Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
136
journal of undergraduate research
1 37
Religious liberty is a topic on which the Catholic Church has developed its doctrine more
significantly and more dramatically than it has on any other issue. Popes as late as the nineteenth
century condemned freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, and liberalism in very
strong terms. But in 1965, the Second Vatican Council completed its “Declaration on Religious
guarantees by states for the religious liberty of Catholics and non-Catholics alike, based on their
inherent dignity as human persons. These two stances, less than a century apart, are not easily
reconciled with the Church’s claim to be consistent in its teachings. Thus, religious liberty can be
seen as an area where the doctrinal integrity of Catholicism is at stake. This topic is also of
interest because more than almost any other issue it frequently causes the Catholic Church to
insert itself into the world of public policy. The debate over the Church’s teaching on this issue is
not only doctrinally important, but also politically important. Catholic intellectual George
Weigel has approvingly paraphrased the Oxford historian Sir Michael Howard, saying that the
twentieth century saw two earth-shattering revolutions: the first was Lenin’s Bolshevik
Revolution and the second was “the transformation of the Roman Catholic Church from a
bastion of the ancien régime into perhaps the world’s foremost institutional defender of human
rights.” 1
The theologian most associated with this revolution is Fr. John Courtney Murray. Fr.
Murray was silenced by his Jesuit order under pressure from the Vatican’s Holy Office in 1954
for his liberal views on religious liberty and separation of church and state, and yet nine years
later the Second Vatican Council would invite him as one of its experts on those very matters.
While there, he helped author Dignitatis Humanae. According to one strand of conventional
wisdom, the Church’s stance regarding religious liberty was unchanged between the 1800s and
1
the Second Vatican Council. Then, due to the strength of Murray’s arguments formed in the
1950s and ‘60s and to the less restrictive intellectual atmosphere fostered by Pope John XXIII,
the Church, as if overnight, changed its position on this politically foundational issue. As one
In this essay I will argue that the conventional wisdom about Fr. Murray and the
l development on this question was both less drastic and more gradual than is often presu
med. While it is true that some of Murray's ideas were quite influential at the Second
Vatican Council, he was no revolutionary. Rather, his ideas were an organic extension of
previous concepts taught by popes and theologians. First I will examine the Catholic
Church’s policies and statements regarding the subject of religious liberty from the
French Revolution until the Second Vatican Council, try to understand what historical
events influenced the Church's view of liberty, and attempt to discern what doctrinal
developments occurred during that time. Next, I will examine the ideas of John Courtney
Murray and the role he played at Vatican II. After that I will discuss Dignitatis Humanae
and assess how much of it was really new and to what extent the conventional wisdom
about Murray and the document is correct. Finally, I will discuss the ramifications of
2
The Early Catholic Responses to Liberalism
liberalism, and state neutrality regarding religion are numerous, but a few examples will suffice.
In his 1832 encyclical Mirari Vos, Pope Gregory XVI famously denounced “this false and
absurd maxim, or better this madness, that everyone should have and practice freedom of
conscience.” 3 Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors condemned the proposition “that persons
coming to reside [in some Catholic countries] shall enjoy the public exercise of their own
peculiar worship.” 4 Even the more moderate Leo XIII made similar statements about the dangers
of states allowing “the licence of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth, and souls
away from the practice of virtue.” 5 Such statements are quite illiberal and sound harsh to
contemporary ears. They seem to be hard to square with the more liberal 6 statement of Vatican II
The French Revolution was an earth-shattering event for the Catholic Church. It was the
beginning of the end of what can be called “Catholic political Christendom” 7 in which states
cared for and privileged Catholicism as the dominant religion in society and were allowed to
participate in the Church’s governance and receive the Church’s blessing. This brutal conflict
was the harbinger of the modern age of rationalism and the secularized, even anti-Christian,
political order. For many years to come Catholics would view liberal and progressive reform
movements in Europe with suspicion, reasonably considering them to be the offspring of the
Revolution. The nineteenth century would see Napoleon’s persecution of the papacy, the anti-
clericalism of the Third Republic, 8 the Kulturkampf in Germany, and the Italian annexation of
the Papal States. Throughout this period the European state was paternalistic and not limited in
theory, and so “separation” from the state meant that the Catholic Church would likely be
3
dominated, hindered, and even persecuted by secularist opponents. 9 Another Catholic fear was
that a neutral policy towards Catholicism would lead people toward indifference and cultures
freedom of conscience and worship with the teaching that all non-Catholic religions were
regarded as false. How could someone have the right to believe and preach what is erroneous?
