Bridging the Sacred and the Secular: Selected Writings of John
Courtney Murray, S.J. Bridging the Sacred and the Secular: Selected Writings of John
Courtney Murray, S.J. Edited by J. Leon Hooper, S.J.
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994)
Copyright © 1994 by Georgetown University Press
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved
This book can be ordered from the Woodstock Theological Center or the publisher (410-516-6995). The following is from the text on the cover:
This new collection brings together for the first time the theological essays of a 20th-century philosopher renowned for his defense of civil religious freedom.
In this new volume of essays--previously scattered among various periodicals over the course of thirty years--J. Leon Hooper, S.J., presents a selection of Murray's theological writings that outlines and highlights the integrity of Murray's moves toward a public theological discourse.
John Courtney Murray, one of the century's foremost theologians, was the author of We Hold These Truths (Sheed & Ward, 1960), The Problem of God, Yesterday and Today (Yale University Press, 1964), and The Problem of Religious Freedom (The Newman Press, 1965).
J. Leon Hooper, S.J., is a senior research fellow at Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University. He is the editor of Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles With Pluralism (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993) and author of The Ethics of Discourse: The Social Philosophy of John Courtney Murray (Georgetown University Press, 1986).
There follows the table of contents and a few paragraphs from Hooper's introductions to each chapter.
The Pattern for Peace and the Papal Program
The Juridical Organization for the International Community
Federal Aid To Church-Related Schools
The Problem of Free Speech
The Bad Arguments Intelligent Men Made
Memo to Cardinal Cushing on Contraception Legislation
Selective Conscientious Objection
The Construction of a Christian Culture
Towards a Christian Humanism: Aspects of the Theology of Education
The Christian Idea of Education
The Liberal Arts College and The Contemporary Climate of Opinion
The Return to Tribalism
On the Future of Humanistic Education 157
Freedom in the Age of Renewal
The Declaration on Religious Freedom
The Social Function of the Press
Freedom, Authority, Community
A Will to Community
The Right to Unbelief
On the Necessity for Not Believing A Roman Catholic
Interpretation
Things Old and New in "Pacem in Terris"
Religious Freedom and the Atheist
The Unbelief of the Christian
A Crisis in the History of Trent
The Catholic Position: A Reply
A Statement by Fr. Murray
Hopes and Misgivings for Dialogue
Good Pope John: A Theologian's Tribute
The Status of the Nicene Creed as Dogma
Our Response to the Ecumenical Revolution
Appendix: Toledo Talk
The selection and organization of this collection is a response to several claims made by John Courtney Murray, shortly before his death on August 16, 1967. Scanning over two millennia of Western social history, yet with an eye on modern democratic societies, he broadly concluded that "[a] work of differentiation between the sacral and secular has been effected in history." Further, the Second Vatican Council, particularly in its Declaration on Religious Freedom and Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, had recognized and endorsed modern forms of this differentiation. Yet, he continued,
. . . differentiation is not the highest stage in human growth. The movement toward it, now that it has come to term, must be followed by a further movement toward a new synthesis, within which the differentiation will at once subsist, integral and unconfused, and also be transcended in a higher unity ("The Declaration on Religious Freedom: Its Deeper Significance," 1966e, p.593).\1
It was now time to generate "new perspectives" within which the sacred and the secular might be (re)integrated.
What Murray in the 1960s had designated by the terms "secular" and "sacred" covered a full set of distinctions or differentiations that he had earlier injected into several American public arguments, and had marshaled to his defense of civil religious freedom. At its most concrete, incarnate level, the distinction was another expression of what he called Gelesian dualism or Christian constitutionalism--a dualism that he first characterized as "state" and "church" and later as "society" and "church". . . .
