A dialogue on “Faith, Democracy and the Common Good” on March 18 at Georgetown University connected the thoughts one of the most respected U.S. Catholic theologians of the 20th century with challenges facing the United States today, and it included firsthand accounts of how Catholics in Washington and Minneapolis have reached out to help their undocumented immigrant neighbors impacted by the federal government’s mass deportation policy.
The dialogue participants included Washington Cardinal Robert W. McElroy, who said, “The main thing going on with immigration (policy) is, it’s such an assault on fundamental human dignity. In Washington, we have a parish where 30 people have been detained or deported.”
The archbishop noted that this past fall, Mass attendance at Spanish-language parishes in the Archdiocese of Washington went down 30 percent, “because people are afraid to come to Mass. So the parishes took steps to make people safe” in coming to church, with different ways of “how to be neighbors to undocumented people, who, all they want to do is come to Mass.”
The dialogue was subtitled “Lessons from John Courtney Murray for Our Times,” and it drew upon the teachings on the role of faith in a democracy by Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray, a noted theologian who played a key role in drafting the Second Vatican Council’s landmark Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, in 1965. Murray also wrote the 1960 book, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition.”
Cardinal McElroy noted that the theologian emphasized the importance of human dignity and the common good in society, and that “we need to act” to safeguard those elements of our democracy.
The Dahlgren Dialogue – held at the Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart at Georgetown University, was sponsored by the university’s Office of Mission & Ministry and its Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life.
Introducing the dialogue’s topic, Kim Daniels, the initiative’s director, said, “The American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray taught that human dignity which is of course the foundational principle of Catholic social thought is best served when people pursue truth and the common good in a free and deliberative way, and when states defend the freedoms necessary for people to do so.”
Joining Washington’s archbishop in the dialogue were Robert K. Vischer, the president of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota; Cathleen Kaveny, a professor at Boston College’s Theology Department and Law School; and Vincent D. Rougeau, the president of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Cardinal McElroy, the author of the 1989 book, The Search for an American Public Theology: The Contribution of John Courtney Murray, said the theologian believed democracy has a two-fold meaning: its processes have to be democratic, and it has a substantive element, defending the dignity of the human person and “all those sacred elements of society that could be at risk.”
The cardinal said he feared that “both of those elements are weaking in the moment in which we live.”
“In terms of democratic processes, those who should be guarding the processes of our democracy that are so sacred are not doing so, or only are partly doing so,” he said. “…On the substantive side, we’ve seen in these moments on the immigration question, basic human dignity is being assaulted in our streets now. We live in a country where the mask has become the new face of American justice, and that is a great tragedy for us.”
Cardinal McElroy then emphasized that “in our own country, polarization has prevented us from coming to have a consensus. Murray was big in believing, as were the founders of our country, big in believing there needs to be a substantive consensus among the people of the country about basic issues they can come together on and agree with, and that is dissipating. Polarization is eating into that and corroding that.”
Washington’s archbishop said those “are very ominous developments. It doesn’t mean that we’re cascading out of a democracy, but it does mean that the institutions which are guardians of our democracy and sources of our democratic meaning, that those are in disarray now, and also that they are teetering. And we have to move to arrest that now.”
The cardinal said John Courtney Murray believed that freedom should reign and “the common good is most greatly accomplished” in society with its cultural elements, educational institutions and religious institutions.
“But there need to be distinctions between where government should be and should not be, and then (for) society as a whole,” Cardinal McElroy said. “I think one of his critiques of the present moment, one of his alarm bells of this moment would be we see government now encroaching on areas of society and culture, on educational institutions and the arts… That really erodes the notion that government has a particular realm, that it cannot use its coercive powers to intrude into. On the domestic issue, that’s one issue I’d say that would be paramount today for Murray.”
Cardinal McElroy said John Courtney Murray also believed strongly in “the role of morality in foreign policy,” which countered the views of the approach to international relations espoused by Hans Morgenthau, a German-American political scientist who emphasized that countries should act on the basis of their power and national interests rather than on ideas of morality.
The cardinal said Murray warned that if the United States’ foreign policy was based solely on its power and interests, the country risked becoming “a lost giant lumbering in the world destructively. That’s what I fear we’re becoming, a lost giant lumbering in the world destructively, lurching from one situation to the next.”
Washington’s archbishop said the theologian’s concerns that moral rules should apply in foreign policy “are certainly at the core of the Catholic tradition on this.” Noting the United States’ current war with Iran, he said, “That’s why, speaking of the war in the present moment, our position is so clear. Within Catholic thought there are differences between those who stress active nonviolence and those who stress just war, but either way, the reasoning comes out the same. This war is not just.”
In January, Cardinal McElroy had joined Chicago Cardinal Blase J. Cupich and Newark Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin in issuing a joint statement emphasizing the importance of morality in U.S. foreign policy that cited an address by Pope Leo XIV to diplomats accredited to the Holy See, in which the pope warned that “war is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading” among the world’s nations.
Cathleen Kaveny, the Darald and Juliet Libby Millennium Professor at Boston College whose scholarship focuses on the relationship of law, religion, and morality, said Catholic thought challenges the belief in society that “all that matters is power and wealth.”