The anti-liberal pronouncements of the nineteenth century popes look very different from
the Second Vatican Council’s embrace of constitutional guarantees of the right to religious
freedom, but theologian Fr. Brian Harrison offers a caveat. Those not schooled in the arcana of
papal history sometimes have a tendency to treat all papal utterances as equally authoritative.
However, papal statements vary in their levels of theological weight for Catholics, based on their
context and intent. Some statements, especially in the period from the Reformation to the
twentieth century, are of unclear authority due to their perhaps intentionally ambiguous wording.
In the Middle Ages popes could in some cases blatantly issue political orders to monarchs. After
the Reformation, however, as papal political power waned popes sometimes adopted a more
hortatory tone. When a pope uses a word like “ought,” it is not always clear if the audience
“ought” to do something as a matter of doctrine or for the sake of pleasing the pope by
complying with his policies. 12 Readers might keep in mind that not all papal statements (or
conciliar statements for that matter) carry the same theological weight, and how much weight
4
Thomistic Responses to Modernity: The Popes See Liberty in a New Light
Were these condemnations of liberalism the last word on the matter until Vatican II took
an apparently opposite stance, or was the shift more gradual? A strong case can be made that
Catholic social and political doctrine developed gradually but significantly between the mid-
1800s (the era of Pius IX) and the 1960s. The development starts at least as far back as Leo XIII
(1878-1903). Weigel, like his hero Murray before him, sees the American Catholic experience as
a strong challenge to the Catholic assumption in Continental Europe that liberal separation of
church and state automatically led to secularization, indifference, and a weakening of the
Church. By the late nineteenth century it was clear that the Catholic Church in America was
flourishing under a relatively laissez-faire stance from the federal government. In other words, it
looked as if American liberalism was not the same as the European variant, or at least it was
having different effects. This state of affairs led Leo XIII to acknowledge in his 1895 encyclical
to the American bishops, Longinqua Oceani, that the American system was tolerably good, but
that it was wrong to draw the conclusion that this model should be adopted everywhere. As Leo
saw it, the Catholic Church in America “would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to
liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.” 13 Thus, a
new way of viewing church-state relations was born: the thesis-hypothesis model. This theory
states that a system of state neutrality (the “hypothesis”) is tolerable whenever Catholics are
unable to bring about a political order in which the state privileges the Catholic Church above all
others (the “thesis” or ideal). 14 The American system had been upgraded from intolerable to
Leo XIII’s papacy was a step towards an embrace of freedom of religion in other ways.
