City of God & Man

See Cover: The all-conquering barbarians were storming the gates of Augustine's city when the saint died in 430. The North African town of Hippo was one of the last imperial outposts to be attacked. Rome had already gone under. Only four years before, St. Augustine's City of God had laid the theological groundwork for the church to step into the void left by the collapsing Roman Empire Ever since, Western civilization and the Christian enterprise have been joined together for better or worse; the church has moved and countermoved, advanced backtracked, tottered and triumphed before the contingencies of history. And the barbarian is seldom far from the city gates.

The barbarian is not necessarily known by his bearskin, his ax or his H-bomb nor does he always pound on his desk in a parliament of nations. He may be as urbane as the 18th century philosophers who prepared the way for the guillotine and the tumbrels. Or, in one man's words: He may wear a Brooks Brothers suit and carry a ballpoint pen ... In fact, even beneath the academic gown there may lurk a child of the wilderness, untutored in the high tradition of civility, who goes busily and happily about his work a domesticated and law-abiding man engaged in the construction of a philosophy to put an end to all philosophy This is perennially the work of the barbarian to undermine rational standards of judgment, to corrupt the inherited intuitive wisdom by which the people have always lived, and to do this not by spreading new beliefs but by creating a climate of doubt and bewilderment in which clarity about the larger aims of life is dimmed and the self-confidence of the people is destroyed."

In the considered view of the grave and learned man who wrote those words that is precisely what is happening to the U.S. John Courtney Murray sees his native America entering a new era of post-modern man" in a sorry state of ideological disarray that, unless repaired must doom the best political skill and dedication. His lucid, well-modulated concern for the U.S. has long ago earned him eminence among the cognoscenti with time for learned journals and debate Now in his first book, We Hold These Truths (Sheed & Ward; $5), he is entermg a new, broader area of influence. In the months to come, serious Americans of all sorts and conditions--in pinstripes and laboratory gowns, space suits and housecoats-will be discussing his hopes and fears for American democracy. This m itself betokens a new era in the U S For Author Murray is a Roman Catholic priest and a Jesuit.

Who Is Safe? It did not take the 1960 election to establish--though it well served to recall--what a unique encounter i diverse traditions is contained in the words "American Catholic." In the historical reality behind those words St Ignatius Loyola, founder of John Courtney Murray's order and soldier-saint meets Citizen Tom Paine, soldier-atheist. St. Thomas, the Angelic Doctor and patient builder of a great intellectual system, meets John Dewey, pragmatist and patient destroyer of systems. Monasticism, shielding a candle through the Dark Ages, meets the blaze of the Enlightenment. The Inquisition meets the Supreme Court, the apostolic succession meets the clapboard Congregationalist Church, the Sacred Roman Rota meets Reno.

Perhaps in no other society in history could these elements have endured together without mob scenes, crowded prisons and burning stakes. In. the U.S. a new kind of commonwealth in the long chronicle of church and state, they have not only endured in peace (by and large) but also they have greatly nourished their common society. Not that they have understood or loved one another. A great many Americans still see their Catholic fellow citizens as vaguely alien and as narrow-minded servants of an absolutist theology. Because their church is vast diverse and all too easily regarded as monolithic," American Catholics are often taxed with everything from Spanish Catholic intolerance to Italian Catholic cynicism, from Legion of Decency censorship to neo-Thomist philosophy.

Debating issues of church and state during the 1960 campaign, Catholics sometimes sounded defensive. Not so John Courtney Murray. His lifelong subject of study has been the interaction of America and Catholicism; some critics in his own faith have occasionally held him to be more American than Catholic. Without representing an ' official position--and without running counter to it--he is now telling his fellow Catholics that they must become more intellectually aware of their ' coexistence'' in a pluralist, heavily Protestant society. But not even remotely is he trying to trim Catholicism to any other faith, or to the absence of faith. In his view, Catholics can make a major contribution--perhaps the decisive contribution--to an American society in spiritual crisis. His terms may startle some non-Catholics. "The question is not," says Murray, "whether Catholicism is safe for democracy, but whether democracy is safe for Catholicism."

