American Democracy’s Moral and Cultural Foundations

For someone who was arguably the most prominent Catholic intellectual in the United States in the first half of the 1960s, Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., faded from the scene rapidly after his untimely death in 1967. A new generation of Catholics who imagined that, as one of them once put it, "we know so much more than Murray," took up one academic fad after another, lowering the intellectual cash value of Catholic thinking about public life in the process. Today, to read back issues of America and Commonweal in the years immediately after Murray's death is to descend into a realm of the febrile and the fetid: a far cry from the cool and dry atmosphere of public conversation about public goods that Murray championed and embodied.