For example, he set in motion a Thomist revival in Catholic education, which would be vitally
5
important to later Thomist defenders of religious liberty, including Murray himself. Leo XIII
drew upon St. Thomas Aquinas to make arguments for the value of freedom of association for
non-state entities, calling them “real societies,” based on friendship, “that bring about mutual
perfection by free activity.” 16 Defenses of freedom important for human moral and social
flourishing would be important to Murray and other reformers. Additionally, Leo drew upon
Pope Gelasius, of Late Antiquity, to form his own theory of Church-state relations. He believed
in “concordia” between the two, rather than a traditional establishment of religion. The state
would facilitate the Church. The state would not teach doctrine, but it could be taught by the
Church in matters of justice and truth. 17 Finally, Leo did not consider democracy to be a
defective system in itself, but rather claimed that the form of government and the content of
Pius XI (1922-1939), whose papacy spanned almost the entire interwar period of
ascendant totalitarianism and eventual economic collapse, was the next pope to make substantial
contributions to Catholic social theology. Although most famous for his statements regarding the
economic order, Pius XI made contributions in various areas of social thought, which he
considered to be a single integrated body of teachings. Indeed, Pius was “the first pontiff to
speak of social teachings as a single body of ‘social doctrine.’ On his watch emerged the now
especially important for understanding religious freedom, but it is not widely understood. As one
6
In other words, the state bears some responsibility for promoting the common good, but not all
responsibility. Writing in an age that put great hopes in the power of the state to solve all human
problems, Pius sought to “set clear boundaries to state power.” 21 He defended the principle of
subsidiarity forcefully in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno: “all social activity, of its very
power and nature, should supply help to the members of the social body, but may never destroy
or absorb them.” 22
And the gravest abusers of state power in the interwar period were not monarchs or liberal
democrats, but totalitarian dictators. In his scathing denunciation of Nazism, Mit brennender
Sorge (1937), Pius declared: “The man of religious faith has an inalienable right to profess his
faith and to practice it in appropriate ways. Laws which repress or render difficult the profession
and practice of religious faith are in contradiction with a law of nature.” 23 Thus, in an age when
some of the world’s most powerful states were brutally disregarding the human rights of their
citizens, the papacy was developing arguments for human freedom that used the language of
Pius XII (1939-1958) went further in embracing liberal democracy and regimes based on
liberty and inalienable human rights than any of his predecessors. According to Russell
First, he did not speak as though the Church were still situated within political
Christendom. Second, he took as normative the democratic regimes’ self-
understanding of the nature and scope of their authority: namely, as governments
legally limited by constitutions and morally limited by a commitment to human
rights. Though Pius XII was critical of certain aspects of democratic government,
his concerns were expressed in the manner of an internal, rather than external,
criticism. 24
7
Pius XII further developed his predecessors’ ideas of a limited state. He wrote at length about
religious liberty and man’s relation to the state and the importance of respecting human rights
and dignity. His most famous statement on the subject of politics was his famous 1944 Christmas
message, which arrived at a conclusion that looked more favorably on democracy than the
beneath the sinister lightning of the war that encompasses them, in the blazing
heat of the furnace that imprisons them, the peoples have, as it were, awakened
from a long torpor. They have assumed, in relation to the state and those who
govern, a new attitude—one that questions, criticizes, distrusts. Taught by bitter
experience, they are more aggressive in opposing the concentration of dictatorial
power that cannot be censured or touched, and call for a system of government
more in keeping with the dignity and liberty of citizens…to avoid for the future a
repetition of such a catastrophe, we must vest efficient guarantees in the people
itself… If, then, we consider the extent and nature of the sacrifices demanded of
all citizens, especially in our day when the activity of the state is so vast and
decisive, the democratic form of government appears to many as a postulate of
nature imposed by reason itself. 25
John XXIII (1958-1963) would reiterate and build on the teachings of Pius XII. In the midst of
the Second Vatican Council, he released his 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris, which listed
As this brief survey shows, the Catholic view of the state and liberty had developed
significantly between the mid-1800s and the mid-1900s. The earlier era was marked by a fear
and distrust of liberal democracy and freedom that ran amok. The later era saw some Catholic
arguments for liberal principles such as limited government, democracy, and the inalienable
human right to social and religious liberty. Moreover, these developments did not occur in a
vacuum, but were a response to the changing political climate in which popes found themselves.
As always, papal statements make the most sense when put into historical context. In the
nineteenth-century Continental, anti-clerical liberalism seemed like the Church’s worst enemy,
and papal pronouncements from that era reflect that hostility. However, the horrors of the
8
twentieth-century dictatorships showed the modern popes the even greater dangers of unchecked,
illiberal government. Around the same time, the relatively benign American Catholic experience
showed that the faith could flourish under conditions of liberty. These developments helped
moved the Church closer to an acceptance of political liberalism and a less hostile stance towards
modernity.