The Separation. Most Americans, when they hear about conflicts between "church and state," think of certain concrete issues that reach the headlines. On most of these, Murray has taken liberal and eloquent positions. Item: on government funds for parochial schools, he thinks simple justice demands it, but argues that Catholic pressure for it should be confined to argument and slow persuasion. Item: on censorship, he upholds the right of the church to guide its own faithful and to convince others with its moral judgments, but by persuasion, not boycotts. There is danger, he suggests, in reading bad books, but also "great danger in not reading good books."

Father Murray is generally in favor of the U.S. version of church-state separation, established by the First Amendment and by the principle that government and church function in entirely separate spheres, one caring for the people's earthly wellbeing, the other endowed with the mission of guiding them toward salvation. This, argues Murray, is an ancient Christian principle, even if often broken by either church or state in less socially and juridically advanced times. Writes Murray: "In 800 A.D., Leo III had a right to crown Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans; but this was because it was 800 A.D. If there were a Christendom tomorrow--a Christian world-government in a society whose every member was baptized --the Pope, for all the fullness of his apostolic authority, would not have the slightest shadow of a right to 'crown' so much as a third-class postmaster."

But such matters of church and state are all part of a larger issue, as Murray sees it. That issue is the American public philosophy, which must provide a kind of spiritual charter by which all Americans can live together. It is "the constitutional consensus whereby the people acquires its identity as a people and the society is endowed with its vital form . . . its sense of purpose as a collectivity organized for action in history." To Murray, the civic consensus is constructed neither of psychological rationalizations nor of economic interests nor of purely pragmatic working hypotheses. "It is an ensemble of substantive truths, a structure of basic knowledge, an order of elementary affirmations that reflect realities inherent in the order of existence."

The Noes Have It. Is there an American consensus? That there was one once is not in doubt. The Founding Fathers knew what they believed and what they wanted for their new Land of the Free, and they carried on their civil argument in terms they shared. What Historian Clinton Rossiter calls the "noble aggregate of 'self-evident truths' "--as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and later in the Bill of Rights--essentially added up to liberty under limited government, guided by law and ultimately relying on God. The builders of the republic knew what they meant by liberty, by law and by God; less obviously but just as importantly, they knew what they meant when they declared, "We hold these truths." They believed that ultimate, universal truth could be perceived by human reason. They also believed, in Murray's words, that "only a virtuous people can be free," that freedom can survive only if the people are "inwardly governed by the moral law."

If there is anything left of this consensus, thinks Father Murray, it is not the doing of U.S. philosophers, most of whom are positivists--whose strictly limited truths must be capable of scientific proof--or pragmatists--whose truths are whatever works. Says Murray: "The American university long since bade a quiet goodbye to the whole notion of an American consensus, as implying that there are truths that we hold in common, and a natural law that makes known to all of us the structure of the moral universe in such wise that all of us are bound by it in a common obedience."

When he talks to academic audiences about an American consensus or, as he sometimes calls it, "the public philosophy," Father Murray is usually greeted by a blank stare or emphatic denial that such a thing exists. "Sir," someone is sure to say, "you refer to 'these truths' as the product of reason; the question is, whose reason?" When Murray replies that it is not a question of whose reason but of right reason, the rejoinder is: "But whose reason is right?"

Thus, to the question of whether an American consensus exists today, Father Murray feels that the noes have it. But, says Father Murray, ask if America needs a consensus and the yeas have it.

New Act of Purpose. Murray poses his question cogently: "Can we or can we not achieve a successful conduct of our national affairs, foreign and domestic, in the absence of a consensus that will set our purposes, furnish a standard of judgment on policies, and establish the proper conditions for political dialogue?" Anti-Communism is a poor substitute. If Communism should vanish overnight, he says, Americans would still be faced with the world's disorder and the questions: What kind of order in the world do you want? What truths do you hold? The U.S., says Murray, needs "a new moral act of purpose" beyond the "small-souled purpose of mere survival."

Where is the act of purpose, the work of thought to come from? Even with the will to achieve it, deliberately acquiring a consensus may sound as absurd as deliberately deciding to fall in love. But for those about to embark regretfully on a dubious, consensusless future, Father Murray has a further word. "It just happens," he says in effect, "that I have here a device which any reasonably intelligent person may apply to lead him to the consensus, the public philosophy." And with an urbane, engaging smile, out of his long black clericals he pops it: natural law.

