A new post has been issued on Rorate Caeli on the topic of religious liberty. It presents links to a new essay by Professor Thomas Pink of King's College London on a problem which has exercised the minds of philosophers and theologians on both wings of the Church.

The controversial passage in Dignitatis Humanae, Vatican II's declaration on religious freedom, is usually taken to be the following:


1. [...] Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.

Over and above all this, the council intends to develop the doctrine of recent popes on the inviolable rights of the human person and the constitutional order of society.

2. This Vatican Council 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 of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.

Interpretations of what this declaration really means are varied, but three clear trends emerge from them.

Liberal interpretation - this was a revolutionary reform since by approving freedom of conscience the Church thereby corrected one of its previous mistakes.


Conservative interpretation - this was a surface reform of political policy but the deeper obligations of society to God remain the same.


Traditionalist interpretation - this was a revolutionary reform that overturned two centuries of near-certainly infallible teaching, and represents the Council's commitment to bring the 1789 Revolution into the Church.


The significance of Pink's new essay is that it reframes the problem completely. For the liberal, conservative and traditionalist interpreters, the idea that Dignitatis Humanae is the rupture point in a long line of teaching on this issue goes largely undisputed. For Pink, however, a specialist in Early Modern thought, this understanding evinces near complete ignorance of Church teaching on these issues between Trent and the nineteenth century.

Pink thereby drops several bombshells on the various sides of this debate but let me highlight here just two:

1. Dignitatis Humanae, which is thought to be a denial of the permissibility of coercion of belief, significantly omits to say anything about the Church's power to coerce its own members (i.e., those who are baptised, even schismatics and heretics). This coercive power is in fact a matter of Catholic faith as taught by the Council of Trent in its treatise on baptism.

2. The personalist argument, which traditionalists say Dignitatis Humanae used to dissolve the Church's 19th century Magisterium, is in fact a lot older than they recognise, not in explicit terms (which were not developed until the 20th century) but in its fundamental assumptions about autonomy. The idea that the subject cannot be coerced interiorly in matters of religion appears to be a keystone of theological thinking in this area in nineteenth-century Catholic writers such as Cardinal Manning or Bishop Kettler. But, as Pink shows, this idea would have been very strange to the theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who understood the problem in the light of Trent.

It seems, therefore, that the great forgotten link in this chain of argument is this: the Church has only dogmatically asserted its power of coercion over the baptised, and any State which acts as the civil arm to help the Church in this matter does so by delegation of the Church and NOT by its own power.

Consequently - and this is Ches-reading-Pink now - it is logical that as we move into a period where the Church is no longer in a position to delegate in that way, the need to remind the State of its true powers is ever clearer. It does not de jure have the power to coerce conscience. The Church never taught that it did. It only ever held it as a delegated power accorded it by the Church for the sake of the baptised (see Leo XIII, Immortale Dei). It might have overstepped this boundary at times, but that is another matter.

So why the change in this problematic? I can only suggest a couple of reasons myself. Perhaps coercion is more thematic in the treatment of the issue of religious liberty by the theologians of the earlier period because they instinctively assume that most people are Catholic or baptised. When the theologians of the nineteenth century begin arguing in favour of interior freedom, it seems they are working on a new assumption that Catholicism is now a minority religion in hostile and secular conditions. Both positions depend ultimately not on a shift in doctrine but in contextual circuмstances.


******************

That at least is how I understand the consequences of Pink's essay. As I say, for me this essay not only reframes the problem; it is a game-changing intervention.

In its light, no longer can the liberals pretend that coercion has been done away with by Vatican II.

In its light, no longer can the 'personalist' reading of Dignitatis Humanae be used by traditionalists as a stick to beat the Council.

I commend its reading to you all most heartily.

http://thesensiblebond.blogspot.com/2011/08/coercion-and-liberty-reframing-debate.html

http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2012/08/de-mattei-religious-liberty-or-liberty.html

De Mattei: "Religious Liberty - or liberty for Christians?"