Fr. John Courtney Murray, an American Jesuit priest and arguably the most eloquent
Catholic defender of religious liberty in his day, was active as a public intellectual from the
World War II years until his death in 1967. Although Murray’s views are often contrasted with
the statements made by the more anti-liberal popes of the nineteenth-century, it should be clear
from the story of development told above that Murray was operating in a Catholic environment
that seemed to be ripe for a reconsideration of religious liberty. As we attempted to do for the
modern popes, it is important to understand the historical context before getting into a discussion
of the ideas.
Murray lived in an overwhelmingly Protestant nation that had been gradually coming to
accept Catholics as equals but still harbored some concerns about Catholicism’s seemingly
authoritarian claims. Even if most Catholics in America were good, patriotic citizens, could fears
about politically authoritarian Catholicism ever be put completely out of mind? As Reinhold
Neibuhr complained to Murray, “the Catholic Church’s theory of ‘one true church,’ which is the
very dynamic of Catholic religion, necessarily made Protestants uncomfortable when the
Catholic Church appeared to be gaining an increase of power in any particular nation or in any
particular phase of a nation’s activities.” 27 Such criticisms of the Church struck Murray as
9
having more than a grain of truth and led him to seek a way to reconcile Catholicism and liberal
with critics of Catholicism that the Church had been for years supporting a seemingly cynical
double standard: when Catholics were out of power, they demanded freedom and tolerated a
non-Catholic state as a necessary evil; but when they gained power, they attempted to erect a
Catholic state that would enforce orthodoxy on Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Thus, Murray
bitterly opposed the thesis-hypothesis view of church-state relations, first iterated by Leo XIII. 29
Here is Murray’s sarcastic description of Leo’s “thesis” of the Catholic political ideal, as it was
It is true that you may not find in these [Catholic] countries a Catholic people that
intelligently and actively professes its public faith animo et moribus….You
certainly will fail to find the fulfillment of the Western Christian ideal of political
life and government, which is certainly not dictatorship. No matter. You do find
establishment and intolerance, and therefore you find the ideal Catholic state. 30
something he would dedicate much of his life to rectify. However, it is important to see that
Murray was not a typical liberal critic of traditional Catholicism in the Rawlsian or Lockean
mold.
Murray was not simply a cheerleader for liberalism. Rather, he was a strident critic of
Locke’s individualism, preferring a more Catholic, social view of man. 31 He criticized the view
he attributed to Locke that sees “every individual as a sort of little god almighty, whose power to
preserve himself is checked only at the point where another little god almighty starts preserving
himself.” 32 Rather, like Pius XII and later popes, John Courtney Murray can be seen as an
internal critic of liberal society. He sought to make authentically Catholic natural law arguments
for religious liberty that would nonetheless be intelligible to non-Catholics as well. Murray saw
10
modernity as a two-fold challenge. First, Catholics had to oppose the intellectual and social
currents that promote secularism and marginalize the role of religion in society. Second,
Catholics had to find a way to reconcile their faith with the good parts of modernity, such as
democracy and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. 33 Thus, Murray’s concerns were largely
the same as the concerns of those who would be considered more conservative Catholics: how
could Catholicism remain a vital, flourishing force in modern society; and how could human
organizations?
Attempts at reform within the Catholic Church can be described with the following three
terms: development, aggiornamento, and ressourcement. 34 Development is the idea that new
concepts can be incorporated into Catholic teachings, if they follow from or are an unfolding or
clarification of what the Church has already been teaching. Development often has an emphasis
on recent papal and conciliar statements, as if Catholicism were a living organism, becoming
more mature and wiser over time. The other two concepts complement the idea of development.
