This is Part Three of three. A petition comes to Corbett’s Landing, a hardware store owner changes his mind in public, and five people write a rule small enough to keep.
In 1955, an American Jesuit named John Courtney Murray put his work on church and state in a drawer. In July 1954, the Holy Office in Rome had judged four propositions drawn from his writing to be erroneous. Now Roman censors refused permission to publish the last article in his series on Leo XIII, and his Jesuit superiors told him to stop writing on the subject. Murray canceled the book contract he had signed and returned his books on religious freedom to the library. He accepted the decision in obedience and went back to teaching.
His offense was an argument. Murray held that the state has no competence to coerce anyone in matters of religion, and that the Church could say so without betraying anything it believed. Rome’s theologians called that a concession to American liberalism.
When the Second Vatican Council opened in October 1962, Murray was not on the list of theological experts. Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York got him appointed for the second session in 1963. Murray went to work drafting a declaration on religious freedom. Opponents stalled it again and again. On 19 November 1964, the council’s presidents abruptly postponed a scheduled vote, and the bishops, denied a ballot, answered with long applause for the bishop presenting the text. Only Paul VI’s intervention in the final session forced a decision.
On 7 December 1965, the council fathers approved Dignitatis Humanae, 2,308 to 70. The man told to stop writing about religious freedom had written the Church’s declaration on it. He died less than two years later.
The question Murray answered was about to arrive in a small Midwestern town: whom a community’s official voice may leave out.
A kingdom not of this world
On Sunday 22 November 2026, the Church celebrated Christ the King, and Fr. Bill preached on John 18:36: “My kingdom is not of this world.” Two days later, the study group met with a live question on the table.
The county board in neighboring Halbert County had passed a resolution declaring itself “a Christian community,” affirming its “Christian heritage and identity,” and directing that its meetings open with prayer led by Christian clergy. A petition now circulated in Corbett’s Landing urging the town council to do the same. It had four hundred signatures. Doug had been the eighth to sign.
“I signed it at the Legion breakfast,” he admitted. “It seemed like standing up for the church. Then you made me read the essay, and I got to the last page.” He read it aloud: “When a religion like Christianity, and within Christianity when a movement like Christian nationalism, gains the political power to define who counts as a citizen, then democracy as such has died.”
Chidi told them about the canvass. Two men had brought the petition to his pharmacy counter. One studied his name tag for a long time. “Then he said, ‘You might not be the kind of neighbor this is about.’ I am a naturalized citizen, a Catholic convert, a Lions Club member, and I fill prescriptions for half this town. Which box do I not check?”
Lois opened with the feast’s founding document. Pius XI instituted Christ the King in 1925, and Quas Primas (§15) insists that this kingdom is spiritual, that Jesus “shrank from the honor” when crowds would have crowned him, and that it is opposed only to the power of darkness. “That passage doesn’t decide the council vote for us,” Lois said. “The same encyclical says rulers and nations have obligations to Christ. What it settles is smaller and larger at once. Christ’s kingship cannot be reduced to any town’s identity resolution, or to the movement opposing it.”
Youngest first
The Rule gave them their procedure. In Chapter 3, Benedict tells the abbot to call the whole community to counsel, because “often the Lord reveals to the younger what is better.” Chapter 71 asks the brothers to obey one another. So they heard each other before deciding anything, youngest to oldest: Tessa, Chidi, Doug, Lois, Ruth.
Merton supplied both halves of what they needed. The mystical half was his moment at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville on 18 March 1958, when he was overwhelmed by the realization that he loved all those strangers, “that they were mine and I theirs.” The political half came from “The Root of War Is Fear”: the true solution is not accessible to any one isolated party or nation, “but all must arrive at it by working together.”
Then they did what Cardijn’s method, the one John XXIII commended in Mater et Magistra (§236), always demands first. They found out what the resolution actually says. Non-Christians could attend, speak, and vote. They could not lead the invocation, and their faith was written out of the county’s official description of itself.
Doug made the case for it, and he made it well. “The Supreme Court said in 2014, in Town of Greece v. Galloway, that a town board can open with sectarian prayer. Nobody is forced to pray. Most people here are Christian, and this town was built by churches. Why is it wrong to say so out loud?”
“You’re right that it’s legal,” Chidi said. “I’m not arguing about legal.” He read Dignitatis Humanae (§2), the declaration Murray drafted: every person has a right to religious freedom, which means immunity from coercion, “in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs.”
“So let’s be precise,” Chidi said. “Nobody is forced to pray. What this does is quieter. It writes one religion into the town’s identity and marks everyone else as a guest at their own town meeting. That is not the worst injustice in this country. But I have taken an oath as a citizen, and I know what it is to be made a guest in your own town.”
