CATHOLIC

...But the struggle with revolutionary regimes did some good things for Catholicism...

...The second thing Murray had to do was bring into relief those aspects of the American order that are especially amenable to Catholic tradition...

...Murray's position was a delicate balancing act...

...But in fact abortion had already made it impossible to turn back to merely private Catholic opinion about public things...

...Studying in Jesuit seminaries in Massachusetts and Maryland, he was ordained in 1933 and sent to Rome to work on a doctorate in theology at the Gregorian University...

...Although Catholics in 1948 had intact their fleet of parochial schools and so were less immediately affected by the new jurisprudence, Murray urged them to "make common cause" with Protestants...

...And the third and most important thing Murray had to do was give an explanation for why the political state should not be an instrument of the Church...

...According to diplomatic protocol, she presented her credentials to Pope John Paul II, who took the occasion to give a pep talk on the "self-evident" truths of the Declaration of Independence...

...and second, reinterpreting the American tradition in order to accommodate Catholicism...

...On the other hand, Murray required Catholics to take a "high" reading of the American tradition—for it is a high reading of America to see the nation as founded on the principles of natural law and thus open to the most serious moral conversation about public policy...

...Two there are," as the fifth-century pope Gelasius had put it in a letter to the emperor Anastasius, "by which this world is chiefly ruled: the sacred authority of the priesthood and the royal power...

...This antistatist view would find its way into the Vatican II's statement on the Church and the modern world, Gaudium et spes...

...Pius VI was attacked by the French Directory for rejecting civil marriage and divorce, resisting the civil appointment of clergy, and condemning the elevation of the Goddess of Reason as the official French deity...

...In the almost forty years since he spoke in Houston, religion has erupted in public life: in struggles over race and the Vietnam war and prayer in schools, in the stands of Kennedy's own Democratic party on abortion and the privatization of religion that caused the flight of millions of traditionally Democratic Catholics to the Republicans...

...Kennedy would embrace (as he assumed Protestants wanted) the privatization of religion...

...On the one hand, he required Catholics to take a "low" reading of the Catholic tradition: A government without an established religion cannot be addressed in the language of Christian revelation, and so Catholics making public arguments in America must argue from generally accessible, naturally known truths about law and morality...

...Even more than John Courtney Murray, Karol Wojtyla was a mover behind Vatican II's declaration on religious liberty...

...John Courtney Murray understood instead that Catholics would have to do some serious reinterpreting in order to participate in the political life of American democracy: first, reinterpreting the Catholic tradition in order to accommodate America...

...In We Hold These Truths, Murray suggested that America's institutions are too good to rest upon the empiricist, pragmatic, and skeptical ideologies of the Enlightenment...

...Murray undoubtedly fashioned overly favorable interpretations of Church decrees, and his polemics sometimes ran ahead of his sources...

...It made the Church extremely suspicious of the centralized state and weaned Rome from thinking of civil government as an instrument for religi ous orthodoxy...

...Rather than giving direct political orders, it would teach...

...But in fact, there was no one at Vatican II actually suggesting that the state should make unbelievers profess the Catholic faith...

...By the late 1960s, Kennedy's path of private religion had proved unworkable...

...But in fact, his Eirst Amendment absolutism was already obsolete by the time he formulated it...

...Eor Murray, the American genius was to revive the old—and fundamentally Catholic, he daringly asserted—distinc-tion between society and the state...

...And for its part, the Church ought not to control the society, but influence it through teaching...

...Indeed, it was the rediscovered Murray who provided such thinkers as Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus with the notion that democracy actually depends on the constant participation of its religious believers...

...It would be a sad thing," the pope remarked, "if the religious and moral convictions upon which the American experiment was founded could now somehow be considered a danger to free society...

...Where Kennedy seemed perfectly happy to regard Catholicism as politiRussell Hittinger is Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and research professor of law at the University of Tulsa...

...In his Christmas radio address of 1944, Pope Pius XII surveyed the disaster of Europe and declared that democracy "appears to be a postulate of nature imposed by reason itself" because it affords some check upon the power of dictators...

...In Catholic pulpits and universities across the country, the laity were reminded of their obligation to take religiously and morally informed positions against racism first, then poverty, and then the Vietnam war (even though there had been considerable Catholic support for America's fight in Vietnam, at least during the early 1960s when South Vietnam had Catholic leaders...

...And the question for Catholics and non-Catholics alike was how Catholics could be good citizens if their doctrine required them to lie in wait for those conditions that allow a confessional state...

...Catholic by Russell Hittinger The Catholic Theology of John Courtney Murray During the presidential campaign of 1960, John E Kennedy, addressing a group of Baptist ministers in Houston, declared that he believed "in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute...

