Dignitatis humanae

DIGNITATIS HUMANAE

The Declaration on Religious Liberty

of the Second Vatican Council

This Declaration is one of the most important documents of the Council. The ecumenical euphoria which followed Vatican II would not have been possible without it. No substantial ecumenical progress could have been made while the Church still insisted upon the right of a Catholic state to repress the public expression of heresy.

Paul Blanshard was America's most virulent anti-Catholic polemicist in the years preceding the Council. His particular bete noire was the Church's teaching on religious liberty. The fact that he had much to say in praise of Dignitatis Humanae (which will be abbreviated DH from now on) is a damning indictment of the extent to which the traditional teaching has been compromised. Blanshard claimed that DH "marked a great advance in Catholic policy, perhaps the greatest single advance in principle during all four sessions of the Council."⁶ He was sufficiently perceptive to note that Article Two of the Declaration contained "the best paragraphs."⁷ This is also the view of Mgr. Pietro Pavan, one of the theologians who collaborated with Fr. Murray in drafting and defending the Declaration. Mgr. Pavan wrote the commentary on DH which appears in Father Vorgrimler's highly praised Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II. (This commentary is highly praised because it endorses all the standard Liberal assumptions on the merits of the Council.) Mgr. Pavan states in his commentary that: "Article 2 is undoubtedly the most important article of the Declaration."⁸ It could certainly be considered the most important article in any document of the Council as, until it is corrected by the Magisterium, it represents not simply a contradiction of consistently reiterated, and possibly infallible, papal teaching but an implicit repudiation of the Kingship of Christ. Article 2 reads:

This Vatican Synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or social groups and of any human power, in such wise that in matters religious no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs.

Up to this point everything can be reconciled with the traditional doctrine. Article 2 continues:

Nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his own beliefs, whether privately?

The traditional teaching has still not been violated-but now comes the break with tradition:

“or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.

The phrase “within due limits” could have maintained harmony with previous papal teaching had these “due limits” been specified as “the common good.” However, in conformity with the Masonic Declaration of the Right of Man the “due limits” are later specified as “public order.”

The Declaration continues:

The Synod further declares that the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person, as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself.

It is important to bear in mind that from the moment the words “or publicly” were used, the term “religious freedom” in this Declaration includes freedom from restraint in the external forum, subject only to the requirements of public order. The sentence just cited is, then, neither in harmony with the revealed word of God nor reason. If there is one doctrine which is taught clearly throughout the Old Testament, it is that no one has a right to express religious error in the public forum - the penalty, mandated by God, was death. Are we to believe that God commanded men to be put to death for exercising what He had established as a human right? Nor is there anything reasonable in claiming that men have a natural right to teach error in public as long as this does not result in a breach of public order. The civil laws of slander and libel make this clear.

Mgr. Pavan comments:

...the right to religious freedom must be regarded as a fundamental right of the human person or as a natural right, that is one grounded in the very nature of man, as the Declaration itself repeats several times. ⁹ (Emphasis in original.)

Contrast this with a statement by Father Connell:

Beyond doubt, the expression "freedom- of worship " is ordinarily understood by our non-Catholic fellow-citizens, when they advocate the "four freedoms,” in the sense that every one has a natural God-given right to accept and to practice whatever form of religion appeals to him individually. No Catholic can in conscience defend such an idea of freedom of religious worship. For, according to Catholic principles, the only religion that has a right to exist is the religion that God revealed and made obligatory on all men; hence, man has a natural and God-given freedom to embrace only the true religion. One who sincerely believes himself bound to practice some form of non-Catholic religion is in conscience obliged to do so; but this subjective obligation, based on an erroneous conscience, does not give him a genuine right. A real right is something objective based on truth. Accordingly, a Catholic may not defend freedom of religious worship to the extent of denying that a Catholic government has the right, absolutely speaking, to restrict the activities of non-Catholic denominations in order to protect the Catholic citizens from spiritual harm. ¹⁰

The Vatican II Declaration continues

This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed. This is to become a civil right.

