Atilla Gregorian, SJ

I recently had a chance to begin -- and I'm only about a quarter of the way through the almost 550 pages of  -- Walter F. Murphy's Constitutional Democracy: Creating and Maintaining a Just Political Order (Johns Hopkins, 2007).  Mary Ann Glendon describes the book as a "masterpiece," and I have every reason to believe that she is, as so often happens, spot on.  The argument of the first part of the book is developed through an imagined colloquy among a group of select individuals whose task it is to draft a constitution for a nation that is just emerging from a phase of rule by a tyrannical junta.  Sometimes the literary device rankles a little, but on the whole I think it's a smashing success, especially as it allows the "voice" of the lefty Jesuit in the group to emerge and make a series of impressions.  This "worker priest," Fr. Atilla Gregorian SJ, wants the constitution to reflect and advert to "the dignity of the human person."   Many others in the drafting group suspect that there's no there there in said "dignity."  Still others are of the view that there's way too much that's spooky in the vaunted "dignity." 

As I say, I'm not nearly done with the book, but I hasten to recommend it, especially to those of us who frequently find ourselves talking up "the dignity of the human person" for purposes of shaping thinking about law and society.  Sometimes Murphy gives at least this reader reason to resist Gregorian's rhetoric; at other times Gregorian seems to say exactly what needs saying.  Even the popes who can't be suspected of being crypto-Kantians (e.g., Pius XII) spoke frequently and passionately of the dignity of the human person, but of course they did so with the benefit of a metaphysical scaffolding that it's not clear Fr. Gregorian would affirm.