Light On Dark Water

“The Murray project is dead”

I saw that remark on Facebook not long ago, and it struck me as true. The reference is to John Courtney Murray, S.J. I have not read Murray, but my understanding is that he articulated the idea that American institutions, particularly religious freedom, and Catholicism are fundamentally compatible. He is said to have been influential in Vatican II's declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae. He seems to have been a big influence on First Things magazine and the whole attempt of politically conservative Catholics to influence American politics. The basic idea, as I understand it, was that a common foundation on "truths [held] to be self-evident," amounting to what Catholic theology understands as natural law, was sufficient to allow church and state to co-exist in reasonable harmony.

Well, it's not working out. It seemed to be for a while, but it's collapsing before our eyes. Whether it's intellectually and historically justifiable or not, the grounding of the American constitution in something like natural law–the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" so admired by the Founders–has been discarded by the authorities whose understanding of the Constitution is law. The situation we have now is not of religion and the secular authority coexisting in mutual respect, but of a conflict between two incompatible religions–a loose collection of various forms of Christianity, on the one hand, and materialist progressivism on the other. The latter is also the faith of the secular authority, which is seeking to impose it in every situation where the two come into conflict in the realm of practice.

Set aside the theoretical arguments for a moment, it is, I'm afraid, simply a practical effect of human nature that societies require some sort of commonly-held metaphysic. The rationalism of the 18th century, implicitly including some Christian axioms, left something of a vacuum there, a gentleman's agreement not to press the issue too far, and its more vigorous and militant descendant, having cast off the remaining Christian elements, is now filling the vacuum. 

I've never been able to get enthusiastic about the idea of a Catholic (or any sort of Christian) confessional state, the main reason being that the inevitable corruption that goes along with political power ends up discrediting the Gospel itself. But I'm wondering now if that's the only alternative to a political order in which Christianity is at best marginalized and at worst persecuted. Maybe the modern conception of more or less unlimited religious freedom within a single polity was never realistic. At any rate it seems workable only within certain limits, limits which the Murray project perhaps thought reliable, but which have proved not to be.

Perhaps Archbishop Lefebvre was right all along about Dignitatis Humanae.

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38 responses to ““The Murray project is dead””

  1. Janet

    About 30 years ago, I thought a lot about different forms of government and which would be best. I came to the conclusion that none of them are really any good in the end, although some of them work given the right conditions–but the conditions never remain the same. I think it’s result of the Fall.
    I don’t really believe in separation of Church and State (gasp) and I guess that’s because I am much more Catholic than American. I don’t really have any problem with a Catholic confessional state or a King for that matter.
    More than anything, though, I think about how for the greatest part of history, people had to live under a government over which they had no control. They just had to figure out how to live a Catholic life (or whatever kind of life they wanted to live) as best they could. I’m pretty sure that whenever we think we control the government it’s 90% illusion anyway.
    AMDG

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  2. Mac

    I agree completely with all that. But still, there’s better and there’s worse. And I think ours has been decidedly better than most, all in all.
    But then if we didn’t take something good and destroy it or let it fall apart, we wouldn’t be human, would we?

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  3. Janet

    Jesus was human, wasn’t he? It isn’t because we are human that we do this. It is because our humanity is itself fallen apart. We are most human when we bring it back together.
    AMDG

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  4. Mac

    Well, sure, you know what I mean–humanity as we exist now, i.e. fallen. But it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s not intrinsic to the species as originally designed.

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  5. Janet

    The reason I say that is that so often people use that as an excuse–I’m only human–for doing stuff. Not you, of course ;-). But that’s why I think it’s important to make that distinction.
    AMDG

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  6. Mac

    Oh yeah, I didn’t mean it in that sense. It is an important distinction.

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  7. Louise

    We’ve talked before about the confessional state and I won’t go over that again. I certainly agree with you that when the state is formally Catholic, that any abuses of power, which are inevitable in a fallen world, do reflect badly on the Gospel, or at least the Church. That is the best argument against such a thing.
    “Well, it’s not working out. It seemed to be for a while, but it’s collapsing before our eyes. Whether it’s intellectually and historically justifiable or not, the grounding of the American constitution in something like natural law–the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” so admired by the Founders–has been discarded by the authorities whose understanding of the Constitution is law.”
    I have been re-reading Belloc’s essay, “The Catholic Church and the Modern State”. There are lots of pertinent passages. Here is one:
    “The Modern Electoral State does indeed always and inevitably support one general religious attitude and oppress its opposite very strongly, but by implication only, and indirectly; it would be shocked if it were accused of doing even that; and a defined and named religion it does not and, consistently, cannot openly adopt.”
    When he says “religious attitude” he does not mean only formally recognised religions. “Secularism” or whatever we want to call it, would fit, I think.
    “Perhaps Archbishop Lefebvre was right all along about Dignitatis Humanae.”
    I’d be inclined to think so.