God's Reason. The concept of a law of man's nature prior to the "positive" laws he enacts has meant many things to many thinkers. It is a pre-Christian notion, going back farther than Aristotle, and in the Christian era it is by no means exclusively Catholic. But it was Thomas Aquinas who shaped and polished the idea into one of the strongest and most subtle instruments of civilization.

There is an eternal law, he held, which is God's reason governing the interrelationship of all things. This eternal law has two divisions--divine positive law, accessible to man only through revelation, and natural law or moral law, directly accessible to man through his reason (which, according to the Thomist theory of analogy, bears some relationship to God's). Natural law governs man's relationship to God and to his fellow man.

The criteria of good and evil are to be found in man's nature; man is naturally a social being; therefore the good of society is man's good. Theft, for example, is wrong because it subverts the basis of social life, as does any private injury to another. When there is conflict between the satisfaction of two natural requirements, the rational (therefore the lawful) course is to subordinate the lower to the higher. Thus self-preservation is good, but to refuse to risk one's life when the well-being of society demands it is wrong.

Elementary life situations confront even the child with the opportunity to reason out the good to be done and the evil avoided. For instance, says Father Murray, citing an example from St. Thomas, "To know the meaning of 'parent' and of 'disrespect' is to know a primary principle of the natural law, that disrespect to parents is evil, intrinsically and antecedent to any human prohibition." As experience unfolds, more and more precepts are derived--the basis of marriage, property, the state, the nature of justice. As human relationships become increasingly complex, the factoring-out of natural law eludes the unaided reason of the ordinary men. Such questions as the legitimate use of force, economic justice, the duties of employer and employee become the province of what St. Thomas called sapientes (the wise).

The Uses of Power. The wise are sometimes called upon to make painful revisions, for the content of natural law may change with time and circumstance. Throughout the Middle Ages, the practice of lending money at interest (usury) was held to be against natural law because money was considered naturally unproductive. The wealth of the church was almost entirely in land, as Bertrand Russell points out, and landowners are borrowers rather than lenders. But when Protestantism arose, its support--especially that of Calvinism--came chiefly from the rich middle class, who were lenders rather than borrowers. Accordingly, first Calvin, then other Protestants, and finally the Roman Catholic Church, decided that charging interest under proper restrictions was not a violation of natural law after all--although usury in the sense of exorbitant interest still is.

How does natural law apply to some of the larger practical issues of the day? An example is the use of force, which, says Murray, baffles Protestant morality. (The "Eastern seaboard liberal," he says, at once abhors and adores power, since in the matrix of American Protestant culture "power is unconsciously regarded as Satanic.") Old-line Protestant ethics saw social morality as personal morality writ large, which led to such inappropriate questions as "How does one apply the Sermon on the Mount to foreign policy?" This failure to understand the difference between public and private morality, argues Murray, leads to the disastrously false alternatives that often characterize U.S. foreign or military policy, e.g., sentimental pacifism or all-out atomic holocaust. Murray believes that there is morally valid territory between these extremes, that war may be legitimate in the defensive repression of injustice, and that the concept of limited war has moral significance. In general, says Murray, Americans should learn from the natural law tradition that "policy is the meeting place between the world of power and the world of morality."

The New Rationalism. What is the non-Catholic to make of natural law? The Founding Fathers certainly accepted the concept, in one form or another, much of it having reached them through the English common law out of the vast reservoir of Christian tradition. Murray thinks that the Bill of Rights was far less a "piece of 18th century rationalist theory [than] the product of Christian history." In fact, to some it may seem that Murray at times regards the U.S. as having sprung directly from medieval Christianity--he calls St. Thomas "The First Whig"--with hardly any help from Protestantism or the Enlightenment.

But the main source of natural law to the early republic was of course John Locke, whose version of it was radically different from the Catholic view. Where the Catholic theory sees society as equally given with the person, Locke regarded society merely as something for the convenience of the autonomous individual and not inherent in the nature of man. Murray condemns Locke as too much of an individualist to have "any recognizable moral sense" of the rights of man: "There is simply a pattern of power relationships." Still, when pressed, Murray concedes that Locke's natural law is better than no natural law at all, and throughout much of U.S. history, the concept appeared in the courts and in government.

