John Courtney Murray and the Fortnight for Freedom

Today the US Bishops' “Fortnight for Freedom” campaign begins, and I can't help thinking that Jesuit John Courtney Murray, known more than anything for his fight for religious liberty, would be spinning in his grave if he knew what the bishops were doing. Murray ...

was an American Jesuit priest and theologian, who was especially known for his efforts to reconcile Catholicism and religious pluralism, particularly focusing on the relationship between religious freedom and the institutions of a democratically structured modern state. During the Second Vatican Council, he played a key role in persuading the assembly of the Catholic bishops to adopt the Council's ground-breaking Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae.

When Murray started writing about religious liberty, the Vatican and the church in the US hated the very idea .....

Catholic dissent -- When wrong turns out to be right

[...] For the greater part of Christian history, it was accepted as absolute doctrine that civil governments had an obligation to officially recognize the church and support it.

Pope Pius IX made the point in no uncertain terms in 1846 in his encyclical Quanta cura and the accompanying Syllabus of Errors: "The state must recognize [the Catholic Church] as supreme and submit to its influence. . . . The power of the state must be at its disposal and all who do not conform to its requirements must be compelled or punished. . . . Freedom of conscience and cult is madness." Catholics were told that they need not openly oppose a government that did not so recognize the church (as in the United States); rather, they should tolerate the existing situation until such time as Catholics formed a majority of the voting population.

Beginning in 1950 Father John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit theologian, argued that the old tradition must yield. In a series of articles in Theological Studies magazine and in public appearances, he contended that the state should not be the tool of the church and has no business carrying out the church's will. Rather, he said, the civil government's single yet profound obligation is to insure the freedom of all its citizens, especially their religious freedom.

"Every man has a right to religious freedom," he wrote, a right that is based on the dignity of the human person and is therefore to be formally recognized . . . and protected by constitutional law. . . . So great is this dignity that not even God can take it away." Murray claimed the old doctrine as enunciated by Pius IX was not an absolute, static thing but a teaching that had been developing over the past 100 years-a development which Murray saw in the writings of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XII.

The reaction was vehement and instantaneous. The two most influential U.S. Catholic theologians of the day, Fathers Joseph Fenton and Francis Connell, called Murray's argument "destructive, scandalous, and heretical" and engaged in lengthy, published refutations, especially in the American Ecclesiastical Review. Wrote Fenton, "The state is obligated to worship God according to the one religion [God] has established. This is so obviously a part of Catholic doctrine that no theologian has any excuse to call it into question."

Murray did not back down ......

You can read more on this subject in a post at America magazine's blog - Religous Liberty: Big Issue, Narrow Campaign. Here's a bit of it ...

[...] Our Constitution is built upon the Enlightenment, Hobbes and Locke. Its conception of rights is decidedly individualistic. These traditions see religion as inherently private. John Courtney Murray had to do quite a bit of work to argue for the compatibility of American conceptions of freedom and Catholicism. Such work has and continues to be done, but it cannot be taken for granted as an established consensus. The bishops quote Cardinal James Gibbon’s letter to Rome, but fail to note that Pope Leo XIII’s response included Testem benevolentiae, which was decidedly suspicious of the individualistic nature of American freedom. It also rejected a few other First Amendment freedoms—of speech, and of the press.

The US Bishops and their “Fortnight for Freedom” campaign have flipped the idea of religious freedom around and are arguing for the opposite of what Murray worked for and what was decided in Vatican II's Dignitatis Humanae.

And meanwhile, a line from an old movie, follow the money, comes to mind ......

Who’s funding the Catholic bishops’ religious freedom campaign?

[...] “The activities around the Fortnight for Freedom cost money,” said Steve Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington. “What groups are paying for this, and what’s the accountability for that money?”

Those kinds of questions were asked of key Catholic leaders like Baltimore Archbishop William Lori last week as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops met in Atlanta.

Lori, who heads the bishops’ committee on religious liberty, told reporters that gifts “from Catholic groups and foundations” would help sustain the campaign. “The generosity we’ve experienced has been heartening,” he said.

The campaign, Lori said, “is not in any way partisan, either in its spirit or in its funding.”

But he has not been specific about all the outside groups providing financial resources, or how much they’ve contributed .....