The articles in this section deal with civil law and are further subdivided according to the juridical order that they address; that is, as they take up questions of (1) international law, (2) American constitutionalism, and (3) the penal restraint or constraint of particular actions. Within the venerable distinction between applications (or policy) and theory, all three orders touch on questions of applications--the making of good civil law. In the two discussions of international law, Murray elaborates and adds specificity to Pope Pius XII's call for rebuilding the post-war, international order. The article on American constitutionalism addresses the question of state distribution of tax dollars to private education. The third set of articles struggle with problems concerning the legal enforcement of specific ethical judgements within a pluralistic society.
Yet none of these arguments are entirely restricted to policy considerations. In all three, Murray presumes that equitable and reasonable applications can only be shaped and enforced within commonly shared, general commitments, or, in other words, that policy is always dependent on theory. In each argument, he defends or proposes a set of theoretical truths that are necessary for policy formation. Murray's reasons for insisting on a specifically natural law consensus for juridical discussion are discussed throughout this collection. . . .
The two articles included here demonstrate an early subtle shift in Murray's approach to social ethical issues--from an almost exclusive concern with society's general truth claims to at least equal focus on its juridical order. In 1940 Murray had argued that only the Christian doctrines of Incarnation, Trinity, and the Cross could provide an adequate defense of Western liberties. However, in "The Pattern for Peace" (1944b), he claims that a natural law consensus suffices for international reconstruction. While the difference between these arguments is striking, both remain primarily at the level of culture. In the second article, "The Juridical Organization" (1944a), Murray's attention shifts from consensual requirements for justice to institutional requirements, that is, to juridical structures that must embody the people's moral commitments. In the following year, he began his first religious liberty argument, yielding his subsequently enduring judgement that the establishment is always a juridical, and therefore a contingent, non-ideal, act (see, e.g., "Freedom of Religion, I: The Ethical Problem"[1945b] and "Notes on the Theory of Religious Liberty"[1945e]).
A further aspect of this first debate deserves attention. The environment within which these juridical concerns first arose had a lasting impact on Murray's understanding of the human person. Toward the end of the Second World War, a debate swirled within Roman Catholicism concerning the manner and degree to which Catholics could participate with non-Catholics in social reconstruction. . . .
While Murray attempted to defend American constitutionalism as a legitimate growth of Christian constitutionalism (against counterclaims within his own church), he was also engaged in an intra-American debate over historical and contemporary interpretations of the First Amendment. Here the firm wall separating church and state could, in secularist proclamations, sound like a product of Enlightenment laicism or, in Protestant calls, like outgrowths of Protestant ecclesiologies.
To my reading, Murray's constitutional argument took three distinct tacks that differed from one article to the next more in emphasis than substance. First, he argued that the founding fathers adopted the First Amendment for the sake of public peace. Here the primary drive behind the Amendment was a pragmatic attempt to preserve public order in a religiously divided society. As such, the Amendment was primarily a product of practical reasoning, not of theory, although grounded in a founding consensus that was compatible with Murray's notions of the externality of civil law and of the incompetence of the natural law state in religious matters . . . .
Civil Restraint and Constraint
Murray considered the genius of the Anglo-American juridical tradition to be expressed in the jurisprudential maxim "as much freedom as possible; as much coercion as necessary." The adoption of the maxim was grounded in a "great act of faith" in the moral capacities of the American people, i.e., in the recognition of their human dignity (see WHTT, p. 30). Murray offered variously three or five indices for the application of restraint or constraint on a citizen's freedom, namely, public peace, general moral norms, and justice, to which he later added the further norms of national security and public welfare.
Murray also argued that any and all attempts to change juridical structures affect two distinct areas of social, moral concern. The first, of course, pertains to the actions that are to be demanded or restricted. Here, judicial reform attempts to control or encourage specific types of behavior. A second order of concern, however, involves the way people understand the judicial system as a whole. . . .
