A C L OS E R L OOK
The Profound Irresolution of Christian Citizenship Twentieth Century theologian John Courtney Murray, S.J., remains the most important interpreter of the American Catholic experience of citizenship and religious liberty. Featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1960, Father Murray was a chief architect of Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty. In his seminal book, We Hold These Truths, he famously noted, “The question is sometimes raised, whether Catholicism is compatible with American democracy.” But this “impertinent” way of asking the question “inverts the order of values,” he continued. “It must . . . be turned round to read, whether American democracy is compatible with Catholicism.” Father Murray’s “turned round” question poses a challenge for many of us. In practice, if not in principle, we Catholics often live our moral and political lives as though American
1 8 | RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
democracy is the rule by which Catholicism is to be judged and practiced. This can take one of two problematic forms: Either we subordinate Catholic principles to American ones, making “American” the standard and “Catholic” the conditional qualifier; or we collapse Catholicism into Americanism, such that we are not even able to see a distinction between them, thinking that being a patriotic American is coextensive with being a pious Catholic. These dangers are manifest in the way that we think about what it means to be a conscientious citizen and how we think about political freedom. EVERY HOMELAND IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY
In a Second Century letter known as Epistle to Diognetus, a Christian apologist describes the social and political predicament of the early Church during a time of