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  8. Mac

    Belloc is really quite prophetic. In regard to this sort of question, maybe more so than Chesterton. A couple of days ago I was flipping through the last section of The Great Heresies, the part where he deals with the modern world, in search of a quotation, and thought it’s really time to re-read that. Which I’ll do in the next couple of days.

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  9. Janet

    I’ve been reading Everlasting Man with a group and last night we discussed a passage that talks about the people who were at the death of Christ. The part about the mob is very like the phenomenon surrounding Trump.
    He also says something about the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece that made me think I would like to get him into the 21st century for 15 minutes to hear what he had to say.
    I’ve had The Great Heresies on my shelf for years, but never read it. I would like to say I will, but I doubt I will.
    AMDG

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  10. Louise

    “Belloc is really quite prophetic.”
    It’s uncanny at times, because he can be quite specific and it’s all unfolding before my eyes.
    “In regard to this sort of question, maybe more so than Chesterton.”
    Yes, I think so too. Maybe it’s the specifics.
    BTW, I’m planning to write some pieces for your blogs, Janet and Maclin, in the next week, now that the crazy-busy time has passed.

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  11. Mac

    It might be worth your while to read just that last section. “The Modern Challenge,” I think it’s called. I think it would stand on its own pretty well and it’s not that long.
    Chesterton might just blow a fuse or something if suddenly picked up and set down in our time.

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  12. Mac

    Cross-posted–I was replying to Janet.
    I’ll greatly appreciate it if you have time to write something.

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  13. Janet

    Thanks, Louise! Things are looking up.
    AMDG

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  14. Janet

    I might read that, Maclin.
    The first time I had heard of Murray was when I saw an ad for one of his books. I really wanted to read it because at the time I was really interested in the history of our government, and had read quite a bit from a Protestant point of view–this because of homeschooling in the Bible Belt. I was enthusiastic about his ideas, but never got the book.
    Now, though, I’ve come to the conclusion that our government at it’s best was based on a Protestant mindset and has flaws that proceed from that mindset and won’t ever be compatible with Catholic culture.
    I would be hard pressed to tell you in detail what I mean, though.
    AMDG

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  15. Mac

    Part Protestant, part Enlightenment rationalism, I’d say.

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  16. Janet

    Yes, of course that, but that’s the obvious. 😉
    AMDG

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  17. Marianne

    I’ve come to the conclusion that our government at it’s best was based on a Protestant mindset and has flaws that proceed from that mindset and won’t ever be compatible with Catholic culture.
    That got me to wondering if Flannery O’Connor ever wrote anything about that incompatibility. Anyone here know?
    One thing I found in searching the question is this from an essay in her book Mystery and Manners:

    At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily. The fiction which celebrates this last state will be the least likely to transcend its limitations, for when the religious need is banished successfully, it usually atrophies, even in the novelist. The sense of mystery vanishes. A kind of reverse evolution takes place, and the whole range of feeling is dulled.

    That “reverse evolution” was something your comment, Mac, about societies needing “some sort of commonly-held metaphysic” and that now we have a vacuum in that regard also made me think of.
    And considering O’Connor’s essay was published in 1963, that “an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily” sort of surprised me — didn’t realize we were so far gone so long ago.

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  18. Mac

    I think there were others who had seen the problem then and earlier though I can’t think of an example right now. That line about the range of feeling being dulled really strikes me as true.

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  19. Rob G

    “I’ve come to the conclusion that our government at it’s best was based on a Protestant mindset and has flaws that proceed from that mindset and won’t ever be compatible with Catholic culture.”
    A few months back I read an interesting little book that discussed that subject with regard to American religious freedom. Here’s an old Touchstone review of it:
    http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=12-06-049-b

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  20. Janet

    Thanks, Rob. I’ll check that out at lunch.
    AMDG

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  21. Mac

    Very interesting.
    “Toleration, therefore, becomes only a mask for a pronounced agnosticism about the existence of truth.”
    Official agnosticism, that is. Unofficially certain dogmas have always remained. Somewhere behind every assertion that things must be one way rather than another there is an axiom concerning what is ultimately true and right.
    Whatever the theoretical problems with American religious freedom, the point where it started to become a serious practical problem was when the courts started regarding “religion” at large as a sort of pollutant that needs to be regulated by the state. Or maybe that wasn’t a point exactly, but a long development.