What caused its decline is chiefly a combination of Protestant theology and modern rationalist philosophy. "The new rationalism," as Murray describes the thought of men like John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, sees man as autonomous, beneath no knowable God, with a conception of natural law as merely "the drive of the whole personality," the striving to "live ever more fully." Calling itself "modern evolutionary scientific humanism," it regards human values such as reason, justice and charity as man-made and human rights as dependent on man for their guarantee. In jurisprudence, it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who defined law as "the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact and nothing more pretentious." Said Holmes: "The jurists who believe in natural law seem to me to be in that naive state of mind that accepts what has been familiar and accepted by them and their neighbors as something that must be accepted by all men everywhere."

While Murray concedes that natural law has been used vaguely, naively and repressively, he sees far greater danger in the "subtle and seductive system" by which all ethics are considered relative.

In Time of Trouble. Many Protestant theologians are critical of the formal rigidity of the natural law theory; neither they nor the Jews find the stock Biblical proof-text from St. Paul convincing.* Others, notably Karl Barth, reject the Thomist theory of analogy on which the natural law stands; in fallen man, they hold, sin has shattered God's image, and since the Garden of Eden he has had no direct knowledge of God's reason or his will without revelation. Many Protestants distrust the whole Scholastic tradition, which they feel keeps man from direct contact with God by interposing an artificial structure of reason. But some Protestant theologians, while far from accepting the classical Catholic version, are ready to underwrite natural law in some form. Reinhold Niebuhr denies the existence of natural law but concedes "certain laws, certain norms and degrees of universality'' (incest, for instance, is almost universally taboo).

Father Murray feels that only inside the Catholic community has natural law endured, therefore Catholic participation in the U.S. consensus has been "full and free, unreserved and unembarrassed, because the contents of this consensus--the ethical and political principles drawn from the tradition of natural law--approve themselves to the Catholic intelligence and conscience. Where this kind of language is talked, the Catholic joins the conversation with complete ease. It is his language. The ideas expressed are native to his own universe of discourse. Even the accent, being American, suits his tongue."

The 1960 election of a U.S. President from the Catholic community dramatizes this claim. And whether or not the Catholics have been the true custodians of the American consensus, as Murray would have it, there is no denying that a new era has begun for Catholics in America, a country that in itself represents a new era in the history of church and state.

Two There Are. The idea that religion and government are different--let alone separate--is a relatively new one. Either the ancient kings were sacred, if not actually gods, or the high priests exercised kingship, as in Israel. Separation began with the concept of an official religion (Plato recommended in his Laws that all citizens who refused to accept the state religion should be imprisoned for five years, each day of which they should listen to a sermon). Christianity became a state religion 347 years after the Crucifixion, when the Emperor Theodosius made it the religion of the Roman Empire.

Then began Europe's long up-and-down battle between Pope and Emperor, with the Emperor usually ending up on top. Monarchs customarily appointed bishops in the Middle Ages; when Pope Gregory VII told Emperor Henry IV to stop doing it and was refused, he excommunicated Henry, and had the warming pleasure of keeping the penitent Emperor waiting barefoot in the snow at Canossa for three days before letting him in for forgiveness. But Gregory's fun was soon over. Henry exiled him in 1084, and the back-and-forth went on.

Basic Catholic doctrine on the ordering of society was laid down by Pope Gelasius I in a letter to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I in 494: "Two there are, august Emperor, by which this world is ruled on title of original and sovereign right--the consecrated authority of the priesthood and the royal power." This, says Father Murray, established a "freedom of the church" in the spiritual sphere that served to limit the power of government on the one hand, and on the other brought the moral consensus of the people to bear upon the King.

But with the rise of the absolutist monarchies in the 17th century, Gelasius' finely balanced dyarchy was shattered. Between Pope and King stood a saint who took 309 years to be canonized, Robert Francis Romulus Bellarmine (1542-1621), whose influence reached far beyond his lifetime. His was a time of upheaval; Galileo was turning the old earth-centered cosmos upside down, a new national consciousness was breaking up the Holy Roman Empire, and the "heresy" of Protestantism was digging in throughout the world. As one of the greatest polemical theologians in his church's history, Jesuit Cardinal Bellarmine was in the forefront of the struggle against the Protestants. But within Catholicism he was a transitional figure, facing the modern era with his feet firmly rooted in the Middle Ages. And. like many another human bridge, he was trampled on from both sides.

