John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-67) was an extremely influential figure in 20th century church-state relations, and to a large extent, in the overall history of Catholicism. Featured on the cover of Time magazine after the election of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, in 1960 and the publication of the theologian’s soon-to-be-famous book “We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition,” Murray quickly rose to international prominence. He is widely recognized as “the pre-eminent practitioner of public theology and public moral discourse in the whole history of American Catholicism,” according to Father David Hollenbach, S.J. of Boston College.
Murray’s intellectual and spiritual contributions to Catholic life are best revealed in his work on Dignitatis humanae, which he largely drafted. This Vatican II document, translated into English as the “Declaration on Religious Freedom,” states that all people have an inherent right to religious freedom based on their unique and permanent dignity as persons.
This freedom demands that “all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits… This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed and thus it is to become a civil right” (DH 2).
Reflecting Pope John XXIII’s thoughts in Pacem in Terris, the Declaration maintains that “the exercise of religion, of its very nature, consists before all else in those internal, voluntary and free acts whereby man sets the course of his life directly toward God. No merely human power can either command or prohibit acts of this kind” (DH 3).
Murray was instrumental in convincing predominantly Protestant Americans that Catholic faith and the United States system of government and public policy were compatible and not antithetical to one another. His philosophical basis for such a claim was grounded in the natural law, the universal moral code inscribed on every human heart accessible through reason, without recourse to revelation or religious conviction. Only the theory of the natural law could, in Murray’s opinion, “give an account of the moral experience which is the public consensus, and thus lift it from the level of sheer experience to the higher level of intelligibility toward which … the mind of man aspires.”
Turning to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, Murray argues that “the dictates of common human reason are the dictates of God, who is Eternal Reason, the Logos” (We Hold These Truths, 115-6). Thus, pluralistic society could through civil conversation (conservatio civilis) achieve shared values intrinsic to the good of all men and women.
As Angela Carmella has pointed out in her study of Murray, he distinguished between the moral demands of revealed religion and the universal natural law on the one hand, and the litigious aspect of human law, governed by the prudential order, on the other. Because human laws are basically coercive and regulatory, they are in a very real sense of a limited character. The “just” and the “legal” are then connected, but not identical.
Murray believed that three “arguments” grounded American public and political life. The first theme which political conversation addresses is “the argument about public affairs, the res publica, those matters which are for the advantage of the public (in the phrase as old as Plato) and which call for public decision and action by government.” Such affairs are transformed from “brute facts into arguable issues.”
The second theme is “the affairs of the commonwealth… They go beyond the public order as such; they bear upon the quality of common life.” The most recognizable and common affair of this nature is education, both within the school system and throughout later life.
The third theme of public argument “is the most important and the most difficult. It concerns the constitutional consensus whereby the people acquires its identity as a people and the society is endowed with its vital form, its entelechy, its sense of purpose as a collectivity organized for action in history.” This consensus lies at the foundation of the American project and our collective self-identity, for as Murray puts it, “The whole premise of the public argument, if it is to be civilized and civilizing, is that the consensus is real, that among the people everything is not in doubt, but that there is a core of agreement, accord, concurrence, acquiescence. We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them.”
In recognition of John Courtney Murray’s contribution to religious and political history, “through whose dark and bloody pages there runs like a silver thread the tradition of civility,” the Catholic Theological Society of America annually bestows its highest award in his name. Recent recipients of the award include David Tracy, Bishop Richard Sklba, Francis A. Sullivan, S.J., Elizabeth Johnson and Lisa Sowle Cahill.
Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is a Ph.D. candidate in systematic theology at Fordham University.
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