Bishop William F. Murphy
Lecture
Bishop William F. Murphy, D.D., S.T.D., is the Vicar
General and Moderator of the Curia in the Archdiocese of Boston,
Massachusetts. Bishop Murphy has published and lectured extensively
on the social teaching of the Catholic Church. Following is
our abridged version of a lecture he gave at the College on
November 20, 1998.
There's little doubt about the triumph of secularism, if
not throughout these United States, at least in the American
Academy. No one can say how long this triumph will last, but
it's there. And it's there because, to a certain extent, it
corresponds to one of the deepest strains in the American
experience, namely the kind of individualism that has marked
the history of this confident country from its very beginning,
which has been enshrined in a number of images such as the
rugged cowboy on the frontier, the plucky lad who worked himself
up from rags to riches and the single person who changes the
course of history. I'm not saying that there's no merit in
these images, but there's a strain in the American experience
that can overemphasize the individualistic to the point that
it can become anti-social. And that strain has championed
a brand of individualism that has made it possible for egoism,
selfishness, hedonism and the break-down of a civilized society
to be more easily attained and, once arrived at, even more
easily maintained.
Another aspect of the forces that have shaped our culture
today is the very strong influence of Enlightenment thought
on our Founding Fathers and on the cultural molders of the
American experience. The sense that human beings could construct
an ordered and intelligent world totally of their own design
and set up a rationally justified society in which the individual
would live and work according to the dictates of enlightened
reason has been also one of the strains at the heart of the
history of these United States.
The difficulty with the whole Enlightenment approach in today's
society is that it's been found out. The crisis in the academy
these past 25 years, a crisis that has entered the life of
the Church, our courts, our social customs and mores, has
come about because people discovered that the Enlightenment
ideal simply doesn't correspond to reality. Sadly, however,
what is being proposed by them is as bankrupt as the claims
of an earlier generation.
econstructionism coupled to subjective hermeneutics in discipline
after discipline has succeeded only in breaking down what
was already corrupt. It has not, and cannot, succeed in proposing
an alternative that is intellectually rigorous, satisfying
and true. We have to then ask ourselves if we have an alternative
that seeks truth as the means to integrate the whole person
and makes of the academic enterprise a total experience so
that we can begin to propose, or at least work towards, a
society of truth, goodness, beauty, and love.
I'm sorry to announce that most "Catholic" universities
not only do not commit themselves to this way. Most, in fact,
mirror the predominant Zeitgeist. But the only viable alternative
to this bleak society is to have a truly Catholic commitment
to the truth in academia.
Now the Church, through John Paul II, has highlighted this
way in an extraordinary document, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, which
sets forth the shape and content of what the university must
be. The Holy Father underscores time and again through this
exhortation that the priority of the commitment to truth is
the distinguishing mark of the University, indeed as the only
justification for the University. And what distinguishes that
commitment from others is the conscious engagement within
the Catholic academic world to, as he says, the noble task
of "seeking to integrate the truth." This search
must proceed from the conviction that truth includes the whole
person (including the spiritual dimension), all of creation
(including God's design for it), and ultimate reality, (which
is God himself). Thus, if we come up with an hypothesis about
the human person or about creation, or about God, that leaves
out essential, constituent, substantial aspects of the data,
then we have to go further until we come up with a vision
of truth that is intelligent and intelligible to others.
This search for truth provides the content of a person's
personal growth in an unending and ongoing formation that
discovers God as ultimate truth. Thus increasingly, the Catholic
intellectual lives in what the Scripture calls the "holiness
of truth." The Catholic university then is a place of
freedom of inquiry, called to a continual renewal of itself,
as both university and Catholic. It interacts with the culture
and does not hesitate to dialogue with other cultures. It
encourages interdisciplinary efforts that illumine the worlds
of nature, person, and God. It becomes the place where the
Good News is lived and the fullness of life is encountered,
affirmed, and made available to all those who chose to participate.
But there's no academic blueprint for us to follow in doing
this. We must be as committed as our predecessors were to
the search for truth, even while we know that the ultimate
truth, God, has been revealed to us in and by Christ Jesus.
We must use the hermeneutical tools proper to each discipline,
and embark with as much rigor and intellectual honesty as
anyone else does in the fields of our expertise. And we must
be willing to test our own hypotheses in the academy for their
adequacy as being intelligent and intelligible "accountings
of the data" of our research in whatever field we find
ourselves.