...On the other hand, it is held that, in the exercise of public and professional duties, respect for other people's freedom of choice requires that each one should set aside his or her own convictions...

...But the key to Murray's thought was his argument that neither of these powers can supplant the "conversation" of society...

...Though Kennedy's victory as the first Catholic president and Murray's appearance on the cover of a national news magazine seemed related—and probably were related in the minds of Time's editors—any careful reader could discover that Murray's thought was at odds with Kennedy's...

...Here was the state using public law to supplant the conversation of the free society: The Supreme Court seemed to imagine that because the state must be neutral among religions, so too must society be neutral...

...Even voluntary religious activity in public schools makes students aware of their differences along religious lines, and thus subverts the schools as the primary "symbol of secular unity...

...Murray held instead that by prohibiting state imposition of religion, the Eirst Amendment liberates Catholics to carry their religious formation into political practice...

...In retrospect, of these two Catholic figures of 1960, Murray has proved the more prophetic...

...Catholics, on the other hand, received their historical lessons from the French Revolution and its aftermath...

...In recent decades, the Catholic church has made an enormous investment in the principles and institutions of free society...

...In the 1948 McCollum decision, the Court had ruled unconstitutional voluntary religious instruction in public schools...

...Murray viewed Western history as an ongoing struggle to resist any slide into a "monism" with one power subordinated to the other...

...public-private dichotomy, arguing that he was "personally opposed" to abortion even while he supported the Court's decision to legalize it...

...President Eisenhower appointed him to the Atomic Energy Commission...

...But for Kennedy the Eirst Amendment not only protects Catholics from the Protestant majority, it also guarantees Catholics' privacy and saves them the embarrassment of mounting religiously informed public arguments...

...Murray warned that this was precisely the kind of "monism" against which America's Protestant Founders had reacted...

...Murray was the first Catholic thinker of any influence to see the role of the Supreme Court in distorting the proper roles of church and state...

...Born in New York in 1904, John Courtney Murray entered the Society of Jesus in 1920...

...Nor was there anyone suggesting that Catholics should refuse to give allegiance to secular states...

...From 1789 onwards, the Catholic Church suffered such bad relations with European governments that its main concern was not imposing Catholicism but eking out some modest liberty for itself...

...In 1960, John F Kennedy opted for the secularist myth of merely private religion...

...Church and state can collaborate precisely because neither can replace the moral conversation of the people...

...Understandably, this was not often preached for public consumption in the United States, but it was no secret either...

...It is tempting to say that Kennedy, by virtue of his political success, prevailed...

...And the first reinterpretation turned out to be much easier than the second...

...By the end of the Second World War, European émigrés like Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon were writing books showing a congruence between Anglo-American political institutions and Catholic social theory...

...More than anything else, this little moment at the Vatican reveals Murray's legacy...

...Although censured by his Jesuit superiors, he continued to write and speak on American public affairs...

...The European states born in revolution waged war against the Church...

...One of the lessons of Roe v. Wade is that he underestimated the darker forces in American culture...

...But the watershed was Roe v. Wade and the legalization of abortion in 1973...

...Beginning in the 1940s, Murray had argued that the history of the Church's direct governance of political things was an accident of the Middle Ages, when the Church had to supply political leadership after the collapse of the Roman Empire...

...Catholic liberals found themselves in an awkward position: Having argued throughout the 1960s that the moral energies of Catholicism ought to be devoted to social issues, how could they justify quietism on the life issues...

...The guardianship of the original American consensus, based on the Western heritage, would have passed to the Catholic community...

...ambassador to the Vatican in 1997...

...Murray warned that the Supreme Court was erecting a notion of the First Amendment that "cannot be approved by the civic conscience because it is a radical departure from our Federal constitutional tradition...

...For a while, it was Catholic liberals who championed Murray for his role in changing the Church's official position on democracy...

...His religion, he swore, was "his own private affair," and no public official should request or accept "instruction" from an ecclesiastical source—Catholic, Protestant, or Jew...

...His message was clear: A Catholic president would make no trouble, and neither would he make a positive contribution, at least not as a Catholic...

...So too, by depriving Rome of the political powers it had previously enjoyed, the revolutionary European states forced the Catholic Church to re-learn its ancient role as primarily a moral teacher...

...New York governor Mario Cuomo made an effort to resurrect Kennedy's It was among conservatives after Roe v. Wade that Murray was rediscovered as a major resource for believers taking stands on public issues in a democracy...

...They would doom as well the newer lib-erationist theologies that looked to the state as an engine of radical social change...

...In 1954, he used statements by Pope Pius XII to support his own argument that religious liberty is something to be not merely tolerated but defended in principle...

...These developments not only doomed the old conservatives' model of a confessional state...

...He opposed public aid to parochial schools and an American ambassador to the Vatican...

