Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

"Problems arise even within his [Fr. Murray's] own thought"

I reached the following "editor's footnote" in my re-reading this afternoon of J. Leon Hooper (ed.), Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles with Pluralism (1993) (p. 226 n. 11); in the footnote, Hooper is describing, analyzing, and judging Murray's "The Issue of Church and State":

 

Murray's manner of restricting the socially significant meaning of religious freedom to an immunity right works well, if one considers the interaction of the church hierarchy and the executive branch of government.  Problems arise even within his own thought, however, when one considers the role of the laity in shaping governmental legislation.  For his argument to still apply, one would have to presume that the laity could bring no substantive content from their faith commitments to the laws that they shape -- that their faith remains simply motivational.  As discussed in the general introduction to this collection, some question whether Murray has adequately dealt with the laity's attempts to bring gospel values to the juridical structures of the state, much less to what is called the world.

John Rawls's imposition of "the proviso" was published in the very same year as Hooper's footnote was published.  

https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2016/12/problems-arise-even-within-his-fr-murrays-own-thought.html

Brennan, Patrick | Permalink