Contrast this with the proposition condemned by Pope Pius IX in Quanta Cura, censuring those who:

“fear not to uphold that erroneous opinion most pernicious to the Catholic Church, and to the salvation of souls, which was called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI (lately quoted), the insanity (deliramentum) (Encyclical 13 August 1832): namely, “that liberty of conscience and of worship is the peculiar (or inalienable right of every man, which should be proclaimed by law”.

What Fr. Connell had stated no Catholic may defend is precisely what the Declaration defends and proclaims as a right. Thus Mgr, Pavan states in his commentary that: “In the religious sphere no man may be compelled to act against his conscience; and no one may be presented from acting according to his conscience.” (My emphasis.)

It is not simply traditionalists who fail to see how the teaching of Quanta Cura and Dignitatis Humanae can be reconciled, how the latter can be said to be a development of the former. It is also very significant, in view of the important place held by Quanta Cura and the Syllabus in papal teaching on the subject of religious liberty, that neither is referred to in any of the footnotes to Dignitatis Humanae . In the many references to the teachings of “recent popes”not one of the texts cited affirms the right to religious freedom in the external forum. The breach with the traditional teaching can be narrowed down to two words in the Latin text of Dignitatis Humanae, “et publice” (”and in public”). Among the many non-traditionalists who have admitted the difficulty of proving a legitimate development between the traditional teaching and that of Vatican II are four Council periti (experts) whose testimony is of the very highest importance-the first three being the experts most influential in drafting the text of the Declaration itself. These experts are Fr. John Courtney Murray, S. J., Mgr. Pietro Pavan, Fr. Yves Congar, 0. P., and Fr. Hans Kung.

Father Murray admitted openly that no one had been able to supply an explanation of how the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae constituted a development. He simply asserted that it was a development:

The course of the development between the Syllabus of Errors (1864) and Dignitatis Humanae Personae (1965) still remains to be explained by theologians. ¹¹

Mgr. Pavan concedes that no previous papal teaching agrees with Dignitatis Humanae. The best he can come up with is that the teaching of some recent Popes "tended towards" it, including in this list Popes Pius XI and XII who had specifically re-affirmed the traditional position.

Mgr. Pavan writes:

...there had, of course, been a doctrinal development, but that its last phase tended towards what was said in the Council documents, if Fra did not actually agree with it.

Fr. Congar writes, apropos Article 2 of Dignitatis Humanae:

It cannot be denied that a text like this does materially say something different from the Syllabus of 1864, and even almost the opposite of propositions 15 and 77-9 of the document.¹²

An interview with Hans Kung published in the National Catholic Reporter on 21 October 1977 contained the following passage:

In recent books he has stated that while conservatives do not have the right answers, they are often asking the right questions. And Lefebvre is no exception.

"I think he is wrong, but nevertheless what he's arguing are theoretically unresolved questions. "

Lefebvre has every right to question the Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Kung says, because Vatican II completely reversed Vatican I’s position without explanation.

“The Council evaporated the problem,” Kung insists, “because it called into question the doctrine of infallibility”. He reminisces over the late night conversations with Father John Courtney Murray (the American who guided Council thought on religious liberty):

“The Council bishops said, ‘It’s too complicated to explain how you can go from a condemnation of religious liberty to an affirmation of it purely by the notion of progress.’”

For Kung the issue is still unresolved and cannot be settled without looking at permanence, continuity and the infallibility of doctrine. And to do that the bishops may well have to say that what they uttered infallibly in the 19th century or before simply does not hold in the twentieth. (My emphasis.)

Perhaps the most damning indictment of Dignitatis Humanae is the praise it received from the virulently anti-Catholic Paul Blanshard, who described it as making “a great advance in Catholic policy, perhaps the greatest single advance in principle during all four sessions of the Council.”¹³

The Declaration is commended by Blanshard because:

“Catholicism after centuries of delay has finally caught up at least in part to the United Nations, to Western Protestantism, to Western democracies, and to the social democratic parties of Europe in advocating what had been written into the American Constitution more than 175 years before. The final statement on religious liberty was an important achievement. It will make the struggle for religious liberty throughout the world easier. From now on every libertarian can cite an offical Catholic pronouncement endorsing the principle of liberty.”¹⁴

