Citizen Murray

By J. Leon Hooper, S.J. senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center

Boston College magazine, Winter 1995
Copyright © 1995 by Boston College
All rights reserved

J. Leon Hooper, S.J., a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., is author of The Ethics of Discourse: The Social Philosophy of John Courtney Murray and has edited collections of Murray's essays, including Bridging the Sacred and the Secular: Selected Writings of John Courtney Murray.

I first met John Courtney Murray, S.J. -- or at least his written word -- in November 1963. The meeting was illicit.

As was then customary for Jesuit novices, our reading was restricted to works in early Jesuit spirituality and history. Even so, rumors of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council infiltrated our late-medieval environment, leaving many of us hungry for hard news of our 20th-century church. To satisfy that hunger, we established an underground railroad of sorts, unobtrusively circulating more-or-less current Catholic periodicals. When I returned to my desk one afternoon, I found a five-month-old copy of America magazine hidden neatly under Alfonso Rodriguez's 17th-century Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues. I opened Rodriguez, slipped America within its pages, and began to read a series of short essays responding to the death of Pope John XXIII that June. Hello, Father Murray.

"After John XXIII," Murray wrote, "certain things are no longer possible." Having spent 22 years in the Church, I was not surprised by this line, but his next line threw me: "It is...not possible impatiently to turn away from the voices" to whom the Pope had listened, Murray wrote. John XXIII had encouraged the discussion "old things and new," a conversation that "could never again be abruptly silenced."

Murray pointed out that John XXIII had "listened while the theologians freely talked, and had an even keener ear for the voice of the simple faithful." The pope summoned Catholics to speak with one another, not simply with Rome -- "cardinals and bishops, priests and laity, pastors and professors, and not only the learned." They spoke about new questions as well as past truths, and John XXIII even raised "the great, sprawling ecumenical question -- to which he returned no definitive answers," Murray wrote. "He encouraged the raising of other questions, both old and new, both theological and pastoral -- and even political. The symbol of him might well be the question mark -- surely a unique symbol for a Pope."

Since the late 1940s, I myself had been concerned with many religious voices raising both old and new questions. In response to a troubling claim from my first grade CCD teacher that there was no salvation outside the Church (troubling because my paternal grandparents were Presbyterian missionaries to the Philippines), my mother assured me that my teacher would be in Hell long before my grandmother. While this answered my question about my grandmother, it raised questions about my CCD teacher. Moreover, the sharpness of my mother's response carried over from my teacher's earlier questioning of the religious orthodoxy of mom's side of the family. My maternal grandparents were, and my own immediate family are, Byzantine Uniate Catholics. In the late 1940s we celebrated the Eucharist in English and collectively prided ourselves on the accomplishments of my great uncle who was a priest. He also was married with 10 children -- and in good standing with the bishop of Rome. My CCD teacher did not know that there were many rites in union with Rome, rites that do things differently from Roman Catholics and, therefore, raise legitimate questions about some internal Roman practices. These differing religious voices (old to my family but new to most Irish Catholics in our parish), prepared me for Murray and for a listening pontiff.

On that November afternoon in 1963 (a couple of weeks before John F. Kennedy died), I had no inkling just how personal was Murray's appreciation of Pope John. Although Murray was well-known as an expert on church-state relations--his face had appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1960--his relationship with the Church was strained and since 1956 he had been forbidden to speak publicly on the issue of religious freedom. Privately, he continued to pester his Roman censors with articles on the subject-- articles they continued to reject. Publicly, though, Murray turned his attention to other matters, most notably the problem American pluralism posed for Catholics. As Americans debated whether a Catholic president could be trusted to uphold the nation's commitment to religious freedom, Murray's 1960 book We Hold These Truths offered a sympathetic Catholic understanding of American pluralist society. When the first session of the Second Vatican Council met in Rome, though, Murray was not invited.

A listening pope would change that, however. By the time Murray wrote the America article, he was packing for Rome, leaving for the second session of Vatican II. At Cardinal Francis Spellman's insistence, he was to serve as a theologian for Cardinal Augustin Bea's Secretariat for Christian Unity, which he would do for the council's remaining sessions. From that Secretariat, the Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis humanae personae or "The Dignity of the Human Person") would eventually emerge. Murray's appreciation for this pastoral Pope who was also a theologian's Pope was infectious, even for Jesuit novices living at the imposed distance of three or four centuries.

