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Developing the Murray Heritage:
Holding Up a Theological "Icon" in the Public Square[Woodstock Report, March 2005, No. 81]
Most scholars will gather the sources and materials they need, but leave it to archivists and others to make those materials available to the public. Woodstock senior fellow J. Leon Hooper, S.J., has found himself performing both of these essential tasks. An authority on the work of John Courtney Murray, Father Hooper is also engaged in another Murray project as director of the Woodstock Library at Georgetown University.
"We're trying to put all of Murray on the Web," said Father Hooper, author of The Ethics of Discourse: The Social Philosophy of John Courtney Murray (Georgetown University Press, 1986). He expects that by the end of this year, all of the great moral theologian's published writings and some of his unpublished work will be linked to the Murray page of the library's well-stocked Web site. The archival materials are kept mostly in the special collections of Georgetown's Lauinger Library, which is cooperating with the Woodstock Library in this venture. Much of the funding for this effort has come from the family of Mark Williams, Murray's nephew, and from the Loyola Foundation.
This past year has brought some fresh reflection on Murray, whose 1960 collection of essays, We Hold These Truths, landed him on the front cover of Time magazine following the election of John F. Kennedy as the nation's first Catholic president. Woodstock and other organizations held events in 2004 commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth, along with the centenaries of two other towering theological figures who, like Murray, were Jesuits - Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner. Last November, Woodstock sponsored an evening of conversation that presented a talk by Williams, who gave a family perspective while examining the wider church backdrop as a lay Catholic. Also featured were presentations by Woodstock senior fellow John Haughey, S.J., who looked at Murray through the lens of Lonergan; long-time Woodstock scholar and prolific author Walter Burghardt, S.J., who offered personal reminiscences of Murray; and Father Hooper.
Mark Williams"He has become the Roman Catholic icon of rational public reflection for Catholics and non-Catholics alike," Father Hooper says of Murray, who died in 1967 after leaving his mark on the universal church through the Second Vatican Council. It is not surprising that a social research and education center with Woodstock's mission would seek to carry this icon in today's public square. As Woodstock director Gasper F. Lo Biondo explains, "Woodstock is a natural locus for carrying on the Murray heritage." Not incidentally, Murray taught at Maryland's Woodstock College, a Jesuit seminary that closed in 1974 after moving to New York. The college continued in spirit as the Woodstock Theological Center - founded 30 years ago, this academic year.
At Woodstock's evening of conversation, Father Hooper delivered remarks interspersed with audio clips of Murray explaining Murray. What follows is a version of that presentation. In the audio clips presented by Father Hooper, Murray explains his input into the drafting of Vatican II's declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis humanae personae. As Father Hooper explains, this document embraced the notion of civil religious freedom as a social and religious good, not merely as a matter of "grudging tolerance" or the lesser of two evils. Father Hooper presented a longer, formal version of this address at Seattle University this past December. (The full text is available.) Murray's collected works are available nearly in full at the library's Web page.)
This issue of the Woodstock Report also features a profile of the Woodstock Library that Father Hooper directs.
J. Leon Hooper, S.J.Remarks by Leon Hooper
I never laid eyes on John Courtney Murray. For the past fifteen years, though, I have known my fellow Woodstocker and Jesuit, Walter Burghardt, and he knew Murray well. Two months ago, over lunch, when I asked Walter what we should emphasize this evening, he said he wanted two things mentioned: first, that Murray continued to pester Rome with religious liberty manuscripts even after his informal silencing in 1954, and second that Murray was witty.
This evening I will let Murray do the heavy lifting. I have a couple of clips from a talk he gave for a summer 1964 conference at Georgetown University. There, Murray traced the up-to-then twists and turns over religious freedom at the Second Vatican Council. The Council was then poised between its third and the fourth sessions. During the first session, as Murray here describes it, the main battle had been to get the religious liberty discussion away from the redoubtable Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, who headed what was then known as the Vatican's Holy Office, and over to Cardinal Augustin Bea of the Ecumenical Secretariat. Murray was not at that first session, but Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York forced Ottaviani to invite Murray to subsequent sessions. During the second and third sessions, three drafts on religious freedom emerged. The first draft judged civil religious freedom to be a lesser of two evils - the grudging "tolerance" argument that had magisterial endorsement. The second draft was a French argument, which I will allow Murray to describe. Then came the third, Murray's own draft. This draft was not voted on during the third session, but coming now toward the fourth session, Murray's text had center stage.
