Vatican II and Religious Liberty | Omar F.A. Gutierrez | Catholic World Report
Dignitatis Humanae, the Council document on religious freedom, represented a development of Church teaching, not a reversal of it.
Of all the documents produced by the Second Vatican Council, none had more revisions, saw more debate, or garnered more controversy than the “Declaration on Religious Liberty” Dignitatis Humanae. This is in part because the document’s 15 tightly-packed paragraphs had the burden of boldly defending the rights of conscience while at the same time respecting the teaching of the embattled Church of the 19th century. This was no easy task, so we should be ever grateful to the conciliar Fathers for the declaration as we face challenges to our religious liberty today.
Change in doctrine?
The controversy stems from the accusation by both progressives and ultra-traditionalists that the Council Fathers reversed earlier Church teaching. The strange bed-fellows of Father Charles Curran and the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre agree that the declaration is a break from doctrine and that it is a break with significant consequences for the Church.
For Father Curran, who advocates for changes in the Church’s teaching on contraception, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, and divorce, the perceived break is a welcome example with which to argue for more change. If the Church can totally reverse her teaching once, she can do it again. For Archbishop Lefebvre, founder of the Society of St. Pius X, the break is a betrayal. He went so far as to call the declaration outright apostasy and, because of it, the Second Vatican Council a “robber council.” So his followers today point to Dignitatis Humanae as exhibit “A” in their dissent from the teachings of Vatican II.
Not everyone agreed with this assessment. The great Dietrich von Hildebrand thought the declaration “marvelous,” and indicated that it was overdue. He did not think it was a break from previous teaching, but rather a natural consequence of the Gospel.
This was also the position of the drafters of the document, the members of the Secretariat for Christian Unity. They wrote and scrapped and rewrote version after version of the declaration in their conscientious effort to proclaim the truth about the rights of conscience. They worked so hard because a key aspect of Blessed Pope John XXIII’s vision was at stake.
The perception of the Church’s teaching by many was that whenever she found herself in the minority, the Church would cry religious liberty. However, if the Church was in the majority, the state would be obliged to suppress other faiths. If that perception was not addressed, argued the Secretariat, the desire of Blessed Pope John XXIII to make inroads with non-Catholic Christians would be impossible.
This was a tension particularly acute in the Catholic Church in America. Paul Blanchard’s 1949 anti-Catholic book American Freedom and Catholic Power portrayed the Church as a menace to the US Constitution and real religious freedom. Thus Father John Courtney Murray, Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston, Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, and other American prelates agreed and worked to advance the declaration at the Council.
The 19th century
An objective eye must admit that Dignitatis Humanae’s language does at least appear to run counter to the language of the 19th-century popes.
Vatican II's Constitution on the Church says this in chapter three:
"Although the individual bishops do not enjoy the prerogative of infallibility, they nevertheless proclaim Christ's doctrine infallibly whenever, even though dispersed through the world, but still maintaining the bond of communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter, and authentically teaching matters of faith and morals, they are in agreement on one position as definitively to be held. This is even more clearly verified when, gathered together in an ecumenical council, they are teachers and judges of faith and morals for the universal Church, whose definitions must be adhered to with the submission of faith."
(http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html)
The 20 ecumenical councils before it are still infallible, like the ecumenical council of Trent that declared that Catholics with faith can lose salvation from unrepented mortal (grave) sin. And that baptism or the implicit desire of baptism is necessary for salvation.
Posted by: Joe Doe | Wednesday, February 06, 2013 at 03:18 PM
I recently had a conversation with my son with respect to religious liberty viz. Islam and the Muslims living in the west. This is a conundrum in some sense because we know that the dominant strain (perhaps not numerically but certainly in terms of power) of Islam does not and will not accept this very idea of freedom of religion as a human right, much less a political right.
When the Christian or post-Christian society finds itself at the numerical tipping point with Islam as some of Europe's nations are approaching, the question is not just academic anymore. The transition may well be peaceful overall, but when it occurs the great but sad irony will be that the very freedom of conscience and tolerance that the western nations practiced, which permitted all of the great movements of immorality and corruption, whose leaders for the most part suffer from severe historical myopia, will be lost to the intolerant fist of Islam just as we see it practiced before our eyes everyday in nations we have sought to "democratize" into enlightenment.
Any intolerance of moral depravity in the Christian past of those nations will be then viewed wistfully as a great golden age, the current vicious and snarling denunciations of Christians long forgotten, when the true definition of "within limits" is obvious, when freedom of conscience is utterly removed.
It seems that those who spend their time and their freedom of conscience on tilting at the Church are truly incapable of exercising that freedom in honesty. They squander that freedom, twisting and turning, concocting philosophies and movements; or they bury themselves in a narcissistic stupor (comfortably numb as the song goes), or they crusade with hatred in their hearts; and it is all to avoid, like the child twisting and turning in the throes of a tantrum, the one thing that the freedom of conscience was given to ensure, the uniquely human prerogative to stand before God Almighty and say "yes" or "no" to him, to say "I love you" or "I hate you."
In some way and to some extent we have all done this, so we recognize it right away. We seek to avoid condemnation yet we squirm to relinquish our little (or big) corruptions, so many have tried to deflect the decision, hoping to have it both ways. But not to decide is to decide.
Many in our society have so numbed that conscience as to pile evil upon evil in order to defend selfishness and willfulness, concocting even "religious" arguments to defend the indefensible.
This is at the core of why there can never, in the practical and political sphere be any such thing as neutral. It is either/or with God. Certainly, he has given us the space of our lifetimes to decide, and the time of indecision is his gift to us, the gift that separates us from the angels, but we see that a society moves in one direction or another, and the time of neutrality is fleeting, actually only a moment. The west has progressed along the way of corruption and will fall under its own weight, unless there is a near total reversal of direction. That can only happen in human hearts, and can only happen with the direct action of the Holy Spirit who converts hearts. On a large enough scale it can change the direction of a nation or society.
So let us pray without ceasing for the conversion of hearts, among the baptized first and then beyond. As Jesus ordered it, "to the Jew first, and then the Gentile."
Posted by: LJ | Tuesday, February 12, 2013 at 02:50 PM