Monday night at the council
On Monday 30 November, all five went to the town council meeting, with Fr. Bill in the back row. At Ruth’s invitation, Dr. Ameen, the internist from the clinic, came too, along with Mr. Patel, who owns the other pharmacy in town. Lois read a letter the group had drafted, arguing from the town’s own charter.
Then Doug Steyer stood up and said what he had rehearsed.
“I signed that petition. I was wrong, and I’d like to say why. I took an oath once, when I enlisted, to support and defend the Constitution. I didn’t check then whether it was a Christian Constitution. It isn’t. It protects the freedom of every one of us, including the folks this resolution would make second-class neighbors. I love this town, and I love my church, and I’ve finally figured out that those are two different loves. Mixing them weakens both.”
The council tabled the resolution for further study, which is what councils do when they lack the votes. It was a small, human-sized result, and everyone knew the question would come back.
A rule for beginners
The last evening, 1 December, fell in the first week of Advent. The library was cold enough that they kept their coats on. Doug brought a box of day-old doughnuts.
Lois looked back over the whole arc: October’s fears, held up against data and examined instead of merely felt; definitions tested and kept; the wooden crosses, and the difference between faith and a costume; other democracies received as guests; Monday’s meeting, the resolution tabled but alive.
“Now write,” she said. “One page. Your rule for how a Christian who loves their country behaves in public life. Keep it small enough to keep.”
She gave them Benedict’s closing joke. In the last of his seventy-three chapters, he calls his masterpiece “this smallest Rule written down for beginners” (RB 73). And she gave them his description of good zeal: “Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ” (RB 72).
They wrote for twenty minutes in near silence.
Ruth: “I will worship, not merely belong. I will wait twenty-four hours before I forward anything. Heritage is the porch; faith walks through the door.”
Doug: “I will fly the flag and follow Christ, and I will know which is which. I will defend my neighbors’ freedom, especially when it is inconvenient to mine.”
Chidi: “No one at my citizenship ceremony asked what I believe. I will never make my neighbors answer a question I was never asked.”
Tessa: “I will love my church enough to tell it the truth, and I will read one source I distrust every week.”
Lois: “I will see before I judge, and judge before I act. And I will learn to tell my true self from my false one.”
Pope Francis named the synthesis they had circled all month. “I can welcome others who are different,” he wrote, only if “I am firmly rooted in my own people and culture” (Fratelli Tutti §143). Against that rootedness he set a “‘local’ narcissism,” born of insecurity and fear of the other, which builds walls for self-defense (§146). Rooted, not walled. That was the difference, they agreed, between patriotism and the thing they had spent six evenings defining.
Lois closed with Merton’s prayer from Thoughts in Solitude, a rule for beginners if ever there was one: “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me.”
At nine o’clock, nobody moved. Ruth said it first. “Same time in Lent?”
An index card for your own table
- See. Name one resolution, petition, prayer policy, or forum in your community that fuses civic belonging with religious identity. Who is inside its “we”?
- Judge. Hear everyone, youngest first. State the strongest case for the proposal before you answer it.
- Act. Attend one public meeting where the question is live. Speak once, or bring one person who is affected and unheard. Aim to be accurate, not to win.
- Write. One page: your rule of engagement. Give a copy to someone who will ask you about it later.
- Check. Is your love of country rooted, or walled? Did you defend your neighbors’ freedom, or only your own position?
John Courtney Murray spent most of a decade with his argument under censure. He did not win it by shouting. He won it in committee rooms and draft after draft, with bishops who had to be persuaded one at a time, until 2,308 of them said yes.
Doug Steyer had carried his own argument, unexamined, for most of his life. He took it out on a Monday night in front of his neighbors and called his own signature a mistake.
The question will come back to Corbett’s Landing.
So will they.
This is the last of three parts. Read Part One, “The Tent of His Kingdom,” and Part Two, “Wooden Crosses.”
Sources. Barry Hudock, Struggle, Condemnation, Vindication: John Courtney Murray’s Journey toward Vatican II (Liturgical Press, 2015). “Murray, John Courtney,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, via Encyclopedia.com. “Religious Liberty,” America, 28 November 2005. Vatican II, Dignitatis Humanae §2. Pius XI, Quas Primas (1925) §15. Rule of St. Benedict, Chapters 3, 71, 72, and 73, Saint Meinrad translation. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday, 1966). Merton, “The Root of War Is Fear,” in New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961). Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958). Francis, Fratelli Tutti §§143, 146. John XXIII, Mater et Magistra §236. Town of Greece v. Galloway, 572 US 565 (2014). Richard Pütz, “Christian Nationalism Beyond the US Border,” The Jesus Seminar and Beyond, 15 October 2026.
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