We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition

The publication of this book was a significant event in the history of modern American thought. In it, one of the country's most distinguished theologians discusses in depth and breadth the major political and social issues that press upon us with an urgency that will not permit the evasion of desultory debate or the luxury of deferred decision. The response of the free world to the Soviet challenge, the demands of our religious pluralism, the relevance of natural-law thinking to our modern dilemmas—these and other areas are treated with a clarity of thought and sharpness of expression equal to their gravity.

Aware only as the trained mind can be of the relevance of the past to the present, Father John Courtney Murray pleads, in effect, for a recovery of our roots, not only in the shaping thought of the Founding Fathers, but in the older tradition of the West, to which our Fathers themselves were heirs. The return to the past he advocates is not to be nostalgic but creative—the kind of return that is the very formula for civilizational rebirth. His concern is always with the present, and his knowledge of the present is the fruit of broad reading and wide intellectual experience. Whether he is discussing the intellectual setting of the First Amendment, the vexed question of tax support for Catholic schools, or the morality of modern war, one discerns immediately the grain of reality that runs through the work of Father Murray.