The Believer as Citizen: John Courtney Murray in a New Context.

Hooper, J. Leon

By Thomas Hughson, S.J. New York: Paulist, 1993, Pp. vi + 186. $14.95.

Two contemporary readings of Murray pivot on alleged dichotomous understandings of the Church. The first contrasts Murray's 1950s ecclesiology and our own, postconciliar Church. Murray's is a Church held together by clear institutional loyalties and doctrinal intolerance; ours is more prone to describe itself in biblical and historical terms, grounded in a conviction that work for justice is integral to Catholic faith. Here critics claim that Murray's conceptualistic ecclesiology offers no principled connection to the Church's present self-understanding. A second reading finds a sharp contrast between Murray's 1940s ecclesiology -- with its exclusive claim to the "fullness of truth" -- and the late Murray's recognition that the Church must learn moral and religious truths that arise outside its institutional boundaries. Here critics judge Murray's late ecclesiology to be a capitulation to the "mushy enthusiasm" of the council. Both readings render a part or all of Murray's ecclesiology, or our present self-understanding, useless or dangerous by positing no principled ground for moving among them.

Hughson, on the other hand, searches out continuities between Murray's various ecclesiologies and an American Church that, in its Economic Justice for All, defines itself in terms of a priority option for the poor. To do so he employs Gadamerian tools and methods for understanding that development, distancing himself, in part, from those of Habermas and, implicitly, Lonergan. He understands Murray to have brought to theoretical expression a just, religiously grounded praxis that first arose in Catholic, colonial Maryland, that John Carroll advanced, and early-twentieth-century immigration deepened. Here the traditional Catholic distinction between the temporal and the spiritual, as practically mediated in the new-world context, led first to a new, deeper appreciation of human religious dignity, then to Murray's own theoretical recasting of Gelasian dualism. At every point H. searches out what morally and religiously was going forward, finding drives, hopes, and faith that span lived Catholic American history. The development within Murray's own ecclesiologies gives witness to an ongoing, distinctively Catholic and American, faith.

But can the contemporary Church learn anything from Murray's theory? H. admits to our deepening political skepticism and the Church's differing self-understanding (but not to sharp differences between Catholic practice and some magisterial teaching) that distance us from Murray's work. Yet, he suggests, the times have moved us from an assimilationist stage of inculturation to a more transformationalist stance. The leading question becomes: Can a principle such as the priority option for the poor (as initially learned from the Third World) transform, yet preserve, Murray's understanding of a distinctively American Catholic practice of Gelasian social dualism. In a marvelous final chapter, H. recasts that dualism, moving from church/ state and Murray's later church/society distinctions to a way of conceiving that dualism in terms of the finality of civil and ecclesial communities, i.e. in terms of justice and eschatological fulfillment. In the process, he corrects Murray's own residual conceptualism, grounding this thoroughly historical conception of dualism in a theology of the Spirit as active in history, and he continues Murray's own moves from static notions of harmony to more dynamic notions of cooperation and coordination.

Although at times, to my reading, H.'s reliance on Gadamer leaves questions of moral and religious normativity unnecessarily hanging in the air, his study is thoroughly sensitive to the moral and religious forces that provide continuity, and distinctiveness, to American Catholic appropriations of the gospel. This pays off particularly in his own theological reflections on the contemporary American Church.