For most of my generation Murray became a hero and a model during the 1960s. He tuned our ears to differing, questioning voices. But by the time of Murray's death in 1967, he felt that his church and society were moving beyond anything he recognized. For one thing, many of us had begun to talk about economic and cultural matters, not just the political issues that had preoccupied Murray. For another, we more easily and publicly spoke out in scriptural and religious languages than did Murray. In fact, until the last three years of his life he shunned the public use of those languages and castigated any, particularly Baptists, who spoke openly in their confessional languages. For many of us Murray became merely a totem -- a revered transitional figure who had borne the civic heat of his day, but not the economic and religious heat of our own. In one of his favorite tangled words, the cultural and religious "problematic" had moved beyond him.

Or so some of us then thought. Like all old but good things, Murray refused to remain buried. In 1978 someone who held the power of academic life and death over me forced my reintroduction to Murray. I was in my third year of graduate studies in the Joint Boston College-Andover Newton theological program, when my professor, Max Stackhouse, insisted that I take a closer look at Murray's written word. Max had heard that the Roman Catholic church was losing many valuable insights that Murray had developed, so he gave me no choice on a seminar paper. With growing interest, I read from Murray's first published work to his last, ultimately turning the study into a dissertation. In the process I came to appreciate how Murray might still guide -- in a voice both Catholic and American -- our own responses to an increasingly pluralistic society and Church. His story deserves retelling.

The United States into which Murray was born in 1904 was a far cry from today's multicultural society, but it was on its way toward genuine pluralism. In the late 19^th century, middle-European (Catholic and Jewish) and Asian immigrants had been seen as un-American--as threats to the national identity. But in the first half of the 20^th century that attitude was changing. Will Herberg's book Protestant, Catholic, Jew describes a nation that from the 1930s through the 1950s gradually came to accept a type of "group pluralism." As long as citizens belonged to one of the three major religious groups, they were accepted within America's economic and political life. By the 1950s they were not only accepted, but seen as having a legitimate say in defining the national identity.

Murray was raised within one of America's legitimized religious communities. In his 17^th year he entered a Jesuit novitiate that was even more sheltered than my own, and he received his theological training in a Jesuit compound in the fields of Woodstock, Maryland, and then in Rome. (He did spend two years in the Philippines, when my grandfather was at the Filipino Presbyterian school, Silliman University. I rather suspect that they never met.)

While Murray's Catholic community had a legitimate public voice, it and the other two faith communities remained self-enclosed. Few braved cross-faith marriages, and still fewer tried to talk publicly about what they held most dear, especially in religious terms. Many in the Roman Catholic hierarchy demanded that Catholics send their children to Catholic schools. Murray's Catholic community functioned as a cultural ghetto, as did the communities of Protestants and Jews generally. These enclosed ghettos were the only places within which Americans could explicitly live out their lives of faith. Only indirectly could those faiths shape the public order.

Murray's own early writings convey a sense of what it was like to have a legitimate, yet religiously silent, place in mid-century America. His generation was caught between America's accepted pluralism and Roman Catholic claims to possess the truths necessary for humane social living (as well as the truths necessary for eternal salvation). When he began his public career in 1938, the Second World War loomed large. In response to the growing violence, Murray condemned Western society generally, but he aimed his sharpest barbs at religiously pluralistic America. "Our American culture, as it exists, is actually the quintessence of all that is decadent in the culture of the Western Christian World," he claimed, "a negation of all that Christianity stands for." The only truths that could reverse this decline, he said, were the explicitly Catholic doctrines of the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the Cross.

In his condemnations, Murray simply echoed many European Catholic views of American pluralism. Yet he intended those comments for internal Catholic consumption, not for the wider public. When he spoke across the boundaries of America's religious ghettos, his claims were masked and considerably milder than those of some other American Catholic theologians. Nonetheless, his was a triumphalistic church, speaking mostly to itself, acceptable as long as it continued to speak religiously only to itself. But that would change.

