This article investigates whether Aristotelian magnanimity is compatible with Christianity. According to Aristotle, this virtue is displayed in claiming and deserving great honors and accompanied by a disdain for others, all of which looks remarkably like the Christian sin of pride. This article argues that in spite of these apparent difficulties Aristotelian magnanimity is compatible with Christian morality, that the deserving Christian may, without prejudice to the virtue of humility, claim great honors, recognize his own superiority, and look down on others. The article concludes with an account of the contemporary political importance of these issues. Responding to scholarship that argues that Christianity's undermining of magnanimity is responsible for modernity's lack of great statesmanship, it is contended on the contrary that in the modern world Christianity alone can make magnanimous statesmanship possible.

Although the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought on political theory has been a profound one, curiously, scholars have quite often misunderstood or misinterpreted his philosophy on issues that are of central importance to his political vision. Specifically, Niebuhr's program for ethical and political action is often described as one of “unrestricted” consequentialism, in which ethical decision making is by necessity reduced to a process where the ends justify the means. Despite the fact that Niebuhr's theory of ethics clearly called for an examination of the likely consequences of one's actions, it should nevertheless not be labeled in this manner.

This article analyzes John Howard Yoder's vision of the church as a polis which, through its embodiment of particular practices, serves as an analogical anticipation of God's Kingdom, and thereby offers an alternative to utilitarian and agonal understandings of politics. After describing Yoder's ecclesiologically based vision of politics and examining prominent critiques of Yoder's ecclesiology, the theological framework for Yoder's understanding of the state is discussed. Placing the state within the Pauline cosmology of “principalities and powers,” Yoder outlined a Christian relationship to the state marked both by subordination as well as by occasional disobedience, a disobedience which included participation in nonviolent direct action.

In October 1950, John Courtney Murray, S.J., wrote for the use of Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini of the Vatican Secretariat of State a memorandum: “The crisis in Church-State Relationships in the U.S.A.” An attempt by Murray to encourage a development of Catholic teaching on church and state and religious freedom that would enable American Catholics to give support in principle to the First Amendment of the U.S Constitution, the memorandum was submitted to some American churchmen and to the Vatican's Holy Office. The dossier here published for the first time includes the texts of Murray's memorandum and of responses to it written by Samule Cardinal Stritch and Fr. Francis J. Cornell, C.SS.R. The introduction to these texts sets the memorandum in context and explains the Holy Office's actions against Murray.

In this memorandum four points will be briefly made.

First, a grave danger confronts the Church in the United States, because the Church is the object of a newly intense fear, distrust, and hostility. At the same time a new apostolic opportunity is being offered to the Church, because the Church is now the object of a new interest, curiosity, and sympathy.

Second, one great obstacle hinders the Church in coping effectively with the danger confronting her. And the same obstacle also blocks her from making full use of the opportunity offered to her. This obstacle consists in the present state of development of the Church's doctrine on Church-State relationships. This doctrine has not yet been vitally adapted to modern political realities and to the legitimate democratic aspirations, especially as they have developed in the United States.

The presentation of what the author calls a “grave danger” which confronts the Church in the United States in my judgment is not comprehensive. All through our history, we Catholics in the United States have had to face this same attack upon the Church from non-Catholics. The point of the attack has been the same all through the years: namely, that Catholics cannot be loyal to the Constitution of the United States and at the same time loyal to their Church. The notion of religious freedom in the non-Catholic mind in the Englishspeaking world derives from the Protestant doctrine upholding the right of the individual to interpret for himself the Sacred Scriptures.

The author seems to have no regard for the supernatural life and vigor of the Catholic Church. He proposes as the most necessary means of protecting the Church from grave harm in the United States something natural—the “adaptation” of a traditional Catholic doctrine to a naturalistic concept of the State. The truth is that the most effective means toward preserving the Church from harm and promoting its apostolic activity will be found in a more ardent zeal on the part of bishops and priests and in a more faithful observance of God's law by Catholics. It should not be forgotten that Christ has promised to abide with His Church and to sustain it, so that the gates of hell shall never prevail against it. The author does not take this promise into consideration.

More than a century after Nietzsche's proclamation of the “death of God,” some recent books speak alarmingly of “the revenge of God” and the prospect of a “new cold war”—a conflict pitting religious “fundamentalists” against agnostic secularists on a worldwide scale. Remembering the cultural struggles of nineteenthcentury Europe, one might say that today Kulturkampfhas been globalized. At this juncture it seems timely to reexamine the meaning of secularism and secularization and their relation to religious faith.