Murray wrote the following article at the same time he was pursuing extended study of Leo XIII's endorsement of Establishment and Intolerance. Note Murray's concern with presenting a proper theory of jurisprudence (neither pragmatic nor relativistic), something that he claimed Leo XIII and Protestants in general lacked. Here his affirmation of Anglo-American conceptions of the limited state is fairly well established, as is his distinction between society and state. He had not yet developed fully his criteria of public peace (that would become clearer in his "Questions of Striking a Right Balance" [1956f]). Therefore it is not surprising that his dealing with the question of the state's positive action for the preservation of a national heritage is somewhat weak. Notes belonging to the editor of Philippine Studies are so indicated. . . .
The Bad Arguments Intelligent Men Made
In 1956, Murray published "Questions of Striking a Right Balance: Literature and Censorship" (1956c), which became one of his most republished articles and eventually Chapter 7, "Should There Be a Law: The Question of Censorship" in WHTT. The problem guiding the article was a boisterous national movement, often led by Roman Catholics, to restrict access to "adult" literature. Murray offered four procedural rules for dealing with the problem:
(1) each minority group has the right to censor for its own members. . .; (2) no minority group has the right to demand that government should impose general censorship. . . [where] judgements of harmfulness [are not shared generally]; (3) any minority group has the right to work toward the elevation of standards of public morality. . .by methods of persuasion and pacific argument; (4) no minority group has the right to impose its own religious or moral views on other groups, through the use of the methods of force, coercion, or violence (1956f, 168).
To Murray's apparent chagrin, those rules were picked up by John Fischer in a broadside against some methodologies used by Catholics. The following is Murray's response to Fischer's editorial. . . .
In the mid-1960s, Richard Cardinal Cushing asked Murray for recommendations concerning a Catholic response to a Massachusetts law that would decriminalize the supplying of artificial contraception devices. At this time Murray apparently maintained the natural law immorality of artificial contraception. Here, however, he argued that Catholics ought not oppose the law and that they ought to offer appropriate witness to both the morality of contraception and the public uses of civil law. For Murray's later judgements concerning contraception, see "Toledo Talk" in the appendix to this collection. . . .
In a 1958 address on nuclear deterrence, Murray admitted the partial validity of a relative nuclear pacifism, partially valid in that it pointed to the extremely deadly potential of a full scale nuclear war, partially invalid because it did not take into account the valid insights of two other viewpoints (WHTT, p. 250). The other two were the recognition that a tremendous gulf between East and West (suggesting to some the possibility of a Holy War), and the insight of others that an international order of law, embodied in the United Nations, ought to make war impossible. While Murray had, in 1944, called for just such an international order of law, and criticized some Roman Catholics for opposing the U.N., in this 1958 article he commented that the U.N. was at present too weak to morally outlaw defensive war for the sake of justice. He then proceeded through a rather tortured argument that Pius XII, in the latter's application of the principle of proportionality, had not ruled out limited nuclear war (p. 259). He continued that Pius had prohibited any Catholic pacifism (p. 264). He finally concluded that the church must help break the American temptation of thinking of war in terms of either total surrender or total defeat, or the temptation of thinking of the use of force as amoral or immoral. Murray's main point once again was the need to construct a social environment in which the nation could distinguish between force and violence, limited and total nuclear war and to think morally about the issue across the present polarization of viewpoints.
The following article was an address, given at Western Maryland College on June 4, 1967, just weeks before Murray's death. Here he affirms the moral validity of selective conscientious objection. Once again his preoccupation rests on the quality of debate that ought to result from the conscientious objector's obligation to defend his position in the public forum. . . .
In We Hold These Truths, Murray claimed that natural law philosophy grounds, and offers the best hope for, the American experiment. As we saw in the last section, Murray eventually judged that natural law theory provides a sufficient, non-theological foundation for social cooperation among peoples of different faiths--especially concerning juridical immunities and enforcement, the deeper commitments of American Constitutionalism, and American foreign policy. The development of Murray's natural law thinking, then, is central for understanding WHTT's approach to questions of public meaning and policy.
