The high tide of the overestimation of natural law discourse was the post-World War Two era, when the Church was eager to reinforce the right lessons of the war. Western modernity found itself recoiling from legal positivism, and moving honestly (if temporarily) to reform its polities on the basis of ideas about human dignity and natural rights. Catholic philosophers and theologians like Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray did remarkable work trying to show how the Catholic tradition should seize the moment: notwithstanding the gentiles' disordered theories about the moral order, the experience of the war and its aftermath rendered them teachable  In retrospect, we see that there was an overestimation, not only of what the gentiles knew but also of what they were willing to do with their knowledge. (Perhaps the most bizarre overestimation of common ground came in 1989 with Cardinal Bernardin's recommendation that Catholic lawyers ought to adopt the natural law theory of Ronald Dworkin.33) From another point of view, we could say that there was a drastic underestimation of the Church's teaching mission. In the literature and discourse of that period, it is often difficult to say who was teaching whom.

Natural Law and Catholic Moral Theology, p. 12