But Blanshard positively exults in the fact that what has taken place is not a development but a change in doctrine. Vatican II had adopted Blanshard’s position, he is pleased, but he is justifiably insistent that it can only have done this by reversing previous Catholic teaching. Having dedicated himself to opposing that teaching no one was better placed to know precisely what that teaching was. Blanshard writes with contempt of attempts to cover up a change in doctrine under the pretext of development. Such attempts are specious at the best and dishonest at the worst. Blanshard writes:

The star of the American delegation was John Courtney Murray, whose chief function was to give the pedestrian bishops the right words with which to change some ancient doctrines without admitting that they were being changed. He built verbal bridges to the modern world very effectively, and the American bishops crossed over them joyously, delighted that they could be good American democrats and Catholic scholars at the same time. Murray argued that certain teachings of past leaders of Catholicism were not applicable at the present time in their original sense, since they had been designed to meet certain historic situations, and those situations had changed. Doctrine, he alleged, could "develop," a polite way of saying that it could change without any necessary admission that it had changed.

This adroit formula for a "changeless" Church was frequently used at Vatican II by theologians who were bound by their Church's veneration for tradition, but it was not always accepted as worthy of honest men even by Jesuit leaders whose institutional past is commonly associated with such linguistic manipulation. In another connection, Father John C. Ford, S. J., of the Catholic University of America, declared after the end of the Council: "I do not consider it theologically legitimate or even decent and honest; to-contradict a doctrine and then disguise the contradiction under the rubric : growth and evolution."¹⁵ (My emphasis.)

Blanshard remarked that:

I am often asked: Have you changed your opinion about the Catholic Church? The answer is "Yes," but only to the extent that the Catholic Church has changed.¹⁶

Although my treatment of this important issue has necessarily been brief, sufficient evidence should have been presented to make it clear that Paul Hallet was perfectly correct to state in his National Catholic Register article that: “Hence it is not disloyal to faith to seek a clarification of its ambiguities. Nothing is to be gained by pretending they do not exist.” It should also be clear that the many Catholics (not all of them Liberals) who sneer at Mgr. Lefebvre, and reject his criticisms of the Declaration without having the courtesy and fairness to examine them, are acting most unjustly. It requires little effort and little integrity to condemn the Archbishop unheard simply because he criticizes Vatican II. Nor does it take much courage to do so, particularly when those who attack him can be virtually certain that no opportunity will be provided in the offical Catholic press for the Archbishop’s side of the case to be presented. Ironically, the Declaration of Religious Liberty is being defended by denying the Archbishop the liberty to express his views in public. In order to assist those who are fair-minded enough to study both sides of the case I have written a book on the subject of Dignitatis Humanae which should be published in 1980.

This appendix can best be concluded by quoting the final paragraph from Paul Hallett’s July 1977 article .

The Religious Liberty Declaration contains many excellent statements of principle, which need to be asserted against the rampant atheism that threatens all religion. All this is to the good. But for the protection of religion and not exclusively the Catholic religion - it is necessary that some things be made clearer and more in accord with tradition than they have been in the Religious Liberty Declaration.

Footnotes

The American Ecclesiastical Review has been abbreviated as AER.

1. See the Approaches supplement, The Ordinary Magisterium of the Church Theologically Considered by Dom Paul Nau, 0. S. B.

2. See the article "Toleration" in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

3. "Discussion of Government Repression of Heresy," Proceedings 111 (March 1949), pp. 98-101.

4. AER, No.119, October 1948, p. 250.

5. AER, No.151, February 1964, p. 128.

6. Paul Blanshard on Vatican II (Beacon Press, Boston, 1966), p. 339.

7. Ibid., p. 89.

8. H. Vorgrimler, ed., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, IV,64.

9. Ibid., p. 65.

10. AER, No.109, October 1943, p. 255.

11. W. Abbott, The Documents of Vatican II (America Press, 1967), p. 673.

12. Challenge to the Church (London, 1977), p. 44.

13. Blanshard, p. 339.

14. Ibid., pp. 88-89.

15. Ibid., pp. 87-880

16. Ibid., Preface.