The articles in this and subsequent sections move beyond the claim that the public forum ought to be guided exclusively by natural law theory. They approach the possibility of confessionally specific, theological languages entering the public forum--shaping both general value commitments and policy determinations. Advancing the discussion to the possibility of public theological discourse, however, does not demand a thorough rejection of the Murray of WHTT. . . .
The articles in this section take up the development of doctrine and its implications for the internal life of the Church. In the last three, Murray attempts to restructure relationships between various subdivisions within the church, and to encourage attitudes (virtues) that are required, if the church is to respond adequately to the Second Vatican Council. The first two articles lay out the foundations for those recommendations. In "Freedom in the Age of Renewal," Murray speaks of the church's new (re)discovery of the importance of freedom. In "The Problem of Religious Freedom," he analyzes changes in the church's argument for religious freedom. By way of introduction, I will discuss what Murray meant by the term "doctrine," and changes in his understanding of that term.
Why focus on doctrine in a discussion of internal church discipline? First, for Murray, questions concerning discipline necessarily entail an adequate understanding of the doctrines that unite the church and direct its mission. His insistence on the necessary role of a public philosophy in directing society (part 1), applies analogously to the doctrines that the church affirms. Second, Murray used the term "doctrine" in both natural law and theological studies. The christological decrees of the great ecumenical councils, as well as the church's self-understanding (ecclesiology), are doctrines; and the truths of "We Hold These Truths" are doctrines of the natural order. . . .
In this 1965 address, Murray begins to blend civil and theological notions of freedom (a task more fully outlined in the next article). He speaks more freely here of love in civil life than he had before the council. It was on this basis that he could work toward a redefinition of the church in the fourth article in this section, "Freedom, Authority, and Community." . . .
Murray's conciliar argument for religious freedom in The Problem of Religious Liberty (1964e) was grounded in the notion of a proper autonomy of the sacred and secular realms, that is, on the principle of Christian constitutionalism. There he mentioned, but did not develop, the claim that differences between the tolerance view and his own argument pivoted on a difference between classical vs. historical consciousness. In this essay (1966c), Murray treats both social dualism and historical consciousness as directing the church toward Dignitatis. He then adopts a call for the church to exercise a "self-denying ordinance." Of particular interest are his initial attempt to spell out an analogous notion of freedom, and his treatment of Modernism. In Murray's understanding, the turn-of-the-century Modernist movement first embodied the contemporary differentiation of historical consciousness.
In the "Forward" to WHTT (pp. ix-x) Murray claimed that any attempt to judge the church by criteria developed in the secular order would be "impertinent," for the Catholic "knows that the principles of Catholic faith and morality stand superior to, and in control of, the whole order of civil life." He therefore hesitated to import the ethical requirements for moral living, as developed by the Anglo-American tradition, into the internal life of the church. With the conciliar discussion of religious freedom well under way, however, he attempts, in the following address, an "analogous" application of democratic theory to the church. The stumbling block for such an analogy was, of course, a democratic people's right to "judge, direct, and correct" its government. No parallel right could be claimed for the faithful vis-à-vis the magisterium. Murray therefore shifts the grounding for free speech in the church to a right to correct information (at face value rather than a passive right). Since the church is bound together by the meanings that its members share in common, church authorities acquire an obligation to encourage communication within the church. However, Murray had difficulty identifying who are to challenge abuses of that authority, and by what right or even obligation they might do so. . . .
After the council, Murray had declared that the very definition of the church, as employed by Pope Leo XIII, was incomplete. At issue was the ecumenical but divided reality of the church. Here Murray attempts another expansion of Catholic ecclesiology--a move beyond an exclusively hierarchical model of the church to a new understanding of the church as constituted by the meanings that all members can affirm. The dynamics of maintaining and developing common meaning recast the role of authority. . . .
