Bridging the Sacred and the Secular: Selected Writings of John Courtney Murray, SJ, edited by J. Leon Hooper, SJ (Georgetown, 390 pp., $55)
JOHN Courtney Murray, the intellectual architect of the Second Vatican Council’s historic Declaration on Religious Freedom, was the pre-eminent public theologian of twentieth-century American Catholicism. This new volume, only the second collection of Murray’s writing to be published since his untimely death in 1967, brings together more than thirty of Murray’s seminal essays and addresses on (among other topics) religious liberty, freedom of speech, the Christian idea of education, religious ecumenism, natural-law theory, and Catholic social thought on war and peace. Especially notable is his 1962 essay on “Federal Aid to Church-Related Schools,” one of the last (and most important) of his remarkably prescient essays on church-state relations in America. Recognizing the legitimate (but then unpopular) claim of Catholic and Orthodox Jewish groups seeking government support for their parochial schools, that “the religious freedom of their members would be diminished” if such support were denied, Murray bolstered their contention that “it was in the public interest for the government to respect the freedom of parental choice, especially when religious beliefs motivate that choice.” Liberal Jewish and Catholic opponents of “school choice” would do well to reflect upon this compelling argument today. This insightful collection, which does much to confirm and illuminate the enduring relevance of Murray’s thought to the continuing debate on the religious and moral dimensions of American public life, should be read by believers, Christian and Jewish alike.
Comments