Word: murray
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...Woodstock, Father Murray's theological specialties were the Trinity and grace. But he was also keenly interested in the church's dealings with the world, and his learned debating on behalf of incorporating church-state separation into Catholic polity became so lively in the pages of the American Ecclesiastical Review that his order eventually silenced him with instructions to clear all his future writing on church-state matters with Jesuit headquarters in Rome...
...Father Murray's views came triumphantly into their own with the wave of aggiornamento begun by Pope John XXIII and carried out after a fash ion in Vatican II. Despite the Curia's success in keeping him out of the first council session, he was on hand as an expert for the second, and when the bishops rose to applaud the passage of the declaration on religious liberty, which confirmed the right of all men to freedom of conscience in worship, many of them felt that the applause was really for John Courtney Murray...
Theologian Murray helped liberalize his church, but he succeeded because he was essentially a conservative-so much so that some of the younger theologians, who prefer to storm the battlements, were disenchanted with his meticulous, scholarly approach. For John Courtney Murray always moved within church tradition, presenting his liberal conclusions as developments of the hallowed past; it was his special gift for holding the two together as a living whole that carried the day in Rome...
Exchange of Ideas. In addition to editing the Jesuit quarterly Theologica Studies for 26 years and writing a show er of articles on dozens of facets of life, Father Murray published five books. Most notable: We Hold Thesi Truths, which expounds the idea that the American structure of church-state relations is more congenial to Roman Catholic thinking on the subject than any other such structure in history; and The Problem of God, which contrasts the Old Testament question "Is God our God?" and the medieval question "What is God like?" with modern man's "new will actively...
...through personal contact that John Courtney Murray wielded much of his large intellectual influence. Thin and towering (6 ft. 4 in.), long-faced to the point of looking sad (which made his witty, self-depreciating smile all the more engaging), he possessed an intellectual charity and unfailing courtesy that ideally suited him to guide the exchange of ideas between peers of widely disparate persuasions...