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  22. Mac

    This is not directly related, but I think it’s an instance of what you’re talking about, Janet. It’s an agnostic-atheist Brit with obvious traditional British anti-Catholic sympathies (obvious if you’ve read much of his stuff, maybe not so much from this piece). The implication of “no outside (i.e. papist) interference” is also “no higher law than the state.”

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  23. Mac

    I mean not intrinsically, but in context.

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  24. Rob G

    I wonder if the theoretical problems with religious freedom made it in some sense inevitable that there would be practical problems down the road. Seems like the two sides of the thing couldn’t ride in tandem forever.

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  25. Mac

    Yes, I definitely think so. Though it often seems that every arrangement of human affairs contains the seeds of its own destruction.

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  26. Janet

    I think that’s true. In the end, every government is its own little Tower of Babel. That’s why I like that Sandburg poem.
    I see a lot of what’s going on with Catholics in the US as a sort of correction to what happened in WWII, which was when Catholics really became assimilated into the American culture. Before, they were outsiders, but fighting in the war, men got to know each other and the Catholics went out of their way to be accepted. (This is, of course, way oversimplified.) They went too far to appear to be just like everybody else. Because we aren’t. We aren’t supposed to be.
    Back then, since the society at large had a similar morality to that of Catholics, it worked. Now, if we are going to be Catholic, we can’t just keep our mouths shut. I’m not sure this is a bad place to be in. It’s going to hurt, but it’s pretty much where we’re called to be.
    I know this is not very coherent, but I ought to be working, so it’s very much off the top of my head.
    AMDG

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  27. Mac

    That is oversimplified, but it’s true that the assimilation happened and I’m sure the WWII experience helped it along. I think Murray is being blamed for it to some degree. But I don’t know whether he deserves that or not. I can’t remember whether it was in something someone linked to here, or I just ran across it while looking for info on Murray, but I read that he was very critical of JFK’s apologia for being Catholic–basically JFK said, to a Baptist group, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to let my religion affect the way I govern.” This was praised by Catholic progressives and condemned (justly I would say) by others.

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  28. Louise

    “I wonder if the theoretical problems with religious freedom made it in some sense inevitable that there would be practical problems down the road. Seems like the two sides of the thing couldn’t ride in tandem forever.”
    I would think so. Just look at marriage and divorce. Religion A says there should never be divorce. Religion B says divorce is fine. What exactly can the state do while being fair to both religions?

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  29. Mac

    The classical liberal view would be that both sides can believe whatever they want, but not impose it on each other, and therefore the state won’t get in the way of Religion B. “Don’t like divorce?” says Religion B. “Don’t have one.” (Sound familiar?)
    But of course that’s a shallow view, because if Religion B has enough adherents, then divorce becomes common and the character of the society is changed for everyone.

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  30. Louise

    Yes, thats how the game goes. It’s sick. But even if hardly anyone did divorce, in principle the state is coming down on the side of Religion B. In practice, the state is imposing Religion B on Religion A!

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  31. Mac

    Like I’m always saying–there’s always a dogma in the mix somewhere. So the state is imposing a doctrine, but not a practice. They’re not forcing people to do anything, only allowing it. That might be ok in principle. But with same-sex marriage it goes further: you may not be forced to do it, but you aren’t morally entitled to disapprove. That’s how you know a concept of absolute right and wrong is at work, not just neutrality.

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  32. Rob G

    Exactly, Mac. And what’s exasperating for the conservative/traditionalist is that most liberals seem to be completely blind to the dogmatic nature of that dynamic, which makes debate extremely difficult.

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  33. Janet

    There’s an article in the new FT about liberalism by someone we know. I haven’t read it yet.
    AMDG

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  34. Mac

    Well, that looks interesting. I’ve been thinking about subscribing, maybe I will now.
    “most liberals seem to be completely blind to the dogmatic nature of that dynamic”
    Indeed! Not only is it frustrating for us, as you say, but it gives them great moral confidence. They think their dogmas are self-evidently true.

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  35. Janet

    I am reading Murray’s “We Hold These Truths” and it is really good. I was kind of dreading reading it, because I thought I was going to have to trudge my way through, but it isn’t like that at all.
    AMDG

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  36. Mac

    I figure I would probably agree with much or most of it. But I wouldn’t figure it would be a lot of fun to read.
    I was a bit shocked when I saw that this comment is on a May 2016 post. I just wrote about this a month ago, not remembering that I had mentioned it two years ago. Well, I guess if you do a minimum of one blog post a week for years on end it’s not a sign of senility that you forget a lot of it.
    http://www.lightondarkwater.com/2018/05/sunday-night-journal-may-13-2018.html

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  37. Janet

    That’s funny. I did a search and just assumed the one I found was the recent one.
    AMDG

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  38. Mac

    Grr. Crummy search. But at least it found something relevant.

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