In the aftermath of World War II, Murray's church could not afford to talk only to itself; the task of rebuilding international society demanded more than private theological assessments of the war's causes. In a series of Christmas addresses in the mid-1940s Pius XII called for cooperation "among all men of good will" in the needed postwar reconstruction. Because Catholics could not rebuild the international order alone, they must cooperate with non-Catholics in the temporal affairs of politics and economics, the pope said.

But on what basis could Catholics and non-Catholics cooperate? Since the root causes of the war lay in the realm of deep human values (what Murray called the spiritual), the task of reconstruction demanded that people of all faiths address issues such as the dignity of the enemy and the moral importance of freedom. Here again Catholic claims forbade public theological discussion. For Catholics and many non-Catholics, common religious languages or symbols could never be the basis for interfaith cooperation. The break effected by the Reformation was so radical, Murray claimed, that Catholics and Protestants could never theologically understand one another. He even recommended against appealing to Christian religious symbols.

This common rejection of the very possibility of interfaith theological conversation led to an argument among Catholics concerning the degree to which they (and particularly the laity) might intermix with non-Catholics in the task of rebuilding a war-ravaged world. Many insisted that cooperation be only indirect -- Catholics remaining in their own parallel organizations within which their faith claims would remain secure. Those parallel groups could still, individually, work toward the goals of a new public order. But they would not talk with one another.

Murray did not think parallel cooperation would be enough though. Unlike many Catholic theologians, he believed that a prostrate postwar Europe and Asia would settle into a permanent state of anarchy unless all who believed in God worked together directly. But how might they speak to one another?

Within the Catholic intellectual arsenal there is, in fact, another way of talking about civil society without appealing to theological terminology. It is the language of "natural law." In Catholic thought, the natural law is seen as a natural philosophy. It is based on the moral law that God instilled in human nature at creation, rather than on the law given to the Church in the dying and rising of Jesus. As such, it is available to all people of good will, regardless of their faith. Strategically, then, the natural law gave Murray a language that allowed those within America's religious ghettos to talk with one another without having to raise specifically theological voices. Only in hindsight did it become clear that, by building a bridge between America's pluralistic groups exclusively in terms of natural law, he legitimated a vacuum of theological discourse in American society.

Murray wrote on many issues--Constitutional law, Trinitarian theology, censorship, education--but his most public contribution to his nation and his church was his work on civil religious freedom. When he started writing about that issue in 1941, Church teaching insisted that American Catholics were obliged, if ever they became a majority, to establish Catholicism as the state religion and. They were to work toward a reversal of the First Amendment guarantees of religious freedom and to use legal coercion to silence non-Catholic voices, tolerating America's religious pluralism only until intolerance became possible. America's religious freedom was considered an evil, though a lesser evil than outright civil war. To U.S. Catholics who objected that such a teaching left them with no basis for the social trust necessary for living in a democracy, Rome answered that this was a cross Catholics must bear for the sake of their faith.

All of this was argued during the 1940s. Twenty-five years later, after Murray had worked and reworked drafts of what eventually became the Vatican II Declaration on Religious Freedom, he had carved out notions of the limited range of civil law, of the state as an institution that was competent only in matters of public order, and of society at large as an arena within which free people determine in ongoing conversation their common public morals. That is, he based his eventually successful argument on a theory of civil law, on the Western notion of a limited state, and on a clear notion of society as a forum bound together in moral discourse.

Of these three, the notion of society as a forum for moral discourse was by far the most revolutionary for a Catholic. In a long series of articles Murray examined the Church's arguments and found at their heart a paternalistic, elitist notion of the state, matched by a low estimation of the moral potential of most humans. From those two premises, the Church insisted that the elites impose religious and moral demands on the masses for their own protection. By Church law, the elites were to be intolerant of differing voices, particularly if those voices belonged to the people at large.

Murray countered with what he called a "great act of faith" in the moral possibilities of the people, an idea he developed within the Anglo-American political tradition. As he only gradually discovered, the Anglo-American "great act of faith" itself was based on a deep appreciation for human moral dignity. Western political traditions, he claimed, had recognized that people, all people, had a right and an obligation to shape the political and economic structures under which they lived and the culture within which they found meaning. Shaping those structures and cultures could not be trusted to any self-declared elites.