In the following audio clip he outlines his own "historically embedded" argument for religious freedom, an argument that honestly recognizes that the intrinsic good of juridical religious freedom arose outside the church, to which the church now, if it is to follow the leads of its Lord, must be attentive. We pick up his talk where he takes on French reactions to his text.
"How do you get two popes who say exactly the opposite things to be really saying the same thing? Well this is what we have theologians for."- Murray on papal teachings regarding religious liberty.
Reconciling the Popes. The eight-minute clip begins with a claim that the third draft abandoned the French line of argument (which tried to ground the right to religious freedom solely on the individual's obligation to seek the truth, but did not embrace Murray's broader affirmative argument that such religious freedom was integral to the common good). As an aside he mentions having been invited recently to a meeting with French-speaking periti, or expert advisers at the Council, at which "I had my ears, my theological ears, pinned back in grand style." He then presents his own, "the English-speaking and Italian-speaking approach." First, "[t]he methodology is commanded entirely by the historical consciousness," by which he means the contemporary extra-ecclesial emergence of the consciousness of human dignity, and of constitutional protection of civic freedom, including religious. Secondly, the draft insists that the notion of religious freedom is formally, in the first instance, a juridical notion [essentially a human right]. Then he points out that
religious freedom today is not based on - or certainly not necessarily based on - any irreligious ideology, as was the case in the nineteenth century. And that introduces an historical question. Oh, this historical question! I wrote it five different times and it's still no good. It was criticized and quite rightly criticized because it's too narrow. It undertakes to make just one point, namely, [to point out that] you have the fact that Pius IX, exactly a hundred years before Pacem in terris, said exactly the opposite to what John XXIII said. Pius IX, quoting Gregory XVI, said that religious freedom is a nightmare, a deliramentum [insanity], such a fantasy as might overcome a man in the middle of the night. An illusion. John XXIII exactly a hundred years later says that religious freedom is a natural right of man. A man has a right to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience. Well this presents a nice little problem in the development of doctrine [laughter]. How do you get two popes who say exactly the opposite things to be really saying the same thing? Well this is what we have
theologians for. [Laughter and applause.]
Murray continues through the third draft's argument, including its "resounding assertion" that juridical religious freedom is good in itself, and then, why it is so - because "it enshrines a true and proper human right." He then spells out the principles upon which the draft bases its endorsement of religious freedom. The third such principle he calls the "principle of the free society," and I include his discussion here both for its wit and as an indication of how far he thought, with the help of the Anglo-American tradition, the church was called to grow. He continues:
And the principle of the free society is established here, namely, as much freedom as possible; as much restraint as necessary. You see, this is just the inverse of the maxim of our friends who plead for tolerance. They say as much tolerance as necessary; as much restraint as possible. I had a little trouble getting this in here and keeping this in here. And the only way it could be kept in there was to show that this was simply a transposition of, a translation, a paraphrase of the 15th among . rules of canon law, odia restringi et favores convenit ampliari, which is itself in substance a piece of Roman civil law. [Editor's note: the rule states that odious things must be restrained and favorable things broadened, and provides a benefit of the doubt against restraint]. And when they heard that, they said: Oh, well, yes, of course. If that's what you mean, we're all for it. Nothing like hiding behind canon law, in favor of something else. [Laughter, somewhat uneasy.]
Over the next three years Murray's argument for religious freedom became even more firmly grounded in "historical consciousness," a notion he took over from Lonergan and in my judgment developed in his own right.
