Quote of the Day (Fr. John Courtney Murray, on the ‘Spectacle of a Civil Society’)

“We face a crisis that is new in history. We would do well to face it with a new cleanliness of imagination, in the realization that internecine strife, beyond some inevitable human measure, is a luxury we can no longer afford. … Perhaps the time has come when we should endeavor to dissolve the structure of war that underlies the pluralistic society, and erect the more civilized structure of the dialogue. It would be no less sharply pluralistic, but rather more so, since the real pluralisms would be clarified out of their present confusion. And amid the pluralism a unity would be discernible—the unity of an orderly conversation. The pattern would not be that of ignorant armies clashing by night but of informed men locked together in argument in the full light of a new dialectical day. Thus we might present to a ‘candid world’ the spectacle of a civil society.”—John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967), We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (1960)