Aggiornamento is the notion that the Church must adapt to the changing world, to some extent,
to ensure that it meets the needs of contemporary people. Perhaps the best illustration of
aggiornamento is Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, whose title literally means “of new
things” and which refers to features of modern society such as capitalism, socialism, and labor
unions. Finally, ressourcement is the attempt to renew the Church by going back to the
fundamental sources of Catholic teaching for inspiration, including Scripture, the Church
Fathers, and teachings and actions of popes, bishops, and saints over time. This way of thinking
asks if the Church is best living up to the example of Jesus Christ as understood in the Bible and
in Catholic tradition. When studying Murray, it is important to keep all three of these concepts in
11
mind. As is clear from passages above, Murray hoped for aggiornamento for the Church in
matters of religious liberty. However, development, in the organic sense described above, and
thought by developing a Catholic argument for the inherent human right to religious liberty. He
argued that merely quoting post-Reformation popes, who tended to be hostile to liberalism, was
insufficient. Contemporary men and women, as Pius XII and John XXIII had argued, understood
the importance of human rights and limited government. Murray argued that due to “the growth
of personal and political consciousness, the state of the ancient question concerning public care
of religion has been altered.” 35 It was no longer appropriate to have debates primarily about the
“tolerance…of religious dissidence. The terms of the argument today are, quite simply, religious
freedom.” 36 Murray used ancient and medieval sources to make his case. Drawing upon St.
Thomas Aquinas, Murray argued that whereas the purpose of moral law is to “make man good as
man,” the much more limited scope of human law is concerned with “not man as man but man as
citizen.” 37 He further argued for the use of prudence and a concern for the common good when
making laws. Not all moral laws could or should be enforced through political coercion.
Therefore, a law ought to be “necessary or useful for the common good in the given
circumstances. The morality of a law is not an immediate guarantee of its necessity or utility.” 38
borrow the language of America’s Bill of Rights, religious freedom has the following aspects:
the right to the free exercise of religion and a prohibition on establishing a national church.
Murray was interested in both of these. First, applying his view of temporal laws to church-state
policy, Murray argued against persecution or hindrance of people in their search for God,
12
whether Catholic or not. He started with the human right to freedom of conscience, of which he
says: “the tradition with regard to the necessary freedom of the act of faith…runs unbrokenly
from the text of the New Testament to the Code of Canon Law (can. 1351).” 39 He argues for the
“immunity of conscience from coercion in its internal religious decisions,” 40 calling the
conscience a “sacred forum.” 41 According to Murray, when this freedom is taken into account
along with man’s social nature, it is clear that human beings also possess freedom from coercion
churches. 42 Murray makes a metaphysical argument for the link between freedom of conscience
a true metaphysic of the human person affirms that human existence is essentially
social-historical existence. It is not permitted to introduce a dichotomy into man,
to separate his personal-interior existence and his social-historical existence.
Hence it is not permitted to recognize freedom of conscience and to deny freedom
of religious expression. Both freedoms are given in the same one instance; they
are coequal and coordinate, inseparable, equally constitutive of the dignity and
integrity of man. 43
This was the crux of Murray’s argument, and it would be adopted in roughly the same form in
Vatican II’s “Declaration on Religious Freedom.” Moreover, Fr. Murray complemented this
argument with a historical one that contends that “coercion or constraint of religious worship,
conscience, from the days of Diocletian to our own day of more subtle and damaging pressures
liberals, his justification is clearly a very Catholic one. Man must be free to seek God, because he
has a sacred quest to find God. The right is inseparable from the duty. Thus, Murray does not
depart from the nineteenth century Catholic wisdom that “error has no rights.” But due to his
dignity as a rational and social creature, man must be free from coercion in religious matters,
13
even if he falls away from Catholic orthodoxy. In Murray’s view error still has no moral rights,
but the person making the error has the right to be left alone by the state.
