Catholic Rightists Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel are trying to tell the world it should be an orthodox Catholic standard.  Of course, they could never get away with that religious supremacist claim outright. So, like their Protestant co-belligerents of the religious right, they say that's what the Founders wanted.

They are not the first to arrive at such a view. Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967) believed that Catholic doctrine is compatible with the thought of America's Founders, particularly based upon their various allusions to natural law-derived self-evident truths. Murray so firmly believed this that fifty years ago he claimed in the second half of the twentieth century Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism would increasingly influence national moralit