Freedom & integrity in church & state
Hehir, J. Bryan
Church/world watch Freedom & integrity in church & state J. Bryan Hehir AYBAR AGO the nation was in the midst of a presidential campaign shot through with religious themes, claims, and...
...This first stage culminated with Murray designing the language of the conciliar decree less than twenty years after he had been forbidden to publish on the topic of church-state relations...
...Two published pieces are available: a seminal article in America...
...It is dated in other ways also, but none of the specific omissions or judgments which date it deprive the book of its fundamental value...
...Authority, and Community" (Dec...
...He made his contribution in two stages...
...Both the upcoming synod, where freedom will be an issue, and the approach of another round of elections, where religion will be an issue, make us aware of how much we owe Murray, how much we miss him, and how badly we need other voices of his quality in church and State...
...In it Murray projects not only guidelines for a public philosophy, but a view of how the church should actively participate in the public arena...
...Both candidates gave speeches devoted to their religious convictions and how they related them to public office...
...For a society like ours, in which the topic religion and politics is shorthand for the relationship of moral argument and public policy, Murray's assessment of the nature of a pluralistic society and the challenge it faces in shaping moral consensus is qualitatively better than most recent analysis in either the secular or religious press...
...Murray took seriously the democratic character, pluralistic culture, and tremendous power of American society...
...This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of John Courtney Murray's We Hold These Truths, and the twentieth anniversary of Vatican II "s Declaration on Religious Liberty, principally drafted by Murray...
...It is also true, in my view, that on the general topic of religion and politics Murray's Theological Studies articles of 1945-1964 provide a foundation, categories, and a sophistication which can be usefully mined by anyone seeking to shape the future discussion of these themes Murray's contribution as a political philosopher is to be found principally in I We Hold These Truths If his theological contribution was a gift to the universal church, these essays are particularly directed to the church in the United States...
...Throughout his campaign to win a Catholic affirmation of the right of religious liberty as a human and civil right, Murray carefully distinguished this right from the question of freedom within the church...
...J BRYAN HEHIR 18 October 1985: 587...
...A second stage of the theological contribution is found in the corpus of commentaries which Murray wrote on Vatican II's declaration...
...One can only speculate where this research might have taken Murray in the multiple debates about freedom which have marked the post-conciliar church...
...Church/world watch Freedom & integrity in church & state J. Bryan Hehir AYBAR AGO the nation was in the midst of a presidential campaign shot through with religious themes, claims, and contentions...
...By Murray's ecclesiological contribution, I mean the scattered signals one can find in the very last years of his life,that Murray was prepared to examine the issue of freedom in the church...
...he also spoke pointedly to the absence of moral direction for much of that power and to the seeming inability of Catholics to contribute to filling the moral vacuum...
...I think, for the wider community interested in pursuing the discussion of religion and politics in the more relaxed atmosphere of a year without national elections...
...After the battle in the secular arena had been won, he was more willing to probe the internal ques(Continued on page 587) Commonweal: 554 Church/world watch (Continued from page 554) tion...
...Murray's contribution was decisive in shifting Catholic teaching from the PostReformation-Vatican I position which held a "Catholic state" to be the normative goal (with its consequent restrictions on the right of religious liberty of non-Catholic citizens) to a position where the church expected from the state not favoritism but the freedom to function...
...As a theologian, Murray made a contribution to the universal church by preparing for and fashioning the development of doctrine in Catholic teaching on church-state relations...
...He might have pushed forward our notion of freedom ecclesially as he had politically...
...My limited concern here is simply to note a resource for the Catholic community particularly and also...
...In the Catholic community the autumn of '84 produced substantial, detailed publiclectures by Cardinals Bernardin and O'Connor and by Governor Cuomo and Congressman Hyde on the topic of religion, morality, and politics...
...read today, it would go far to shape a clearer public debate about abortion, even though the absence of any reference to abortion is one of the characteristics which dates We Hold These Truths...
...First, between 1945 and 1964 he argued, in a series of scholarly articles in Theological Studies, the case for the possibility of developing Catholic (caching in a fashion which would change its conclusions to meet new needs without forsaking key values of a Catholic perspective on the state and society...
...In 1983, as we seek to evaluate the event of Vatican II through the analysis of its products, no better assessment of Religious Liberty is available than Murray's own work...
...His chapter on law and morality remains the best single treatment of the topic...
...3, 1966), which has the richness and density of an outline for a book, and his brief contribution done for the Kpiscopal Church about theological freedom, "A Will to Community...
...The secular editorial commentary on the question was voluminous and the TV time accorded it extensive...
...Murray's contribution spanned three roles: he was a systematic theologian, a political philosopher, and an ccclcsiologist...
...It would be fascinating to know what his judgment of Catholics and the public arena would be in the 1980s...
...Some of this analysis — not nearly enough — has been going on in university symposia and research institutes...
...In a specific sense these two documents are the resource 1 mentioned above, but in a wider sense it is Murray's total work, style of argumentation, and view of the church's publicrole which these two anniversaries should highlight...
...Periodically, in church or state, someone would say that after the election the issues should be sorted out and analyzed in a more leisurely fashion...
Vol. 112 • October 1985 • No. 18