The following article was delivered to the Episcopal Church committee that was examining the problem of heresy. Relying on the distinction between understanding and judgement, Murray here places tight limits on the silencing of theological discourse. He also places restrictions on magisterial social criticism, based on his practical judgement/theology distinction. As best I know, Murray never gave serious attention to the thesis that the entire church was the proper forum for creative theological discourse. Yet note his difficulty in identifying the theological fraternity, a problem that plagued his identification of the wise in civil society. . . .
In Part 3, we saw that the term "doctrine" designates (1) theoretical truths that serve as the condition for the possibility of mutual understanding and action and/or (2) judgements concerning the moral value and the truth of anything that can be questioned--whether those questions intend particular acts, general commitments, or even God. There, too, we encountered shifts in Murray's recommendations for the internal life of the church. That is, we saw Murray moving between the different ethics that flow from these distinct conceptions of church doctrine. In this and the following section, two other areas of church interaction are transformed as Murray delves deeper into the implications of the historicity of, and role of human reasoning in, all truth claims. In the articles reprinted here, Murray refocuses his ethical concern on new structures, procedures, and virtues that are required for adequately living within fully historical churches and civil societies. In Part 4, we will discuss Murray's changing response to social atheism; and, in Part V, the changes in his ethical approach to ecumenism.
By the mid-1940s (see Part 2), Murray had admitted to the sufficiency of a natural law consensus for the task of social cooperation. He listed four essential principles of natural law that "all men of good will" could accept:
(1) a religious conviction as to the sovereignty of God over nations as well as over individuals; (2) a right conscience as to the essential demands of the moral law in social life; (3) a religious respect for human dignity in oneself and in others--the dignity with which man is invested inasmuch as he is the image of God; and (4) a religious conviction as to the essential unity of the human race (Pattern of Peace, [1944b]). . . .
In 1962, a French translation of Murray's 1945: "Religious Liberty: The Ethical Argument" was published in seven issues of the Montreal-based Relations. The appearances of these translations leaves several open questions. By 1962 Murray had, of course, moved at least three steps beyond his 1945 argument, and the Council was just warming up to a full-scale discussion of religious liberty. Who initiated this resurrection of Murray's earlier (tolerance) argument, and why, appears to be lost to us.
Accompanying the French version of "The Ethical Argument" was a further brief article, under Murray's name, entitled "Le droit a l'incroyance" (1962a). This was not taken from the preliminary argument that Murray had sent to Mooney (1945e), nor is there any record in the Murray Archives of its English original, (although the French versions can be found there, indicating Murray's awareness of its publication). . . .
In 1949, Homer W. Smith, Theodore M. Greene, and John Courtney Murray each addressed the question: Does our understanding of modern science rule out the possibility of religious belief? Murray's was the last of three essays that appeared in The Yale Scientific Magazine.
In the first essay, Smith argued that modern science had eliminated the possibility of certain, metaphysical knowledge, and that the contingency and uncertainty of our knowledge ought to be embraced with enthusiasm, for now we have substantive grounds for approaching the social world in which we live with humility and tolerance. . . .
Things Old and New in "Pacem in Terris"
Murray found much that he liked in Pacem in Terris, not the least of which was John XXIII's juridical theory and his addition of "freedom" to the list of necessary social forces for a moral society (the others being truth, justice, and love). Here, however, he bridles at John XXIII's suggestion that one can (and must) distinguish between antithetical founding philosophy and the valid moral forces that drive modern social movements. This essay might be compared to Murray's 1963f: "Good Pope John: A Theologian's Tribute" in the last section of this collection. . . .
After the council, in the context of the Christian-Marxist dialogue, Murray shaped two distinct arguments for entry into such conversations. Those two arguments will be discussed below. Here Murray affirms the valid entry that the atheist has within American constitutional law and within the Christian constitutional perspective of Dignitatis humanae. Previously, in his commentary to the latter, Murray had claimed that Dignitatis had included the atheist within the right of religious immunity (The Documents of Vatican II, [1966i], 678, note 5). And, in response to the reception of the "Thomas Jefferson Award for Conspicuous Service in the Cause of Religious Liberty," Murray called for a continuing conversation concerning human dignity, a conversation that "will be broadened to full ecumenical scope--to included Christians and Jews, humanists and atheists alike" ("Acceptance Speech" [1965a], 12). In the following article, Murray suggests that the sociological causes of atheist-Christian conflict must be fully examined, in order that the more theological roots of atheism and belief might be distinguished and dialectically examined. . . .