The temporal authority of the Pope was under challenge by Europe's new rulers, and Cardinal Bellarmine earned the enmity of ecclesiastical conservatives (notably Pope Sixtus V) by maintaining that papal jurisdiction over heads of state was only indirect and spiritual--the position generally accepted today. On the other hand, in opposition to the Scottish jurist Barclay, he denied the divine right of kings, for which one of his books, De potestate papae, was publicly burned by the Parlement of Paris.

Different Revolution. In the long run, it was the supporters of state power who won out against the champions of church power. In the words of Father Murray, the Gelasian principle of "two there are" became "one there is"--one increasingly powerful state. From absolutist monarchy, Murray sees a straight line of development to modern "totalitarian democracy" via the French Revolution's Jacobin republic, which put the civil government in almost complete control of church affairs. To this day, French separation of church and state makes Thomas Jefferson's famous "wall" look like a split-rail fence.

The French example, feels Murray, became the model of monism--the political theory that "regards the state as a moral end in itself."

But America was a different kind of revolution. In some ways, as Murray puts it, it was not a revolution but a conservation, in that it revived the old freedom of the church. After the colonial phase of religious fanaticism--of setting up state churches and exiling heretics--the early Americans seemed more interested, with the First Amendment, in providing for the freedom rather than the restriction of religion. Catholics knew that a new era had begun when in 1783 the Vatican asked the Continental Congress for permission to establish a U.S. bishopric and was told that, since the matter was purely spiritual,

Congress had no jurisdiction. For the first time in centuries, the Catholic Church was free to work and witness as it saw fit, without special privileges but also without requiring a whole chain of consent from secular government.

New Commonwealth. American pluralist society was a new kind of commonwealth--a nation under God but forcing no one to worship in a particular manner, not because religion was considered unimportant or merely a private affair, but because it was thought that God is best honored by free men. As Roger Williams wrote: "There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls in one ship . . . Papists and Protestants, Jews and Turks ... I affirm that all the liberty of conscience, that ever I pleaded for, turns upon these two hinges--that none of the Papists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks, be forced to come to the ship's prayers or worship, nor compelled from their own particular prayers or worship, if they practice any."

While the Catholic ideal was--and is--a ship of state in which all acknowledge the One True Church, U.S. Catholics soon realized that the unique U.S. situation gave them unprecedented freedom to grow. In 1884 the Roman Catholic Third Plenary Council of Baltimore declared: "We consider the establishment of our country's independence, the shaping of its liberties and laws, as a work of special Providence, its framers 'building better than they knew,' the Almighty's hand guiding them."

Under the freedom and protection of the First Amendment, the Catholic Church has flourished in America. The statistics are impressive: the Catholic population increased from 1,767,841 in 1850 to 40,871,302 in 1960, four times faster than the American population as a whole. But the new situation of Catholics in the U.S. is much more than figures. The church of 50 years ago was largely a church of immigrants, whose concern was to protect and build their minority religion in a Protestant land while showing their fellow Americans what all-out patriots they were. Today, an increasing number of well-educated and theologically sophisticated young Catholics are beginning to take part in what Father Murray calls "building the city"--contributing both to the civic machinery and the need for consensus beneath it.

Debate & Dramatics. The Rev. John Courtney Murray, S.J., is unquestionably the intellectual bellwether of this new Catholic and American frontier. He is peculiarly well fitted for this role--by intellect, by temperament and, just as important, by a life that has been largely insulated from the psychosociological problems of the Catholics in the U.S.

John Courtney Murray was born 56 years ago on Manhattan's then fashionable 19th Street, the son of a prosperous Scottish-born lawyer and an Irish mother --both born Catholics. "I have an idea that my father had been baptized but wandered from the church," says Murray. "But my mother was a practicing Catholic, and after their marriage he rallied around." Early in his childhood, the family moved across the East River to Jamaica, now a crowded segment of the city but then a rural suburb. Here John Murray, with his two sisters, had a happy, uneventful childhood until his father died when he was twelve.

