John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation

National Review, Oct 19, 1992 by John Wauck

THE JESUIT political philosopher John Courtney Murray was once well known. In 1960 he even made the cover of Time magazine. His renown, however, was one of the many casualties of the Sixties-- not because he died in 1967, but because more radical thinkers have rejected the patient, erudite realism of his.work.

Many of the essays included here--by such leading church-state scholars as Richard John Neuhaus, Francis Canavan, and Gerard Bradley-argue that the time has come for a Murray renaissance. Murray's best-known work was a collection of essays, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (1960), which probed the relationship between Catholic moral philosophy and the American experiment in self-government. Murray stressed that the American experiment rests not on "values," subjective preferences, or interests, but on self-evident "truths" about' man and society. Because these truths were uncovered not by the secular Enlightenment but through centuries of Christian moral philosophy, Murray -saw a basic harmony between American democracy and the natural-law tradition within Catholicism. Today, America's dominant public philOsophy has degenerated into nugatory relativism and clashing ideologies, and the self-evidence of the rounding truths seems precarious. But, as Rabbi David Novak points out in his essay, Murray's natural-law approach is not sectarian; it depends on no specifically Catholic assumptions. In the present intellectual climate, Murray's approach offers an inviting means of defending the truths upon which American freedom rests.