I suggest to you that the social teaching of the Church offers
us some insights that would be paradigmatic for the Catholic
academic enterprise. As you know, modern Catholic social doctrine
today is normally traced to Leo XIII's great encyclical, Rerum
Novarum. This extraordinary piece of writing allowed successive
pontiffs (Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, and now
John Paul II) to develop a body of principles based on truths
about the human person that can be applied into society for
its common good. The source of these truths can be found in
the Scriptures and in the lived tradition of the Church. Because
this doctrine is not an ideology, but an intellectual search
for the truth about the human person from within the perspective
of moral theology, it is properly within the subject of university
study and subject to the criteria of an academic discipline
in its own field. It bears four characteristics as proof that
this is so.
First, the body of principles that make up social teaching
are concerned first and foremost with what is true - what
is true about the person; what is true about the person in
society. It concerns a theological discipline that seeks to
present an hypothesis about the human person that can be validated.
It's aim is not so immediately to give us answers as it is
to deepen our grasp of what is real and true.
Thus, when Pope Paul II reflects on human rights as being
grounded in the inherent dignity of the human person, he gives
a grounding to, and an understanding of how, human rights
should be explicated in society today. While everyone might
agree on what human rights are - such as in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights which this year celebrates its
50th anniversary - few may agree on what makes those human
rights as they are. The Holy Father aims to help us understand
the "why," and that then becomes the search for
truth which is at the heart of Catholic social thinking.
Second, Catholic social teaching is historical. Like other
disciplines, it deals with issues proper to it with a sense
of the historical dimension of its enterprise. Again, when
Leo XIII was faced with the challenge of whether Catholics
could take part in free associations of workers, the paradigm
that Catholic Sociologists had presented previously that of
the medieval guild. But the alternative to that was the Socialist
proposal of class warfare to create a classless society, and
a class warfare which, of course, is anti-family, is ultimately
anti-person. In grappling with these alternatives, the Pope
could see the limitations of the medieval guild because of
the changed historical situation. What he forged managed brilliantly
to steer between the old-fashioned medieval guild and the
very modern pernicious reality of socialism. He moved the
Church beyond the narrowness of previous answers to a deeper
understanding of the realities in a changed situation.
Similarly, Catholic social teaching on private property has
developed extraordinarily from Leo XIII through Pius XI and
Paul VI and as now seen within the context of the universal
creation of all reality. And the same can be seen to be happening
with the Catholic notion of solidarity, which began with Pope
John XXIII, was developed by Pope Paul VI, and then turned
into doctrine by Pope John Paul II, who allowed us to see
the implications of solidarity in different circumstances
due to certain historical realities.
The third characteristic of Catholic social teaching is that
it is interdisciplinary. It's enriched by the valid insights
of other sciences and seeks to be in dialogue with them. Clearly
such teaching is in need of philosophy. But it's not limited
to philosophy. It also relies on history, sociology, and even
psychology.
Finally, the discipline of Catholic social teaching is eminently
pastoral. It's not a kind of white tower exercise in theory.
Ultimately, it aims by its pursuit of the truth to offer people
a way to apply those insights for their own good and for the
good of society. At the same time, it is not a blueprint that
has answers to everything, nor is it a political party or
an interest group. But it's an invitation to see whether these
insights should become the basis for our practical judgments.
Pope John Paul II outlines these same four characteristics
in his discussion of the Catholic academy in Ex Corde Ecclesiae.
He sees that the Catholic academy is the place par excellence
to search for truth. It builds upon, but is not limited by,
the truths that have formed a living corpus of academic endeavor.
It is committed to the full truth about the human person in
all dimensions, including the social or the transcendent.
It seeks truth for its own end and as a means to illuminate
the realities of our lives, as it participates in and is condition
by the historical realities of out times and disciplines.
In an American academic scene marked by secularism, pragmatism,
modernity, and post-modernity, the human person is constantly
being deformed and misunderstood. The exclusion of a transcendent
understanding of the person has led to all kinds of ideological
excesses. We do not need to imitate the cultural elites. Indeed,
we do so at the peril of our minds and souls.
e can offer an alternative, so long as we remain intellectually
rigorous and demanding as our peers, and so long as we are
committed to the whole truth as the end of our several tasks
and disciplines. This is critically necessary for the Catholic
College to flourish and for the Church to continue being a
beacon of truth and hope for all peoples to make true judgments
and sound choices. It is needed for the life of the world.
For as the Pope says to us in Fides et Ratio, "Only within
this horizon of truth will people understand their freedom
in its fullness and their call to know and love God as the
supreme realization of their true self."
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Spring 1999
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