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Responsibilities and Temptations of Power: A Catholic View*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

J. Bryan Hehir
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Extract

“The Charter sets forth a renewed national compact, in the sense of a solemn mutual agreement between parties, on how we view the place of religion in American life and how we should contend with each other's deepest differences in the public sphere. It is a call to a vision of public life that will allow conflict to lead to consensus, religious commitment to reinforce political civility. In this way, diversity is not a point of weakness but a source of strength.”

— The Williamsburg Charter

The passage in the Williamsburg Charter referring to two questions — “how we view the place of religion in American life and how we should contend with each other's deepest differences in the public sphere” — opens two lines of inquiry. First, I understand the “we” in the passage to refer at least in part to the religious communities; from this follows the need to assess how these communities understand their exercise of religious and moral authority (power) in the public arena. Second, the passage is also open to an investigation of the exercise of power in our national life. Presumably the religious communities contend among themselves and with other institutions in the evaluation of how power is exercised in the name of the nation.

Type
I. Commentary on The Williamsburg Charter
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 8 , Issue 1-2 , 1990 , pp. 71 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 1990

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Footnotes

*

This article is based on a paper read at a conference on “The First Amendment Religious Liberty Clauses and American Public Life,” at the University of Virginia, April 11-13, 1988.

References

1. Troeltsch, Ernst, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (Macmillan, 2 vols 1950)Google Scholar.

2. For a more developed statement of the argument made here, see Hehir, , Church-State and Church-World: The Ecclesiological Implications, 41 Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society 54–74 (1986)Google Scholar.

3. For the history of this question, see Murray, John Courtney, The Problem of Religious Freedom, 25 Theological Studies 503 (1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Murray, , The Problem of “The Religion of the State”, 124 Am Ecclesiastical Rev 327 (1951)Google Scholar.

4. See Murray, John Courtney, Church and State at Vatican II, 27 Theological Studies 580 (1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World76, in Abbott, Walter M., ed, The Documents of Vatican II 287–88 (Association Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

6. See id at 238-42.

7. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response (1983)Google Scholar; Economic Justice for All: Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (1986).

8. For introduction and commentary, see, e.g., Mueller, Franz H., The Church and the Social Question, in Moody, Joseph N. and Lawler, Justus George, eds, The Challenge of Mater et Magistra 13–154 (Herder & Herder, 1963)Google Scholar; McCormick, Richard A. and Curran, Charles E., eds, Readings in Moral Theology No. 5: Official Catholic Social Teaching (Paulist, 1986)Google Scholar; Haughey, John C., ed, The Faith That Does Justice: Examining the Christian Sources for Social Change (Paulist, 1977)Google Scholar.

9. See, e.g., Dulles, Avery, What Is the Doctrinal Authority of a Bishops' Conference?, 14 Origins 532 (1985)Google Scholar.

10. For a sampling of these arguments, see, e.g., Ramsey, Paul, The Patient as Person: Explorations in Medical Ethics (Yale, 1970)Google Scholar; Ramsey, Paul, Ethics at the Edges of Life: Medical and Legal Intersections (Yale, 1978)Google Scholar; and McCormick, Richard A., How Brave a New World?: Dilemmas in Bioethics (Doubleday, 1981)Google Scholar.

11. For examples of both the earlier and more recent literature, see, e.g., Ramsey, Paul, The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility (Scribner's, 1968)Google Scholar; Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations (Basic, 1977)Google Scholar; Nye, Joseph, Nuclear Ethics (Free Press, 1986)Google Scholar.