As mentioned in the introduction to this section, Murray eventually looked for common perspectives within which Christians and atheists might begin to understand one another. He offered as beginning points (1) recognition of mutual violations by both sides of the principle of Christian dualism (constitutionalism) and, (2) gnosis/agnosis consciousness as posing to believer and non-believer alike the continual temptation to idolatry or despair. The first entailed a turn to historicity; the second to interiority. In this last article on the Christian-atheist dialogue, he again appeals to dualism and sinfulness, and to human interiority. Now, however, his language is shaped by an understanding of the church as sacrament. Dualism becomes two simultaneous histories, secular and sacred, that embrace both civil society and the church. The gnosis/agnosis structuring of human consciousness becomes the belief and unbelief that must be predicated of those in the church as well as of those outside, and of the church itself as well as of individual Christians. . . .
In 1933, while still preparing for ordination at Woodstock College, Maryland, Murray wrote that the radical break caused by the Reformation left no basis whatsoever for the discussion of theological truth claims between Catholics and Protestants. In 1943, he recommended a systematic avoidance of interfaith, theological discussion. Theological discourse was impossible, he clarified, because the severe Reformation break rendered impossible even an analogical understanding of the truths by which the various churches grasped the mysteries of Christian redemption.
After the council, Murray discussed the ecclesiological implications of doctrinal development with Anglican bishops and traced through the intricacies of Roman catholic trinitarian theology with the Lutherans. He declared that the Roman Catholic church would not be able to come to new truths about the content of Christian faith unless it entered into dialogue with Protestants. . . .
In this essay, Murray explores the role of Charles of Guise (b. 1525, d. 1574; Cardinal of Lorraine, 1547-1574) in a debate that preceded the third session of the Council of Trent. At issue was whether the council should abandon its doctrinal and internal focus, perhaps thereby encouraging Protestant participation. The New Catholic Encyclopedia describes Guise as "[e]xtremely intolerant[. H]e tried to bring the Inquisition to France and was responsible for the cruel suppression of the Huguenot conspiracy of Abroise against the Guises (1560)" (vol. 6, p. 858). However, Murray faults Guise for his tolerance--for failing to understand that "the rupture with the heretics is easily seen to have been from the outset irremediable." What Murray judged true of the sixteenth century he also appears to have maintained in the mid-twentieth. In his first extensive discussions of intercredal cooperation, he rejected any possibility that Christian doctrines or common commitments to Christian symbols could unite Catholic and Protestant laity in their common laboring for just social structure (see his "Current Theology: Christian Co-operation" [1942b] and "Current Theology: Co-operation: Some Further Views" [1943a]). As the next article in this section will suggest, the principal focus of Murray's theological concern became doctrines on the church. . . .
In 1948, The American Mercury invited W. Russell Bowie and John Courtney Murray to address "the widening gulf between Protestants and Catholics." In his "Protestant Concern over Catholicism," Bowie outlined concerns ranging from Catholic control of hospitals to Catholic doctrine on religious establishment and intolerance. The tone of Murphy's response speaks for itself, although it must be remembered that Bowie was also a founder of Protestants and Others United for the Separation of Church and State (a group Murray referred to as "PU"). Murray eventually abandoned this polemical style. Yet the article does highlight his concern that Protestants kept insisting on a theological (i.e., ecclesiological) grounding for intercredal cooperation and for the First Amendment. . . .