Critics like Schneck say many of the questions regarding the funding of the Fortnight for Freedom campaign center on private Catholic groups.

“The Knights of Columbus are clearly one of the major sources of funding (against the mandate), as well as other fraternal organizations,” Schneck said ....

Lori — who is the man most directly in charge of the Fortnight for Freedom campaign — has been the Supreme Chaplain of the Knights of Columbus since 2005. The Knights did not respond to requests for an interview about the organization’s involvement with the bishops’ campaign .......

Haight and Neuhaus

I saw this interesting post by Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo at On Faith, about two very different Catholic theologians, that I thought was worth a read .....

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Losing Haight and Neuhaus

Catholic America lost two important intellectual voices in the first fortnight of January 2009. The influential neo-conservative intellectual, Father John Neuhaus went to his eternal reward while the Jesuit theologian, Father Roger Haight was barred from any teaching or writing by Vatican decree. No matter the content of their writings, both priests were integral to the freedom of thought and the scope of Catholic theology. Pairing them in comment on their contributions serves the reality of Catholic America better than claiming one is right and the other wrong.

I cannot cover my comments with the fig leaf of impartiality. I know Roger Haight as a neighbor and theological colleague: I personally met Father Neuhaus but once. Yet, as public figures it is not hard to draw stark comparisons between the two.

Father Neuhaus was a convert from Lutheranism and liberalism. His writings secured Catholic participation in the conservative agenda of the past quarter-century in both Church and State. Within ecclesiastical circles, he was an outspoken and articulate supporter of Pope John Paul II's statements and policies. In U.S. party politics, he was a column of strength for Neo-conservative Republicanism. Rather than face the rigors of academia, he chose to be a public intellectual in the mode of a think-tank expert and on-line blogger known for skewering liberals in politics and theology.

With his passing, Father Neuhaus' allies in these movements have eulogized his contributions to Catholicism and politics are comparable to those of John Courtney Murray, SJ in the past generation. Death allows for certain exaggeration about the deceased, but the comparison to Fr. Murray doesn't work for me. The Jesuit had Murray's 1950s writings on Catholic cooperation with U.S. democracy censured before they were lifted up as charter for the II Vatican Council's documents in the 1960s. In contrast, Father Neuhaus never wrote anything that would have damaged his standing with the establishment, be it the Republican Party or the Vatican. Dressed with elite hauteur - French cuffs and starched clerical collar - Neuhaus was enamored of the pithy put-down, and his repeated dismissals of Latino Catholicism with its popular devotion and lively music as "multi-cultural exhibitionism" reek of snobbery.

Of course, one need not be a saint to be a Catholic. Whatever his faults, exaggerations or misstatements, Father Neuhaus injected a needed Catholic voice into contemporary society in a cogent and effective manner. You could disagree with Father Neuhaus' conclusions but still admire his erudition. Ironically, his passing coincided with the vindication of his theology (Josef Ratzinger is Pope Benedict XVI) on the one hand but also with the implosion of the Neo-Con agenda along with the collapse of Catholic support for Republicans in the 2008 election.

In contrast to Father Neuhaus' political adventurism, theologian Roger Haight, SJ, has explored the meaning of dogma about Christ and the Church strictly as an academic. Respecting his scholarly achievements and his presidency over the most prestigious of Catholic theological organizations, I think Father Haight's wastebasket contains more profound theology than any of Father Neuhaus' published works. Yet, the same conservative climate in which Father Neuhaus gloried produced castigation for Father Haight. I have written before about the content of Haight's theology and the Vatican response, and I wish here only to emphasize that despite their different directions and positions, both fulfill what it means to be completely Catholic. They believe(-d) in the same faith, receive(-d) the same communion and serve(-d) as intellectuals to the U.S. Catholic Church.

Pendulum shifts in history are frequent in Catholicism. It is possible that 100 years from now, Father Haight will be considered the leading light in updating theological thinking and whose only fault was getting too far ahead of ordinary Catholic thinking and the Vatican's watchdogs. Despite his undeniable influence within the establishment of his times, history may look back on Father Neuhaus as a low-watt politics-cum-theology commentator who was little more than a clever apologist for an irretrievable past. But whatever the future holds, both men speak for the breadth of thought in today's Catholic America and we are poorer for the loss of their voices.

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