His views concerning the other church-state issue, establishment, were also largely in line
with American conventional wisdom and the First Amendment. He argued that governments
should not establish a church, not even the Catholic Church. He defends this not from political
expediency as the Catholic “thesis-hypothesis” theorists had (i.e. that a religiously neutral state
could be tolerated as the second best option), but by appealing to the nature of government itself.
He argues that “the care of religion, in so far as it implies the care of souls, is not in any sense a
function either of civil society or of the state.” 45 Instead, applying the principle of subsidiarity,
Murray says that “the care of religion in so far as religion is an integral element of the common
good of society, devolves upon those institutions whose purposes are religious—the Church and
the churches, and various voluntary associations for religious purposes.” 46 Finally, “the care of
religion, in so far as it is a duty incumbent on the state, is limited to a care for the religious
freedom of the body politic.” 47 The state “under today’s conditions of growth in the personal and
that it was appropriate for a nation to constitutionally declare itself to be Catholic as long as there
Murray drew heavily upon the social teachings of the recent popes, especially Leo XIII
and Pius XII, when making his arguments about religious liberty and religious establishment. He
also drew upon older sources, which Leo XIII had also referenced. One was Pope Gelasius who
viewed society as a “dyarchy” of the spiritual and temporal powers. The other was Pope Gregory
VII, who, Murray claimed, had been concerned primarily with the freedom of the Church, not
14
Fr. Murray was well aware of the difficulty of reconciling his own views on religious
liberty with the more anti-liberal views of the nineteenth-century popes. He got around this
problem by emphasizing the historical nature of the papal statements that were not in line with
his own views. In other words, anti-liberal popes were often responding to the specific social and
political conditions of their times, and some of their statements would be anachronistic if applied
pronouncements of past popes and councils. Even Fr. Brian Harrison, one of Murray’s most
thorough critics, attempts to put papal statements into their proper historical context, arguing, for
example, that some of the anti-liberal statements made by nineteenth century popes were against
a certain radical strain of liberalism advocated by people like the French intellectual Lamennais,
not denunciations of all types of liberalism. 52 Moreover, Avery Cardinal Dulles warns against
taking the Syllabus of Errors, containing the most famous papal condemnations of liberalism and
modernity, at face value, pointing out that it was “an unsigned appendix to [the encyclical
Quanta Cura]....According to Newman the Syllabus has no more doctrinal authority in itself than
an index or table of contents taken apart from the book to which it refers.” 53 Nonetheless,
Murray’s attempt to enlist past popes, such as Leo XIII, as champions of religious freedom,
while explaining away their more anti-liberal statements as “historical” was controversial in his
own day, when belief in the development of doctrine was looked on with more caution than it is
today. Indeed, both Murray’s critics and one of his devotees have criticized his cherry-picking of
Murray made enemies with some conservative American Catholics due to his role as a
champion of the development of Catholic teaching toward a more liberal stance regarding
religious liberty, 55 a development that he believed had been already well underway during Pius
15
XII’s pontificate. 56 These conservative critics of Murray, believing that such pro-liberty views
could not be reconciled with traditional Catholic teaching, complained to Cardinal Ottaviani, the
head of the Holy Office at the Vatican, who was sympathetic to their more conservative reading
Ottaviani, Murray’s superiors in the Jesuit order found it best to command him to refrain from
publishing material on the subject of religious liberty, at least for the time being. 57 Murray’s
silencing, though probably not ordered directly by the Vatican, reflected the relatively cautious
atmosphere within the Catholic Church in the 1950s under Pius XII. Although Pius XII was in
many ways a reformer (for example, he praised democracy and he allowed Catholic scholars to
use modern techniques of scriptural exegesis 58) by 1950 a fear of a resurgence of modern values
led to him to look with a suspicious eye toward many of the more liberal theologians of the era.
