Thought a few might appreciate this for the truth I see in it, or him, Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., and his thinking.

American Democracy’s Moral and Cultural Foundations

...As one of the agents of the Murray restoration, I find myself less and less interested in these internecine conflicts, though, than in Murray’s continuing salience as a clear-minded thinker about American democracy and its discontents. As those discontents have become ever sharper, to the point where even non-“doomists” must wonder how the American democratic experiment in ordered liberty will renew and revitalize itself, Murray’s warnings from more than a half-century ago, and his analysis of the roots of a possible crack-up of American political culture, strike me as remarkably prescient and well worth pondering today.

The most striking, even ominous, sentences in We Hold These Truths follow immediately after Murray has analyzed the “dissolution” of the original “American consensus,” or public moral culture, under several malign influences: the impact of an Ockhamite theory of freedom-as-willfulness mediated through Benthamite utilitarianism and Jamesian pragmatism; the scientific revolution and the rise of empiricism; and the theological disarray of mainline American Protestantism. That decay in the public moral culture, with its inevitable consequences in political culture and politics itself, was rather far advanced, Murray cautioned. Then came the voice of Murray-the-prophet, who loved what was best in the American experiment but feared that its foundations were crumbling, with potentially grave public results: “Perhaps the dissolution, long since begun, may one day be consummated. Perhaps one day the noble, many-storeyed mansion of democracy will be dismantled, leveled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged.”

Here, in two sentences, is the definitive and, I believe, irrefutable answer to the charge that John Courtney Murray was an uncritical celebrant of the American democratic experiment. To the contrary. Murray knew that the United States was an idea or “proposition” nation: a polity built, not on the old foundations of blood and soil, but on the foundations of a common commitment to certain truths—truths that he, a good natural law man, believed were inscribed into the world and into us; truths that we could know by the exercise of reason; truths that, known, disclosed our duties as individuals and as citizens. But Murray also knew that a nation “so conceived and so dedicated” would not long endure, if the moral and intellectual foundations that make self-governance for the common good possible were to collapse; if the “truths” on which the American democratic experiment relied for its tensile strength were no longer held.

...Whether Murray’s prescription for American, and indeed western, democratic reform—a recovery of the natural law tradition of moral reasoning as a public grammar for the pluralistic society—can be realized (especially in cultures that have abandoned any notion of givens in human nature) is one of the most urgent questions of our time.
Read the whole piece to find out who he was and what he thought.