the mine was nothing compared to the explosion of insight and realization that has been building in her over the years...

...The Christian call to freedom is inherently a call to community, a summons out of isolation . . . an impulse to service of the others...

...Murray was "vindicated," and became the principal 4 March 1977:130 architect of its statement on religious freedom, which may have been the greatest of the many achievements of the "unexpected Council...

...The drama, as we can now see, was far larger than the struggle of John Courtney Murray against his theological opponents, who seemed determined that the Church in the United States would remain forever an ideological suburb of Vatican City...

...In the end, then, Harlan County is perhaps not so far removed from Moreau's Lumi#e as it may at first have seemed...

...he was creative theologian enough to know that the question could not be met by dusting off the ancient answers...

...If you want my husband, she says, take him...

...RALPH MclNERNY, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, recently published Her Death of Cold (Vanguard...

...In my voicing this hope recently to a youngish, but recognized theologian, he replied, "But we now know so much more than Murray did...

...He had waged his theological battle alone, and he was alone in what he called his "defeat...

...I told him he would have Commonweal: 151 several weeks to choose a dedication, but he later phoned to tell me none would he forthcoming...

...Precisely...

...The sequences where the gun thugs challenge her and her crew are interspliced with those where the thugs confront the strikers themselves as if it were really all the same...

...Nor could I, in fidelity to my own remembrance, deny that in my deepening acquaintance with him from 1956 on, he seemed increasingly 'isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring.' His isolation was brought home to me in the preparation of his major work, We Hold These Truths...

...Fl~NaNE C~M~ is assistant professor of Church History at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington...

...MICHAEL ZEIK is a member of the faculty at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York...

...Almost by way of postscript: To those with any interest in the Catholic theology of the fifties and sixties, it could come as surprise, even mild shock, that seminarians and even theologians in the seventies seem to have so little interest in Murray...

...Almost selfless...

...He was later to refer to this period as "the long distraction of the religious liberty issue," but it was a distraction which'~ brought him bitter For Murray, dialogue between serious men about serious things was a sine qua non of civilized society...

...He conducted for a decade a highlevel debate with adversaries who John Courtney Murray: Theologian in Conflict DONALD E. PELOTTE, S.S,S...

...Much of it is understandable, of course...

...Such Christian realism might well prove an excellent norm for those who have accepted his challenge to commit themselves as Catholics to Americds role in history...

...MSGR...

...But then, with one of those unpredictable turns which both delight and dismay historians, John XXIll convoked the Second Vatican Council...

...Nor did he have to...

...The first gun we see a striker brandish in answer to the violence of the company thugs is one a woman pulls out of her cleavage at a meeting of the women's committee...

...Isolate...

...For a time they prevailed, Murray was silenced...

...Frank Sheed, a long-time friend, had for years tried to persuade Murray to write a book, but no book came...

...The only consolation or hope to be taken from what we see in the film comes from what we see of them...

...It is all set forth by Donald Pelotte with meticulous care and wide-ranging but controlled scholarship...

...If something is not in print --books, articles, archives---then for Pelotte's purposes, quite properly, it does not exist...

...Otherdirected though Kopple's film is, I .think she clearly finds in the women she filmed an ideal for herself...

...D. H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature, speaks of James Fenimore Cooper's most Romantic hero with a scarcely romantic name--Natty Bumppo...

...The end in view was not necessarily agreement but frequently that kind of understanding which is~ presupposed by honest disagreement...

...tn part, I could understand...

...JOHN COURTNEY MURRAY: BELATED HERO PHILIP SCHARPER of the Church into the future as he strove to bring-both its principle and policy into the modern world of religious pluralism and the freedom of the individual either to believe or not believe...

...As much in his life, then, as in his writings, John Courtney Murray demonstrated that one can fiercely hold a clear-eyed commitment to being both an American and a Roman Catholicm and even be a quintessential Jesuit...

...When Frank Sheed presented him with the proposed contents of We Hold These Truths, Murray expressed surprise, and then full consent...

...When I pointed out that a dedication to an editor would be rather unusual and misplaced, he said, "Well, then, I guess to no one...

...Hanging in there with the miners' wives and mothers on the picket lines, Kopple obviously came to feel that she too was a part of t h e strike...

...Perhaps because Kopple and most of her crew were women themselves, the women's committee of the strike took them into its confidence more readily than the men seem to have...

...It is a splendid example of what historical writing should be: building on the work of others, it becomes indispensable for any further writing in its field...

...Father Murray was much too harried by his teaching, the editorship of Theological Studies, his public lectures and his continuing published debates with Monsignor Fenton and the American Ecclesiastical Review possibly to write a book over that period...

...The only thing Kopple's film really affirms is the spirit of those Harlan County women...

...The themes chose him...

...Freedom," wrote Murray two years before his death, "in the deepest experience of it, is love...

...Augustine College in Raleigh, a Black institution established by the Episcopal Church in 1867...

...GEORGE G. HIGGINS is Secretary for Research at the United States Catholic Conference in Washington...

...Like ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, the course of this meeting in the Kentucky wilds seems at this moment to embody much recent evolution of the consciousness of women everywhere...

...At one of the meetings of the women's committee, for instance, a procedural disagreement degenerates into name-calling, accusations of loose morals, man-stealing, etc...

...He had already written it, over a span of years...

...But then suddenly one of the women not involved jumps in with the declaration that none of those things matters...

...So, while still teaching the traditional courses on grace and the Trinity at Woodstock, he ventured into theological thickets wherein he had to cut his own path...

...To be free is to be-for-the-others...

...In the less than two years of life remaining between the end of the Council in December, 1965 and his death in August, 1967, Murray had begun to enter into each of these areas in his new post as director of the John La Farge Institute in New York City...

...More than any evidence it provides of poverty or injustice in eastern Kentucky, Harlan County turns out to be evidence of the strength that the impulse towards identification, towards "sisterhood," has among women these days...