John Courtney Murray on Church and State

Abstract

70 Studies • volume 106 • number 421 John Courtney Murray on Church and State1 Gerard Whelan SJ John Courtney Murray (1904-67) played an important role in producing Vatican II’s key doctrinal statement, the Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae) in 1965. In this article, I offer an outline of Murray’s intellectual biography, noting in particular how his thinking underwent creative development after the Council, as he turned to the thought of fellow Jesuit Bernard Lonergan. In outlining the Irish Church’s slowness to heed the message of Dignitatis Humanae and to accept that Ireland was becoming a secular and pluralist state, I suggest that Murray’s reflections and the importance of Lonergan’s thought for the Church remain as true for Ireland as for elsewhere. MURRAY’S INTELLECTUAL JOURNEY2 Early life and development (1904-46) John Courtney Murray was born in 1904 and, having joined the New York Province of the Jesuits, was sent for doctoral studies in theology at the Gregorian University in Rome (1937-40). Upon his return he was given a number of jobs: to lecture inTrinitarian theology in the Jesuit seminary outside New York City and also to be a founding editor of two Jesuit publications, the academic journal Theological Studies, and the periodical America, aimed at an educated Catholic audience. He would continue in all three roles until his untimely death of a heart attack in 1967. At various times he complained about this workload, suggesting that it prevented him from being able to do any one task well. In retrospect, however, the variety of commitments he undertook had a cross-fertilising effect. His journalistic work helped him be alert to key signs of the times; his academic work enabled him to recognise the deeper theological questions at issue in certain contemporary events. From a young age, he had been attracted to Catholic social teaching and the notion that the Church should contribute to both the education of good citizens and robust debate around public decisionmaking . Although always an admirer of American political order, he felt that Gerard Whelan SJ Studies • volume 106 • number 421 71 the quality of debate was fast deteriorating and that a Catholic contribution was needed. He attributed the deterioration to a number of factors: the difficulty of understanding public policy in an increasingly complicated industrial society; a reduction in the quality of education at popular level; and a reduction of the quality of media debate, often under the influence of self-interested, rich media moguls:3 Underneath the countless surface currents that are bearing in all directions in the thought of our contemporaries, there is, it seems, a deeper current that long ago set in – one might perhaps better call it an enveloping drift: by the action of a considerable portion of its elite thinkers, Western humanity is denying its Christian origins and turning away from God.4 Murray was aware that, during the 1930s in the USA, Catholics had not often felt qualified to engage in public debate and thought of themselves as representing a ‘ghetto Church’, made of certain immigrant communities. He knew that the Second World War, with the mixing of ethnic and religious groups in the army contributing to a more unified sense of nationhood, had made a big difference to this. But, as he began his work on America and Theological Studies, he came to recognise that there was one major obstacle to Catholics enjoying credibility in public debate: the current Church teaching on the question of religious liberty. At this time the teaching on Church-state relations looked back with nostalgia to medieval times, when Catholic kings could be relied upon to make the faith the official religion of states and to exercise official ‘intolerance’ of other religions. After the Protestant Reformation, ‘Plan B’ developed: when Catholic populations found themselves in a minority, they should focus on protecting their right to freedom of religious practice. Even with the advent of Catholic social teaching, from the 1890s on, little stress was placed on the responsibility of Catholic minority populations to promote Catholic social teaching and contribute to the common good of the cultures in which they found themselves. Having identified the question of...