...The tradition of issuing encyclical letters, perfected by Pope Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century, represented an enormous change in Rome's stance toward secular political authorities...

...rather than baptizing the government, it would inform the culture...

...He learned this lesson in Poland rather than America, and perhaps for that reason he sees clearly how moral relativism can turn the principle of religious liberty upside down: When the state affirms certain truths for the society, the state is imposing something tantamount to a religion...

...Both held that religious belief should not be imposed by the state...

...In a passage that seems aimed at such successors of Kennedy as Mario Cuomo, he points out that the notion of a morally neutral public sphere contains an intolerable contradiction: On the one hand, individuals claim for themselves in the moral sphere the most complete freedom of choice and demand that the State should not adopt or impose any ethical position...

...The traditional teaching was yes...

...The view of church-state relations taken by American Protestants, both before and during America's Founding, was born from the historical lessons of European experience...

...Government submits itself to judgment by the truth of society...

...Like other intellectuals of his generation, Murray thought that the mid-century crises of fascism and communism would induce the democracies to return to a classical moral order...

...The first thing Murray had to do was show that the French model is "a deformation of the liberal tradition...

...His successor, Pius VII, was detained by Napoleon...

...This was the sore point in America...

...But he also insisted that Catholics would have to hold America to its highest moral traditions...

...A month after the election, Time magazine featured on its cover the Jesuit scholar and priest John Courtney Murray, whose book, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, had been published a few months before...

...In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae, John Paul II laments that the democracies are retreating from their own best insights...

...Any rapprochement between the Catholic mind and the American experiment required showing that liberal, democratic America is not to be confused with the radical Enlightenment...

...We Hold These Truths, Murray's best-known work, consists mostly of previously published essays...

...cally irrelevant, Murray argued that Catholics must use their philosophical and theological resources to contribute to the American political experiment...

...And John Courtney Murray began putting together his ingenious argument for reconsidering religious liberty in light of the American experience...

...It was rather among Catholic conservatives in the years following Roe v. Wade that John Courtney Murray was rediscovered as a major resource for explaining how believers could take religiously reasoned stands on public issues in a democracy without undermining the principles of that democracy...

...Direct theological discourse should be reserved only for the conversation of the society, not the state...

...The question before the Second Vatican Council was rather whether, given "ideal" conditions—when they constituted the majority in a democracy— Catholics ought to force the state to adopt Catholicism as its official religion...

...These included the ideal of limited government and checks upon the power of the state, the medieval English tradition of common law, and the natural-law foundation of the American order...

...In principle, however, the Church has no right to govern the political multitude...

...Murray contended that "Christian constitutionalism" recognized that society is governed by two authorities...

...That kind of coercion had always been ruled out in principle (though not always in practice...

...it is not itself a judge of the truth in society...

...And it cannot be approved by the religious conscience because it is, in effect, a legal victory for secularism...

...Justice Frankfurter contended that the instruction "sharpens the consciousness of religious differences at least among some of the children committed to its care...

...The free society is not reducible to ruling powers...

...It sounds odd to say that John E. Kennedy—the model of a dynamic, young Catholic layman—was really an old-fashioned Irish Catholic: The laity pray, pay, and obey, and then go about their secular business...

...The Catholic community would still be speaking in the ethical and political idiom familiar to them as it was familiar to their fathers, both the Eathers of the Church and the Fathers of the American Republic...

...The absolute monarchs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had used religious unity as an excuse for state authority and power, and American Protestants were determined that the excuse would not arise in their new country...

...During the Second Vatican Council in 1962, Cardinal Spellman named him a peritus, or theological adviser, and Murray is usually credited with being the main intellectual force behind the council's declaration on religious liberty, Digni-tatis humanae...

...When he addressed the Baptists in Houston, Kennedy supposed that there is a private sphere in which one must obey the Church and a public sphere in which religion has no place...

...But in one of the more pessimistic passages of his book, Murray did speculate briefly about the possibility that non-Catholics would abandon their belief in an objective moral order even as Catholics were at last entering the civil conversation: If that evil day should come, the results would introduce one more paradox into history...

...As for public authority," the council declared, it is not its function to determine the character of the civilization, but rather to establish the conditions and to use the means which are capable of fostering the life of culture among all even within the minorities of a nation...

...Except for a one-year visiting professorship at Yale, Murray taught in the Jesuit seminary at Woodstock, Maryland, from his return to America in 1937 until his death in 1967...

...And when Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, he began to teach that religious liberty protects a truth-seeking society against the state trying to remake society in its own image...

...Lindy Boggs, from a stalwart Louisiana Democratic family, became the U.S...

...Neither should there be a "Catholic vote," or any other kind of religious vote...

...Society must be free to engage in robust debate about the truth, and the function of the state is to protect the freedom that allows this debate to take place...