Religious freedom in America is guaranteed by the first sixteen words of the Bill of Rights:

This simple declaration is pivotal. Its adoption in 1791 was the culmination of an era just as surely as it opened another. The first amendment has inspired almost 200 years of judicial history in which the United States Supreme and lower courts have attempted to fill these plain words with specific content. Its passage climaxed nearly as long a period of significant colonial history. An understanding of that history is indispensable to the interpretation of the first amendment since, as the Supreme Court has said:

American culture bears a lasting imprint from its Puritan founders. Their ideal of a social and political community based on a religious covenant has provided a sense of mutual obligation and commitment to public purposes in American life that cannot be fully explained by the contractarian notion of “mutually disinterested” persons who join forces to further their individual aims more effectively. Covenant theology, at the beginnings of modern liberal individualism, sustained an older notion of the self fulfilled in community. At the same time, however, the covenantal emphasis on consent, the voluntary creation of new communities of identity, introduced new elements of historicity, initiative, and equality into old political theories. The distinctive covenantal form of some basic democratic norms thus continues to exert an influence on public choice and political ideals, even in a public philosophy which is today dominated by contractarian and utilitarian theories.

In November 1963, John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic President of the United States of America, was assassinated while travelling in a motorcade through the streets of Dallas, Texas.

The election of Kennedy was a significant moment in relations between religion and public life in this nation for, although Catholics were physically present on the continent over a century before Protestant's, the Protestant spirit clearly dominated the newly formed nation in positions of political and economic power well into the twentieth century.

But the death of Kennedy was also a significant moment, a moment in which religious sentiments and public concerns were fused. The grief that was felt nationwide betrayed depths of religious emotion usually reserved for the intimate spaces of family life. But this was the grief of a body politic for one in whose office the entire community, however otherwise divided, was symbolized. Moreover, the funeral, stately and elegant, came as close as any other event in the history of America to being a national religious ritual, even if conducted for many only through the conveyance of electronic media.

Whatever has been achieved in the recent debate regarding religion and politics in America, we have not yet clarified the proper place of religion in our public life. All parties endorse the terse formulation of the first amendment, “congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” but there is persisting disagreement about the public philosophy which is there implied. Some fear a secularized state, that is, a state which is independent of all religious convictions, and insist that disestablishment does not preclude a foundation of religious values in the Republic. Others fear a state that is religiously partial and insist that the “wall of separation” prescribes civil neutrality toward religion as such. Each side asserts that the other misrepresents its position. The “religionists,” as I will call them, deny that they seek to impose any particular religious conviction; the “separationists,” as I will call them, deny that they are hostile to religion.

My own beliefs about human rights have always been grounded on very concrete icons and images. Around my neck, for example, I wear a pendant made by a political prisoner in Chile. I have been privileged to meet, through Amnesty International or church connections, prisoners of conscience such as Mr. Babu, the former vice-president of Tanzania, who testify to the efficacy of human rights advocacy from a center in the first world. In Zambia and Peru, I have seen little children, whose subsistence rights have been denied, being treated for malnutrition by staff from missionary clinics. These human images and icons have led me to concrete commitments which include active membership in two international human rights organizations: Amnesty International and the Roman Catholic church as a transnational human rights network of advocacy (I am referring not only to the Vatican's participation in the United Nations and its world-wide orchestration of refugee services through Catholic Relief Services but also to more local human rights networks such as, for example, the Vicariate of Solidarity in Santiago, Chile, or, in our country, the church-sponsored sanctuary movement for refugees from El Salvador and Guatamala).

In 1982 DePaul University announced the establishment of its Center for Church/State Studies. Situated in the College of Law, the Center has an executive board of eighteen distinguished legal scholars and practicing attorneys from a wide variety of religious traditions.

Early in 1983, well before the presidential campaign began to develop largely around the issue of religion and politics, the Center's executive board had decided to look carefully at the issue by sponsoring a symposium on the role of the religious leader in the development of public policy. While there was a great deal of political rhetoric on the pages of the nation's daily newspapers and weekly news magazines, very little reflective and responsible research on the proper relationship of religion and politics was available for public consumption. The American Bar Association offered its annual meeting as an appropriate setting for the symposium, which was held on August 4, 1984.

The Center invited Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, to present the major paper, “The Role of the Religious Leader in the Development of Public Policy.” Cardinal Bernardin, had chaired the American Catholic Bishops' Committee that prepared the landmark document on nuclear war, “The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response.” His work in that role provided him a particularly appropriate perspective from which to address the more theoretical question at issue in our symposium, namely, the proper involvement of religious leaders in the national public policy discussion.

First let me express my gratitude to the American Bar Asociation for its kind invitation to address you this afternoon and to the DePaul University Center for Church/State Studies for organizing this showcase presentation. I would like to commend the American Bar Association for bringing important issues of public concern to the attention of the nation at large. I would also like to pay tribute to the DePaul Center for Church/State Studies because of its impressive initial efforts at sustained legal research into the complex relationship between religion and government in American Society.

I have been asked to address a topic to which I have devoted considerable time and reflection during the past year: the role of the religious leader in the development of public policy. I want you to understand clearly at the outset that I do not come before you as a politician or a policy expert; I am a believer and a pastor in the Catholic Church. What I say to you this afternoon is a reflection and an extension of the concern of the teaching and practice of the Church throughout the world.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of justice understood as a virtue to law and public policy. Is justice adequately understood in terms of virtue, or does the former also include certain rules—or laws—which constitute criteria of justice in human community? If the concept of justice includes the notion of rules as well as virtue, how are the two ideas related? At a more fundamental level, is justice, indeed, a viable concept in modern, pluralistic society?

In an effort to explore these questions we turn, first, to three contemporary ethicists who have attempted to ground morality in public life fundamentally upon the notion of virtue. The first of these writers—Alasdair MacIntyre—is a philosopher; the remaining two—Stanley Hauerwas and James M. Gustafson—are theologians. While each is deeply influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas, all three fail to give adequate attention to the relation of justice conceived as a virtue to law in the latter, particularly in Aquinas. The ensuing section of the paper is devoted to an analysis of the structures of justice as a requirement of collective forms of human life. Consideration of the structures of justice leads, in turn, to the question of the relationship of justice to law. Finally, it is argued that, from a theological perspective, justice is most adequately understood as a form of covenant and that the ultimate norm of justice is reconciling love. Justice is a human task which aims finally at the reconciliation of broken community and the achievement of new forms or levels of the common good.

The highly publicized cases of Indiana's Infant Doe, Tennessee's Pamela Hamilton, New York's Baby Jane Doe, and California's Elizabeth Bouvia raise a series of questions about the proper relations of legal, medical, and moral expertise in our society which are being forced upon us with increasing urgency. Indeed, the daily papers, radio, and television news and special reports flood us with instances of pressing moral dilemmas being played out in courtrooms before bevies of expert witnesses on both sides of issues which only a generation ago would have been virtually unheard of (e.g., genetic counseling and engineering, organ donation and transplantation, the use and abuse of life-sustaining technologies, and so forth). In this article I wish to explore several of the legal, medical, and moral ambiguities surrounding these proceedings by focusing on the first two cases mentioned above.