John Courtney Murray Lives!

I think the major conclusion of our program on the legacy of John Courtney Murray SJ for law and politics (held here at Villanova on Friday) is that Murray remains of considerable importance today for our thinking about the relationship between Catholicism and American Democracy, although there were lots of different opinions about the nature and extent of his relevance.  MOJers Rick Garnett, Patrick Brennan, Fr Araujo and Susan Stabile all participated as presenters or commentators and will, I'm sure, be continuing the discussion here on MOJ and by posting drafts of their articles (which will be published in the Journal of Catholic Social Thought.) But I'd thought I'd report a bit on some of the papers. We kicked off with a paper provocatively subtitled "Notes by an Anarchist on Murray's Conception of Law, Politics, the State and Religious Freedom," by Michael Baxter, a Notre Dame theologian and member of the Catholic Workers in South Bend. Mike displayed an impressive grasp of the law of Church and state, and more patience than I expected, in view of some of his earlier writings on Murray, for certain aspects of Murray's thought, notably the way Murray reads the First Amendment as a way of ensuring the libertas ecclesiae and regards the nonestablishment norm as acceptable so long as it is applied in an accomodationist manner. What he profoundly disagrees with, however, is Murray's argument for the providential nature of the American founding, which Baxter regards as incorporating the ideology of American exceptionalism and Protestant providentialism into a kind of Catholic providentialism, which is just wrong. Murray, he argued,  created a new myth in order to show that there was no conflict between being a Catholic and an American, and smoothed over conflicts between the radical Christian message and liberalism. This myth, Michael concludes, undermines the Church's fundamentally oppositional stance to the Leviathans of state and corporation. Rick Garnett picked up some of these themes in his typically excellent paper. He argued that the notion of the libertas ecclesiae, founded in the Investiture Controversy, not only is the root of the Western desacralization of the state and of constitutionalism, but of the belief that the Church has a vital, independent identity as an entity that has more than a merely private role in society.  The First Amendment, however, increasingly is read to treat religion as merely a matter of individual preference (and individual right), confining it to the private sphere, and constraining its influence on public debate and public action. Rick thus shows how much has changed since Murray tried to link the libertas ecclesiae with the First Amendment, when the legitimacy of the ecclesia as something that stands between the public power and the people was less in question than it is today. Murray thus presents an alternative reading of the First Amendment, and a more attractive one. On the same panel, Fr Robert Araujo emphasized Murray's method-- his commitment to reasoned discourse and to tolerance of discordant views (which underlined, of course, his influential views of religious freedom.) In responding to both Rick's and the Father's papers, I emphasized the new sharpness of the religious/secular polarities in current discourse, the non-negotiabilty claimed by some for certain moral positions, and the revived sense of tension between tradition and democracy, and wondered whether Murray's method, his instinct for agreement and his providentialism are still helpful today. In a subsequent post, I'll report on Judge Noonan's wonderful keynote speech. And I invite my fellow MOJers to chip in with reports or comments of their own. Ditto for our other participants as guest bloggers.

-Mark