Vatican II and Religious Liberty | Dr. James Hitchcock | IgnatiusInsight.com
Vatican II and Religious Liberty | Dr. James Hitchcock | IgnatiusInsight.com
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2008/jhitchcock_religfreedom_jan08.asp
Along with changes in the liturgy, perhaps no act of the
Second Vatican Council has been held in more suspicion than the decree Dignitatis
Humanae, commonly called the Declaration on
Religious Liberty. Some traditionalist Catholics have found in it a repudiation
of previous Catholic teaching, and it has been reported that it was this,
rather than the vernacular liturgy, which most troubled the late schismatic
Archbishop Marcel LefŽbvre.
One historical reality which needs to be remembered in
approaching Dignitatis Humanae is that
Pius IX, in issuing the Syllabus of Errors and Quanta Cura, was
reacting to the bogus promises of Continental Liberalism, which had raised the
banner of religious liberty at the time of the French Revolution, then had
consistently worked to undermine the Church in every way possible, according to
the Continental Enlightenment conviction that true liberty required the
elimination of religion as a social force.
Pius IX probably did not have in mind the pattern of
religious liberty as it had developed in England and the United States, where
actual freedom of worship (including the right to engage in education) did
exist. The day may possibly come when liberal intolerance, now still somewhat
marginal in American culture, will triumph. But it has not arrived yet.
Critics of Dignitatis Humanae read it as merely a concession to the modern secular state, the Church
in effect surrendering to notions of tolerance which are at heart skeptical and
relativistic. But the decree, besides emphasizing human dignity as the
fundamental basis of freedom, also notes that the Church itself benefits from a
regime of freedom, and it is this reality which critics overlook.
They usually do so because they are affected by a familiar
kind of idealization of the "ages of faith," an idealization in which the
justified claim that earlier centuries honored and promoted religion in ways
modernity does not is confused with the unjustified inference that people in
past ages must therefore always have lived their faith appropriately.
Thus union of Church and state has an appealing ring for
such people, who see it as the state's humble acknowledgment of religion's
superiority and the willingness to use the state's authority to inculcate true
religion. They are much less likely to notice that historically such unions
have required sometimes desperate struggles by the Church to maintain its
independence.
Thus the Emperor Constantine meddled in the profound doctrinal
questions swirling the Church's understanding of the Trinity, to the point of
sometimes pressuring the bishops to favor the Arian side. The Emperor Henry IV,
along with other medieval rulers, claimed the right to invest bishops with
their spiritual as well as their temporal offices. Thomas Becket was struck
down in his cathedral at the behest of a king, Henry II, who had successfully
lobbied the pope for Becket's appointment as archbishop and was enraged to find
him resistant to royal control. Henry VIII, at a crucial moment in history,
persuaded the pope to appoint a royal chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, to the position
Becket once held. The Council of Trent was delayed for decades because the
leading Catholic monarchs of Europe could not agree about the conditions of its
meeting, and for almost half a century the "most Catholic" king of France
refused to allow its decrees to be promulgated there. In the next century a
number of French sees stood vacant for years because Louis XIV, who flirted
with the potentially schismatic doctrines of Gallicanism, wanted tame bishops
whom the pope would not confirm in office. As Father Marvin O'Connell has
brought to public attention, the Prince of Monaco, almost a century ago, tried
hard to get the Modernist heretic Alfred Loisy named a bishop.
During the Constitutional Convention, some of the delegates
attended solemn Vespers in a Philadelphia Catholic church, and John Adams
recorded his Puritan reactions — gorgeous ceremony designed to play on
the ignorance of the people. "How could Luther ever have broken the spell?"
There were many countries in the world at the time where
government officials were believing Catholics and deeply respectful of the
faith, and where freedom of worship was by no means secure. But when the Holy
See inquired of the new American government its views on the establishment of
the hierarchy in this country, the papal diplomats were astonished to be told
that the American government had no views on that subject, a response never
before encountered. A few decades later Alexis DeToqueville could judge that it
was this very absence of official support for the churches which accounted for
their remarkable vitality in the new country.
In the first years of the twentieth century the Archbishop
of Krakow arose in the papal conclave to announce that the Emperor Franz
Joseph, in keeping with an old tradition, was vetoing the cardinals' choice as
pope. (Possibly the emperor unwittingly acted as an agent of the Holy Spirit,
as the conclave went on to elect St. Pius X.) But it is not the least
satisfying of the age's many ironies that at century's end a later archbishop
of Krakow is the world's most eloquent champion of genuine human freedom.
This column originally appeared in the March/April 2000 issue of Catholic
Dossier.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Links/Articles:
• The Vatican, Ecumenism, and Tolerance | James Hitchcock
• Excerpts from Truth and Tolerance | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
• Is Tolerance Intolerant? | James Hitchcock
• Vatican II and the Ecclesiology of Joseph Ratzinger |
Fr. Maximilian Heinrich Heim
• Are Christians Intolerant? | Thomas Storck
• Are Christians Intolerant? | Michael O'Brien
• Our Enslavement to "Freedom" | James Hitchcock
• Conscience and Chaos | James Hitchcock
• Secularity: On Benedict XVI and the Role of Religion in
Society | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• What Is Catholic Social Teaching? | Mark Brumley
• Personally Opposed--To What? | Dr. James Hitchcock
Dr. James Hitchcock, (e-mail)
professor of history at St. Louis University, writes and lectures on contemporary
Church matters. His column appears in the diocesan press, in the Adoremus
Bulletin, and on the Women
for Faith and Family website. He is the author of several books, including
The Recovery of the Sacred, What is Secular Humanism?, and Years
of Crisis: Collected Essays, 1970-1983.
Princeton University Press just published his two-volume history of the
Supreme Court, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life:
The Odyssey of the Religion Clauses (Vol. 1) and
From "Higher Law" to "Sectarian Scruples"
(Vol. 2). He is also a regular contributor to many Catholic periodicals,
including Catholic
World Report.
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