After graduating from high school, where he specialized in debate and dramatics, John Murray abandoned his earlier aim to become a doctor and joined the Society of Jesus at 16. After taking his A.B. at Weston, Mass, and M.A. at Boston College, he taught for the order in the Philippines for three years, then he went to the Jesuit college at Woodstock, Md. for four years of theology. In his third year there, he was ordained, aged 28. He put in two years of theological graduate study at Gregorian University in Rome and various other centers of Catholic learning in Europe before taking up his lifework as professor of theology at Woodstock and editor (since 1941) of the learned quarterly Theological Studies. Thin, towering Father Murray is still the debater (and more subtly the actor) of his high school days. Lecturing to his classes of fledgling Jesuits at granite-grey Woodstock--where his major specialty is the Trinity--Theologian Murray makes effective use of his long, well-manicured hands and his well-pitched baritone, which is as clear as his well-organized thought.

A Human Good. Murray gave his polemical proclivities a workout in the early '50s with a scholarly drumfire of debate in the pages of the monthly American Ecclesiastical Review with its editor, Redemptorist Father Francis J. Connell, and Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton, professor of dogma at the Catholic University of America. The subject at issue: Murray's contention that the Vatican should give its formal blessing to the U.S. pluralist system as a new, permanent and viable kind of relationship between religion and government. The learned, footnote-stippled discussion ended when Murray was advised by his order that henceforth he would have to clear all his writings on this particular subject with Jesuit headquarters in Rome.

In his present book, carefully putting the matter in question form, Murray suggests that the .American system, including the American economy, is more than a material achievement to be held somewhat suspect from the spiritual point of view, but "a human good" and a limited "end-in-itself," recalling the 2nd century dictum of Irenaeus that "the material is susceptible of salvation."

Murray's good friend (and hot disputant), Protestant Reinhold Niebuhr, says warmly of him: "What makes Murray significant is that he thinks in terms of Catholic theology and the American tradition at the same time. He rejoices in being in the American tradition."

Burdened Conscience. The heirs to that tradition face a momentous choice today, as Murray sees it. The modern rationalist and pragmatist experiment, he feels, has failed. That experiment tried to carry on Western liberalism, whose roots are Christian, without Christianity. The individual conscience, lacking religion to inform and support it, is collapsing under the burden--"poor little conscience," says Murray. Only the monistic state threatens to remain. If this goes on, a spiritual vacuum will grow at the heart of life and into it will rush violence--"the mark of the Architect of Chaos, the Evil One."

But it may not go on. Few Protestants would accept Murray's notion of the fragility of the individual conscience--to them it is neither poor nor little, but under grace the indomitable center of faith. Yet among Protestants, and others, Murray discerns a sense that the "modern era" is over, and with it man's reliance on modern shibboleths--the inevitability of progress, the perfectibility of man on earth, the relativist idea that morality is determined by little more than regional or historical fashion. What is the "postmodern" era to be like?

It offers a major choice to man, says Murray. The choice is between the permanent "Christian revolution with all its hopes of freedom and justice" and the "reactionary counterrevolution" represented by rationalism. Man can either go on to a "new age of order," guided by the moral law, or he can go back to what Theologian Romano Guardini describes as the "interior disloyalty of modern times" --disloyalty not to a state, an ideal or even a faith, but a betrayal of the "structure of reality itself." In that event, the future will belong to a new incarnation of that "senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless" man whom St. Paul met on the streets of non-Christian Corinth.

The Civil Dialogue. Murray is not guessing which choice will be made, and he is far from sure that the majority of Americans are prepared to accept even the terms in which he states the choice. His expectations, as he says, are minimal: he only hopes to "limit the warfare" of conflicting philosophies and "to enlarge the dialogue." For dialogue, as Murray sees it (and as did St. Thomas), is the very essence of civil society: what makes the multitude civilized is rational, deliberative argument among men ("We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them"). Writes Murray: "The cohesiveness of the City is not hot and humid, like the climate of the animal kingdom. It lacks the cordial 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."

For that kind of argument, Murray may be counted on. At present, he sees not even a "common universe of discourse." The various groups in the pluralist society do not share one another's premises or vocabulary so that only confusion, not real disagreement, results: "Disagreement is not an easy thing to reach." If anyone can help U.S. Catholics and their non-Catholic countrymen toward the disagreement that precedes understanding--John Courtney Murray can.

* "When the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness" (Romans 2:14,13),

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.