“We believe that the poor and the vulnerable are at the center of the community, not at the margins,” she said, adding that the hallmarks of a democracy should include substantive fairness and opportunities for human flourishing and participation, where people have a right to things like healthcare and education.
John Courtney Murray believed in “living together reasonably and talking together reasonably,” Kaveny said.
“Where I think we took a wrong turn was in a culture war model of engagement with our fellow citizens,” she said, adding that Pope St. John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”) “was weaponized and politicized in the United States,” with some Catholics having the mindset that “I can’t talk to you if I think you’re a minion of the culture of death. I can’t find out anything about you. I just have to resist you and put you back in a corner as much as I can.”
Kaveny said a better approach with people “with whom we disagree in fundamental matters” would be to pursue a conversation with them “to try to find out what good they are pursuing, and also to confront them with where their understanding of the good is disordered. We see them as fellow human beings who might be deeply mistaken, but are still, like us, pursuing the good as they see it.”
The Boston College professor also emphasized that John Courtney Murray would have believed in the importance of “the rule of law,” but the recent massive immigration enforcement effort in Minneapolis was marked by “pulling people out by force and fear, without a face, without compliance with basic societal norms of law enforcement.”
In his remarks, Robert Vischer, the president of the University of St. Thomas, noted that “one of the things that Murray consistently emphasized was that freedom requires order, and not an order that can be imposed from top down. He used the term flowering, the natural flowering of the principles held by the people.”
Vischer said that in recent decades, the conception of politics and conversations about politics “may have contributed to a tendency to separate questions of moral virtue from questions of political engagement,” which he said should require soul searching on the right and the left sides of the political spectrum.
He countered that with something that he witnessed in the Twin Cities during the widespread immigration enforcement efforts there.
While the news focused on encounters with protesters and with people blowing whistles to alert the neighborhood of an ICE raid on someone’s house, “what was less remarked on or visible in the news was there were so many more people engaged in what I would call the radical ministry of accompaniment,” Vischer said.
The university president said that “In Minneapolis and St. Paul, we had thousands of men, women and children who didn’t leave their houses for weeks because they knew that would increase the risk that they would be stopped, and it is a matter of fact that I can verify that they were was profiling going on with people on the street, so families would stay in their homes.”
Describing how the community responded, Vischer said, “You had so many residents of the Twin Cities who stepped up, and parishes and Catholic schools I think led the way in this and kept weekly grocery deliveries going for thousands of households, from the boxing of the groceries to bringing them to the parish or school to sort through them and make sure they were meeting the needs of particular families for what they needed, and the ages of their kids, and then an army of vehicles going out throughout the Twin Cities to deliver them to the doorstep.”
“It was really powerful and inspiring,” he said.
Vischer said that what unfolded in the Twin Cities over the last few months illustrated what Pope Francis emphasized in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, “On Fraternity and Friendship,” the idea that “empathy is non-negotiable for Catholics… In Fratelli Tutti, Francis says our service is never ideological. We serve people. It doesn’t mean arguments over ideas or ideology don’t have a place. Above all, we are called to a ministry of accompaniment, period. Walk with those in need, and then afterward, you can argue about politics.”
During the dialogue, Vincent Rougeau, who is the first lay and first Black president of the College of the Holy Cross, noted that in the United States, “we’re involved in one of the greatest projects in history, the project of democratic pluralism, that is, bringing together people of different backgrounds, all different religions, to be equal citizens in a democratic society.”
He said at a time when so much rhetoric is fueled by hate and division, that Catholics and Christians “have important tools and obligations” in promoting human dignity for individuals, and human dignity in the life of the community.
“The parish can serve as a building block of civic engagement in so many ways, and also as a place of invitation for conversation across differences,” Rougeau said. “We as citizens have to start reclaiming work to make democracy strong and healthy, and we can use the parish as a place to start doing that work.”
Reflecting on his role as the president of a Catholic Jesuit liberal arts college, he said, “A big part of my job is forming citizens as moral actors, forming them as contributors, forming them as leaders, forming them as people for and with others. Really unpacking that, you don’t just think about the education we’re offering young people in terms of skills building and getting a job. We are involved in a project in this country that requires morally formed citizens.”
He warned that some of the defense of the harsh immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota echoed comments made criticizing his parents and others who marched for Civil Rights in the South. “We need to think a lot more how to create citizens who are not tempted to have blind adherence to whatever the state tells them is true,” Rougeau said.
Also in the conversation, Kaveny underscored that the Catholic tradition is incarnational, that “we believe in a God who became a human being in Jesus Christ… But we are dealing with a whole generation of young people who are living their lives virtually on the screen, in chat rooms, on TikTok and Instagram, and there is a kind of illusion of that. One challenge for Catholics is how do you take what’s good about that, but recognize that we are an incarnational tradition, and we need to not just talk about the wounds of others, but actually touch and heal them.”
In closing comments when the dialogue participants were asked how people can be architects of hope in building the common good in this democracy, Vischer said, “Look for opportunities to practice civil friendship, which might just mean showing up the next public park clean-up day (with) folks from every spot on the political spectrum. It is giving you and your neighbor an experience of civil friendship that Aristotle and Catholic social teaching have called us to do, to be in right relationship with God and neighbor.”