Was the "great act of faith" justified? That depends on how one interprets the notion of human dignity which emerged within Western societies. On the one hand, many Eastern Europeans judge the West, human dignity to be no more than a license for materialistic consumption. On the other, most Western political theorists in Murray's own time (and our own) see modern freedoms as grounded in an autonomous notion of human dignity -- an individualist reading of the revolutionary cry "Don't Tread on Me."

Murray tried to steer between these consumerist reductions and stark individualism. He countered that the West legitimately recognized the social necessity of modern freedoms; that they were conceived as, and continue to be important for, the common good. Given the complexity of modern social life, the silencing of voices that might have something to contribute to our common life is social suicide. Without new insights, our conceptual gridlock quickly degenerates into a politics of hatred, he said, arguing that we need all the help we can get. The dignity of each person, he said, consisted in part in his or her potential to contribute to our common understanding and friendship.

Murray's argument that public freedom served the common good ultimately grounded the Declaration on Religious Freedom ("the dignity of the human person" became the first words of that text). To make his case, though, he appealed to an insight from American political philosophy, which, he frankly admitted, the Church had ignored. The Church needed to learn a truth about human dignity from beyond its magisterial and cultural borders. In this understanding of how the Church came to endorse civil religious freedom, modern pluralism becomes a positive good -- for civil society and for the Church -- not simply a lesser evil to which the Church must adjust.

Murray's endorsement of modern freedoms was like music to those of us who grew up with the unsettled feeling that Catholic teaching on intolerance was not simply an unnecessary cross, but also, in the mid-fifties, immoral. The dignity of each human being was an old notion in Catholic thought, but Murray had re-conceived as more dynamic and creative, with a little help from an American society that, in its beginnings, was mostly Protestant. This empowered vision of dignity was, Murray thought, identical with John XXIII=s notion of the "rising will of all people" which the pope had endorsed in his Pacem in terris. From those two notions, Murray spelled out the basis for a genuine international pluralism. Good ideas and good will could arise from any social sector.

Murray won over the Church to his thinking about religious freedom, but he was less successful on the issue of artificial birth control. In 1964 Cardinal Richard Cushing asked for Murray's comments on Massachusetts General Law 272. A proposed amendment would repeal several paragraphs of that law which imposed fines and jail terms on anyone who distributed or sold birth control devices within the Commonwealth. Murray recommended that Catholics support the amendment. He offered three reasons. First, he said, civil law, by its very nature, must be limited to "relatively minimal standards of public morality." Civil law can only govern behavior, not attitudes, and only gross forms of behavior at that. Second, he wrote, "in the field of sex morality the public educative value of law seems almost nil."

More telling is Murray's third reason -- an argument that is based on the relationship between public consensus and law. Within a society "in which government is not paternal and the jurisprudential rule obtains," he wrote, Ait is difficult to see how the state can forbid, as contrary to public morality, a practice that numerous religious leaders approve as morally right." Although "the stand taken by these religious groups may be lamentable from the Catholic moral point of view," Murray wrote, "... it is decisive from the point of view of law and jurisprudence, for which the norm of 'generally accepted standards' is controlling."

Rather than trying to dictate law, Catholics should raise the moral quality of public discourse on the issue of artificial contraception, Murray argued. They must make it clear, he said, "that out of their understanding of the distinction between morality and law and between public and private morality, and out of their understanding of religious freedom, Catholics repudiate in principle a resort to the coercive instrument of law to enforce upon the whole community moral standards that the community itself does not commonly accept." Catholic could then "lift the standards of public morality in all its dimensions, not by appealing to law and police action, but by the integrity of their Christian lives."

Just three months before his death, Murray again spoke on the issue of birth control. In 1966 Pope Paul VI had gathered theologians and ethicists to study the morality of artificial contraception. Two reports were written, never officially released, but both were leaked to the press. The commission's Majority Report recommended that the church lift its ban on some forms of artificial birth control. The Minority Report recommended continuing the ban. Murray endorsed the majority report, mainly because "in the absence of an adequate understanding of marriage, there was [in the church] an inadequate understanding of the marital act and an inadequate understanding of the total situation of the problem of reproduction, especially in its demographic dimension." The minority report, he continued, "transferred the problem of birth control from moral grounds--not arguing about birth control at all--to argue about certainty and the authority of the Church. These are two different problems--related to but to be distinguished." The church ought now, Murray argued, recognize that changing definitions of marriage required the church to reassess the morality of artificial birth control (Paul VI's late 1967 letter, Humanae vitae, continued the ban.)