During that time, in which the Curia was more conservative than Pius himself, 59 various well-
known scholars, including Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and, of course, John
After the death of Pius XII and the election of John XXIII, the mood within the Church
changed enough that in 1960 Murray felt comfortable enough to publish his most famous work,
We Hold These Truths, which touched upon religious liberty as well as various other issues in
political theology and philosophy. 61 Murray described the new environment thus: “John XXIII
had created an atmosphere in which a lot of things came unstuck—old patterns of thought,
behavior, feeling. They were not challenged or refuted, but rather just dropped.” 62 Murray, along
with other prominent liberal theologians, was at first deliberately disinvited from attending the
Second Vatican Council by the still relatively conservative Vatican administration that organized
it. 63 However, many American cardinals, seeing firsthand the difficulty of defending illiberal
16
Catholic views regarding church-state issues within a liberal society, were great champions of
religious liberty at the council, and the famous Cardinal Spellman, usually considered a
conservative, succeeded in inviting Murray to the council as a peritus (i.e. “expert” theologian)
in 1963. While at the council, Murray would be a great shaper of the “Declaration on Religious
Freedom,” also known by its Latin name, Dignitatis Humanae. Thus, in a span of eight years,
Murray went from being a censured theologian to an expert theologian at the Second Vatican
Council.
By the time of Vatican II, most Catholic bishops supported that idea that human beings
deserved to exercise religious liberty. Bishops who had qualms about a statement by the Church
in support of religious liberty were in many cases uneasy not so much about religious liberty per
se, rather they worried that such a development would be difficult to reconcile with earlier papal
statements on the matter. 64 There were also bishops at the council who were hesitant to have the
council make a statement about such a hot-button issue. 65 Some of the most vigorous supporters
of a strong statement in support of liberty were bishops from America, 66 where, of course, they
The proponents of religious liberty were not only concerned with making a good
impression on their Protestant critics. They were also concerned that for the Church to insist on
freedom for its members in totalitarian regimes, it must first show itself to be a champion of
religious liberty. A bishop from communist Yugoslavia, expressed the importance of the issue:
the problem par excellence.” 67 Some conservative bishops, often from countries such as Spain
and Italy, where Catholicism was dominant, were quite hesitant and even hostile to drafts of
17
Dignitatis Humanae that appeared to be too liberal. One Spanish cardinal, criticizing an early
draft of the declaration, “denounced the document as favoring liberalism and said that it seemed
to be meant primarily for Protestant countries. Its adoption would mean a revolution in the
Such debates are interesting to read about because they show how diverse the
circumstances were in which the various “Council Fathers” found themselves in their respective
countries. The Catholic Church was in a position of political power in places. In other places it
was a brutally persecuted minority religion. In pluralistic societies it coexisted with other
religions with varying degrees of difficulty. Although earlier drafts of the declaration very much
mirrored John Courtney Murray’s views on both religious liberty and establishment, the final
version also reflects the concerns of the conservative minority at the council. 69
Dignitatis Humanae
The final, approved version of the document, known in English as the “Declaration on
Religious Freedom” and in Latin as Dignitatis Humanae, begins by recognizing and approving
of the fact that “contemporary man” has become more aware of the dignity of human beings and
the needs of governments to recognize the rights that accompany this dignity. 70 It also states its
intention to “develop the doctrine of recent Popes on the inviolable rights of the human person
and on the constitutional order of society.” 71 Thus, the bishops show their concern for both
development of doctrine and for aggiornamento. However, at the outset the document states that
“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,” 72 showing itself to be fundamentally a
traditional document on the issue of establishment. Next, Dignitatis “declares that the human
18
person has a right to religious freedom.” 73 He has an immunity from coercion “on the part of
individuals or of social groups and of any human power” not to be “forced to act in a manner
contrary to his own beliefs” nor to be “restrained from acting in accordance with his own beliefs,
whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.”74
The right is grounded, as the title of the declaration suggests, in the “very dignity of the human