The American Mercury allowed Bowie to respond to Murray's comments. Bowie expressed surprise at the "tone" of Murray's piece, but continued: "The one clear fact which does emerge from [Murray's] words is the admission that the Roman Catholic Church makes the totalitarian claim to be the only church of Christ; and the arrogant corollaries in the whole field of public affairs which have flowed and do flow from that have already been pointed out."
Apparently most responses to the Mercury editorial board ran against Murray. . . .
In 1961, with the Second Vatican Council on the horizon, America elicited eight Protestant and Catholic evaluations of ecumenism. Murray's essay (1961c) was the most skeptical response. Note Murray's insistence on the centrality and value of reason in the two areas that he distinguishes for possible dialogue. . . .
Murray wrote this essay (1963f) in response to Pope John XXIII's death on June 3, 1963. The Second Vatican Council had already met for its first session (October 11 - December 8, 1962). After not being invited to the first session, Murray was preparing to serve as a peritus (expert) at the second session (September 29 - December 4, 1963). The more positive attitude toward ecumenism in this piece contrasts to that in the preceding articles, and its evaluation of John XXIII also advances beyond Murray's earlier troubled response to Pacem in terris. . . .
In a discussion of a second conciliar text on religious liberty, Murray wrote:
We are living in an age in which a great ecumenical hope has been born. The goal of Christian unity lies, of course, beyond the horizons of our present vision. We do, however, know that that path to that goal can lie only along the road of freedom--social, civil, political and religious freedom. Hence the Church must assist in the work of creating conditions of freedom in human society; this task is integral to the spiritual mission of the Church, which is to be herself the spiritual unity of mankind and to assist all men in finding this unity. (1963j, "On Religious Liberty," p. 704)
The church's mission entailed a changed attitude on the part of the church. The eventual decree on religious freedom should undertake "to define the attitude that Catholics ought to maintain and exhibit toward their fellow Christians and toward all men. This attitude is based on the Catholic doctrine with regard to the necessary freedom of the act of Christian faith."
In a discussion of the implications of the decree on Ecumenism, he wrote:
. . . the rules of the dialogue must be such that "each can treat with the other on a footing of equality" (n. 9). This reciprocity in the ecumenical dialogue is a matter of love and respect, not only for the other as a person, but also for the truth as possessed by each, to be understood by both (1966h, "The Issue of Church and State at Vatican Council II," 592).
As to the content of discussions with fellow Christians, Murray's The Problem of God, Yesterday and Today laid out his most extended treatment of the development of Christian trinitarian thought, from the biblical witness through the problem of modern social atheism. . . .
Our Response to the Ecumenical Revolution
This article, which was published a few months before Murray's death, brings together his earlier recommendations for public university education with the notion that ecumenical discourse must be explicitly theological. By this time, Murray has admitted that the definition of the church as used by Leo XIII is no longer sufficient to the reality of the Christian church (see "The Issue of Church and State at Vatican Council II" [1966h], 582-583), and has focused on the church's need for ongoing theological reflection (see "A Will to Community" in Part 3). . . .
On May 5, 1967, Murray delivered a talk in which he explored that changes brought on by the Second Vatican Council. Among other issues, he discussed the majority and minority reports of the Vatican commission that Paul VI had asked to study the question of artificial birth control. The most complete report of the talk was published as "Birth Control Report 'Leak' Called an Act of Genius," The Catholic Chronicle (May 5, 1967) pp. 1, 5. This, and all other reports focused on the birth control issue, reducing the other issues and the general orientation of the talk to secondary positions. Although a note in the Murray Archives claims that an audio tape of the talk exists, no tapes, notes, or manuscripts have surfaced. This article is compiled from all available newspaper sources.
I have tried to restore, as suggested by internal evidence, the general structure of Murray's argument. The portions that directly quote Murray are permeated by Lonergan's contrast between historical and classical consciousness. Even more remarkable, however, the original reporter, in the indirect discourse sections, preserved much of Lonergan terminology that must have been in the original address. That terminology had to be alien to the reporter's normal style. I have left that original language intact, neither developing nor weakening it. . . .