Murray's argument was guided by concerns about the issue, about attitudes toward law and about the possibility of making a people moral through public argument. He was convinced that the Church could and should learn new things--even from those outside the Church. It is an approach that demands a public ethics of respect, not simply of tolerance. While tolerance might lead us kindly to refrain from smashing those who disagree with us, respect drives us to look for goodness where we might least expect it: from people who live in cultural ghettos different from our own. To us who live after Vatican II and therefore tend to think in more scriptural terms, that dictum sounds a lot like the biblical injunction to love one's enemies. It suggests that in Jesus' teachings we might find approaches to public issues that are socially helpful, not simply counsels of virtue for the more blessed among us.

Of course I have just begun to use explicitly theological language in a discussion of public morals. This is the point at which many of Murray's followers thought we had left him behind in the late 1960s. Throughout most of his life Murray had denied the possibility of theological discussions with heretics, much less with those who denied nature's God.

But that was not Murray's last word on the subject of interfaith theological discussion; toward the end of his life he entered into theological discussions with both Protestants and non-believers, on what he described as "a footing of equality." He found -- at least in some forms of modern atheism -- a moral will for the human good and a more honest questioning of God's very existence than had existed among 19th-century scientistic atheists. His endorsement of those theological discussions was very much like his endorsement of free moral discussion: now shaped by a conviction that God could speak out anywhere within human society. If the church wanted to learn new things about God and Christ Jesus, it must listen to all available voices. Theologians, he claimed, must now be trained as ecumenists, for the sake of our discovering God and God's desires within our contemporary world. Engaging in those conversations offered the best hope of reaching, and being reached by, a living God. The core issue facing both civil society and the Church, he contended, was whether God was indeed active in human history, or only to be found in some particular sector of society--a timeless reality speaking only to a few. Murray's last work posed a challenge to the faith of the Church: could it believe and trust that God is active throughout human history and human society?

The peoples of our time continue to ambush us, usually when we feel most comfortable. Just a few weeks ago, soon after her seventh birthday party, a friend and I settled into a discussion of the relative merits of brothers and sisters. She talked about her brother, who was in the next room practicing karate moves on his father. I talked about my sister. After some musing, my friend concluded that having brothers was acceptable, but that having sisters was better. I asked, "How do you know, since you don't have any sisters?" With a curious mixture of confusion and disdain, she answered that she does in fact have two sisters. And of course she does, by her father's previous marriage.

She reminded me of how much the way we speak about family has changed over the past 40 years. When I grew up, we expected little divorce; even our Protestant neighbors felt divorce was fine for Henry VIII, but not to be emulated. Families without marriage were unthinkable. Now our children speak about mysterious sisters and absent fathers, of webs of legal and genetic bonds. Further, each voice demands attention and respect. It is the respect that many of us find particularly difficult to muster.

At least parts of the Church have committed themselves to listen to those voices with respect. My medieval Jesuit novitiate has moved to Culver City, within Los Angeles County. The hope is that our novices might learn to listen for God among the many voices of Southern California--of all strange places. If Murray taught us anything, it was to not fear those voices, for in them a dynamic, creative God is to be found. In years past, Catholics retreated among themselves, sometimes casting up visions of God coming to wipe out all peoples and things outside that Catholic inner circle. Murray found both of those stances unworthy of a people who believe that in becoming human, God embraced not only our human nature, but also our history and society. He believed God calls from our future as well as from our past, from the socially far as well as from the socially near. Again, loving our enemies, as well as the alien, might be a key to finding our God.

What of my seven-year-old friend's voice, and those of her parents? Among them all is an openness to a God's call--an openness that deserves more than elitist concern for their welfare, however kindly. If there are difficulties with our family structures and our politics (and there are), maybe we have to begin as did Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus invited those at the margins of society, and those, in that quaint phrase, "living in sin," to sit down at table with him before they gave any thought to reforming their lives. What an odd thing to do, unless he believed the Father was active among them. That kind of respect requires faith that God can still surprise us within our own times. If we are to solve our society's problems, we must listen--as Murray and his pope listened to the voices of the 1960s--to the many and often confusing voices of the 1990s.

Citizen Murray

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