Religion: Man of the City

A man who would have particularly welcomed the news from Rome died in New York City last week. Victim of a heart attack was the Rev. John Courtney Murray, 62, the Jesuit theologian whose influence and immense prestige extended far beyond the boundaries of his faith and order. Secular leaders met under his guidance. Protestants welcomed him to their councils; the Episcopal Committee on Theological Freedom and Social Responsibilities listed him as one of its advisers. Internation al Catholicism recognized his intellectual leadership at the Second Vatican Council, despite efforts of the ultra-conservative Vatican Curia to suppress his liberal views on religious freedom.

Father Murray’s life coincided in time and purpose with a new era in U.S. Catholicism. What had been largely a church of immigrant ethnic groups at the turn of the century became part of the pluralistic weave of American life, ready to shuck its minority-minded defensiveness and its sense of dependency on authority overseas. With deep insight and patient scholarship, Father Murray incorporated the U.S. secular doctrines of church-state separation and freedom of conscience into the spiritual tradition of Roman Catholicism.

Silence! He was thus a very American Catholic theologian. Born on Manhattan’s 19th Street to a Scottish-born lawyer father and an Irish mother, both of whom were Catholics, the boy had shown an interest in medicine as a profession. But he joined the Jesuits at 16, and after earning an M.A. at Boston College, spent three years teaching in the Philippines. Then there was more study—four years of theology at the Jesuits’ Woodstock College in Maryland, four years of graduate theology at the Gregorian University in Rome—before returning to Woodstock as professor of theology in 1937, a post he held until his death.

At Woodstock, Father Murray’s theological specialties were the Trinity and grace. But he was also keenly interested in the church’s dealings with the world, and his learned debating on behalf of incorporating church-state separation into Catholic polity became so lively in the pages of the American Ecclesiastical Review that his order eventually silenced him with instructions to clear all his future writing on church-state matters with Jesuit headquarters in Rome.

But Father Murray’s views came triumphantly into their own with the wave of aggiornamento begun by Pope John XXIII and carried out after a fash ion in Vatican II. Despite the Curia’s success in keeping him out of the first council session, he was on hand as an expert for the second, and when the bishops rose to applaud the passage of the declaration on religious liberty, which confirmed the right of all men to freedom of conscience in worship, many of them felt that the applause was really for John Courtney Murray.

Theologian Murray helped liberalize his church, but he succeeded because he was essentially a conservative—so much so that some of the younger theologians, who prefer to storm the battlements, were disenchanted with his meticulous, scholarly approach. For John Courtney Murray always moved within church tradition, presenting his liberal conclusions as developments of the hallowed past; it was his special gift for holding the two together as a living whole that carried the day in Rome.

Exchange of Ideas. In addition to editing the Jesuit quarterly Theologica Studies for 26 years and writing a show er of articles on dozens of facets of life, Father Murray published five books. Most notable: We Hold Thesi Truths, which expounds the idea that the American structure of church-state relations is more congenial to Roman Catholic thinking on the subject than any other such structure in history; and The Problem of God, which contrasts the Old Testament question “Is God our God?” and the medieval question “What is God like?” with modern man’s “new will actively to oppose God.”

It was through personal contact that John Courtney Murray wielded much of his large intellectual influence. Thin and towering (6 ft. 4 in.), long-faced to the point of looking sad (which made his witty, self-depreciating smile all the more engaging), he possessed an intellectual charity and unfailing courtesy that ideally suited him to guide the exchange of ideas between peers of widely disparate persuasions.

This, in fact, was the assignment given him in the spring of 1966 with his appointment as director of the John LaFarge Institute. Founded in 1964 by the editors of the Jesuit weekly, America, the institute brings together leaders from many sectors of society and the full spectrum of religious belief for off-the-record discussions of al most any and all subjects—religious liberty, racial discrimination, censorship, abortion, the population explosion, business and political ethics, religion and the arts, war and the anti-war movement.

Dialogue between serious men about serious things was for Father Murray the sine qua non of civilized society. The end in view was not agreement but the kind of understanding that honest disagreement presupposes. “Disagreement,” he would often say, “is not an easy thing to reach.” This, he felt, was society’s protection against the confusion spread by the barbarian perpetually at the gates.

The city was John Courtney Murray’s symbol of civilized society, and in writing about it, he once unconsciously described himself: “The cohesiveness of the city is not hot and humid, like the climate of the animal kingdom. It lacks the warmth of love and unreasoning loyalty that pervades the family. It is cool and dry, with the coolness and dryness that characterize good argument among informed and responsible men.”