Among the slogans of “politically correct” language there is the term “religious liberty”, which is used incorrectly at times by Catholics as a synonym for freedom for the Church or freedom for Christians.  In reality the terms and concepts are different and it is necessary to clarify them. The ambiguity present in the Conciliar declaration Dignitatis humanae (1965) arose from the lack of distinction between the internal forum, which is in the sphere of personal conscience, and the public space, which is in the sphere of the community, or rather the profession and propagation of one’s personal religious convictions.

The Church, with Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos (1836), with Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus and in Quanta Cura (1864), but also with Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei (1885) and in Libertas (1888) teaches that:


1. No one can be constricted to believe in the private forum, because faith is a personal choice formed in the conscience of  man.
2. Man has no right to religious freedom  in the public space, or rather freedom to profess whatever religion, because only the true and the good have rights and not what is error and is evil.
3. Public worship of false religions may be, in cases, tolerated by the civil authorities, with the view of obtaining a greater good or avoiding a greater evil, but, in essence, it may be repressed even by force if necessary. But the right to tolerance is a contradiction, because, as is evident even from the term, whatever is tolerated is never a good thing, rather, it is always a purely bad thing. In the social life of nations, error may be tolerated as a reality, but never allowed as a right.  Error “has no right to exist objectively nor to propaganda, nor action” (Pius XII Speech Ci Riesce 1953)


Further, the right of being immune to coercion, or rather the fact that the Church does not impose the Catholic Faith on anyone, but requires the freedom of the act of faith, does not arise from a presumed natural right to religious freedom or a presumed natural right to believe in any religion whatever, but it is founded on the fact that the Catholic Religion, the only true one, must be embraced in complete freedom without any constraints. The liberty of the believer is based on the truth believed and not on the self-determination of the individual. The Catholic and only the Catholic has the natural right to profess and practice his religion and he has it because his religion is the true one. Which means that no other believer apart from the Catholic has the natural right to profess his religion. The verification of this is in the fact that rights do not exist without responsibilities and duties and vice versa. The natural law, summed up in the ten commandments, is expressed in a prescriptive manner, that is, it imposes duties and responsibilities from which rights arise. For example, in the Commandment “Do not kill the innocent” the right of the innocent to life arises. The rejection of abortion is a prescription of natural rights which is separated from religion and whoever conforms to it. And this is the same for the seven Commandments of the Second Table. Comparing the right to religious liberty to the right to life, considering them both as natural rights, is however, nonsense.

The first three commandments of the Decalogue in fact do not refer to all and sundry divinities, but only to the God of the Old and the New Testaments. From the First Commandment, which imposes adoration of the Only True God, arises the right and the duty to profess not any religion but the only true one. This counts for both the individual and the State. The State, like each individual, has the duty to profess the true religion, also because the aims of the State are no different from those of the individual.

The reason the State cannot constrain anyone to believe does not arise from the religious neutrality of the State, but from the fact that adhering to the truth must be completely free. If the individual had the right to preach and profess publically any religion whatever, the State would have the obligation of religious neutrality. This has been repeatedly condemned by the Church.
 
For this reason we say that man has the right to profess, not any religion, but to profess the only true one.  Only if religious liberty is intended as Christian liberty, will it be possible to speak of the right to it.

There are those who sustain that we live actually in a pluralistic and secularized society, that the Catholic States have disappeared and that Europe is a continent that has turned its back on Christianity.  Therefore, the real problem is that of Christians persecuted in the world, and not that of a Catholic State. Nobody denies this, but the verification of a reality is not equivalent to the affirmation of a principle. The Catholic must desire a Catholic society and State with all his heart, where Christ reigns, as Pope Pius XI in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925) explains.

The distinction between the “thesis” (the principle) and the “hypothesis”(the concrete situation) is noted. The more that we are obliged to suffer under the hypothesis, the more we have to try to make the thesis known.  Hence, we do not renounce the doctrine of the Social Kingship of Christ: let us speak of the rights of Jesus Christ to reign over entire societies as the only solution to modern evils. So, instead of fighting for religious liberty, which is the equalizing of the true religion with the false ones, let us fight in defense of liberty for Christians, today persecuted by Islam in the East and by the dictatorship of relativism in the West.

Roberto de Mattei

[From: Corrispondenza Romana - July 19, 2012. Contribution and Translation: Contributor Francesca Romana. As always, posted articles reflect the views of their authors: we ask for a healthy debate in the comments.]