文档介绍：BOSTON
COLLEGE
LAW

BOSTON COLLEGE LAW SCHOOL
PUBLIC LAW AND LEGAL THEORY
RESEARCH PAPER SERIES

RESEARCH PAPER NO. 38
May 21, 2004

John Paul II, John Courtney Murray, and the
Relationship Between Civil Law and Moral Law: A
Constructive Proposal for Contemporary American
Pluralism

Gregory A. Kalscheur
Assistant Professor, Boston College Law School

This paper can be downloaded without charge from the
Social Science work:

/abstract=550201
1
John Paul II, John Courtney Murray, and the Relationship Between
Civil Law and Moral Law: A Constructive Proposal for Contemporary
American Pluralism

Gregory A. Kalscheur,

A September 2003 USA N/Gallup Poll found that Americans are
content to see “In God We Trust” on coins and a Bible on a teacher’s desk – but they
object to priests and rabbis advising politicians on abortion or the death Similar
objections greeted the July 2003 Vatican statement opposing proposals to give legal
recognition to same-sex unions. Senator John Kerry, for example, contended that the
statement inappropriately “crossed the line” separating church and state in American

Reactions like these pose a significant challenge to a church whose social
teaching includes a call for the recovery of “the basic elements of a vision of the
relationship between civil law and moral law.”4 John Paul II issued that call in his 1995
encyclical Evangelium Vitae, in response to what he characterized as a trend to demand a
legal justification for contemporary attacks on human life like abortion and euthanasia,
“as if they were rights which the state, at least under certain conditions, must
acknowledge as belonging to citizens.”5 In the face of this trend, the Pope advocates a
jurisprudential vision which includes the “doctrine on the necessary conformity of civil
law with moral law,”