Murray in Motion. From someone like Murray one can find proof texts for almost anything, for example (1) that atheists ought to have no social voice or (2) that atheists are the ones who must now teach us about our God. At various times he held and practiced both. But the point I want to make is that, although interesting for what they held, Murray (and Lonergan and Rahner) are even more interesting in the way they moved with our tradition, how and why they corrected and helped their tradition to grow.
In what was probably the bleakest patch of Murray's life - 1955 through 1958 - he wrote that America was governed by little more than our tribalisms, by those warm, humid encampments within our society that are defined mostly by their vicious boundary defenses. And he lamented that, in the face of this irrationalism, his church was forgoing the public practice of reasoning. Contrarily he wrote: "Faith supposes reason as grace supposes nature. If the genuine powers of reason are destroyed or undermined, the true notion of Christian faith suffers the same fate." And again, "not even religion will supply the lack, if reason fails in its functions; for religion cannot form a civilization," if it forgoes public reasoning.
What is this reason? It is not enlightenment scientific method, not even simply Lonergan's cognitional differentiations, including the notion of historical consciousness that was so essential to Murray's later arguments. It is conversing. It is a verb, an action, reasoning as a social motion, a fluid mixing.
Between 1957 and 1967 Murray discovered that even theological truths are open to the same development and decline that challenges the civil order. The term Murray used for the virtue needed when we move beyond the 600 of our nearest and dearest friends and family, beyond our tribe, is "civility." It is a bloodless term - bloodless, that is, until we hear the pain in Murray's own voice as he himself begins learning from the atheist about his (Murray's) God, or when he proclaims to Episcopalians that his (Murray's) church, as a corporate presence, is simul justus et peccator, (simultaneously just and a sinner), even to the same extent that the world is just and sinning. We and that Other, that world, begin our conversing on equal footing - morally, religiously, and politically, and we continue our conversation in equality. Seventy times seven, we again begin.
Murray, Lonergan, and Rahner are even more interesting in the way they moved with our tradition, how they corrected and helped their tradition to grow.
Fallible Fortune Teller. Murray was not a very good prophet in the sense of a fortune cookie. In 1964, at the death of John XXIII, he proclaimed that the church could no longer turn a deaf ear to anyone to whom John had listened. In 1966, after the release of the majority report of Paul VI's commission on artificial birth control, Murray endorsed as a true conclusion (based in historical consciousness) the majority's endorsement of artificial birth control, and suggested that Paul VI had himself released the report to prepare the faithful for an upcoming change in magisterial dogmatic teaching. No fortune teller here. At various times he predicted that we could reasonably apply limited nuclear strikes in Korea, but also that we could reasonably defend selective conscious objection during Vietnam - positions that will appall one or the other of us. But behind them all was his hope for the ongoing correction that emerges only within conversation.
Murray was not a very good prophet in the sense of a fortune cookie.
Not all his recommendations and predictions were golden. But that which he still can demonstrate for us - and what he has certainly demonstrated to me over the last 15 years - is what it is like to dance with our God across the boundaries by which we lesser mortals usually try to protect ourselves. He was a follower of Ignatius in that his primary contact with his God was in action, in working with God as God works to transform our world. And he grew into a faith that God can speak out from wherever God chooses. Murray began there, again and again, often enough reluctantly, even painfully. As we now move into the new world of interfaith searching together for our God, he can teach us much about the hard work of clarifying differences, correcting mistakes, recognizing what is there.
Civility as Murray practiced it, as he endured it, led him where he at various other points in his life would not and could not go. Thank God he went there. Thank God he was a faithful servant.
But we should allow Murray the last word. This is a clip from the earlier part of that 1964 address, where Murray is describing what happened during the first session of the Council, the session that he sat out at Woodstock College.
At the beginning of the second session, a text on religious freedom was submitted. Its major author was Bishop Emile Joseph de Smedt, the bishop of Bruges. And his inspiration came very largely, I understand - I was not around at the time. I was not at the first session. Not that I was uninvited. On the contrary, I was deinvited - which is much, much nicer.
And, he might have added, it is much, much nicer yet to be re-invited. And even nicer yet to find there our living, working God.