person,” and it is to be constitutionally recognized. 75 Men have a duty to “seek the truth,” which
can only be done under conditions of freedom from coercion. 76 Following the same logic that
Murray had, Dignitatis argues that, due to man’s “social nature,” outward expressions and
discussions of faith must not be impeded. 77 The declaration approves of preaching by religious
bodies, but opposes “any manner of action which might seem to carry a hint of coercion or of a
kind of persuasion that would be dishonorable or unworthy, especially when dealing with the
poor or uneducated people.” 78 Governments must “see to it that the equality of citizens before
the law… is never violated for religious reasons… Nor is there to be discrimination among
citizens.” 79 Governments, rather than being neutral toward religion, ought to “create conditions
favorable to the fostering of religious life.” It may also give “special legal recognition” to a
particular religion, as long as it does not infringe upon the rights of people of other religions. 80 It
should favor the “religious life of the people,” but not “presume to direct or inhibit acts that are
religious.” 81
Dignitatis says that exercise of religion is “subject to certain regulatory norms.” 82 Men
and groups are morally bound to respect the rights of others and the “common welfare of all,”
dealing with others “in justice and civility” when exercising their own rights. 83 Moreover,
“society has the right to defend itself against possible abuses committed on pretext of freedom of
religion.” 84 In upholding this right of society, governments are not “to act in arbitrary fashion or
19
in an unfair spirit of partisanship. Its action is to be controlled by juridical norms which are in
conformity with the objective moral order.” 85 When regulating religious activity, governments
must be acting to uphold “public order” which consists of the care for “public peace” and “public
morality.” 86 The rest of the declaration gives Biblical defenses of religious freedom and the
Courtney Murray in the footnotes. He interprets the declaration to be essentially identical with
his own views. The declaration’s arguments in favor of religious liberty, grounded in the human
person’s dignity, social nature, and duty to seek the divine truth, are very similar to the view
advocated by Murray. Moreover, by forbidding heavy state intrusion into the religious lives of
establishment, or at least versions of that theory that called for the hindering of or even
persecution of those practicing non-Catholic religions. To this extent Fr. Murray clearly won a
great victory for religious freedom. No one denies the obvious Murrayan imprint on much of the
document.
However, there is at least one major area in which the declaration deviated from
Murray’s views: establishment or the public care of religion. As we have seen, Murray believed
that government was only competent to care for the religious freedom of its citizens. It could not
intervene in any other way. He argued that a weak or nominal establishment could be allowed as
long as it had “no juridical consequences. 87 Another way of saying this is that the Church could
not ask anything of the state besides respect for its freedom. Murray argued that the Declaration
20
established as doctrine that the Catholic Church could only claim from the state “freedom,
nothing more.” 88 This is so, because “government is forbidden to assume the care of religious
truth as such…or the task of judging the truth or value of religious propaganda. Otherwise it
would exceed its competence, which is confined to the affairs of the temporal and terrestrial
order.” 89
It is difficult to square this claim with the text of the declaration. First, as Russell
Hittinger points out, the Declaration clearly sidesteps the issue of establishment, not intending
any development in that area, when, in article 1, it says it “leaves intact the traditional Catholic
teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and the one
Church of Christ.” 90 Moreover, in article 13, the declaration claims freedom for the Church,
based not only on the natural law reasons given earlier that apply to all religious bodies, but in
addition it justifies its freedom as being a special mission from Christ.91 This seems to
presuppose that states are indeed competent to judge the truth of the claims of Christ. Another
commentator agrees that Murray “did not succeed in having the declaration articulate the role of
the state in wholly negative terms or to adopt the position that the state is incompetent in all
6. 93 Indeed, it seems like a stretch to interpret the declaration’s allowance of giving one religion
“special legal recognition” over others 94 with Murray’s requirement that legal recognitions of a
Furthermore, Fr. Brian Harrison points out that earlier versions of the declaration
included the idea that the state was competent to uphold religious liberty but not competent in
any other aspect of religious affairs. However, after objections from conservative Council
Fathers, this language was dropped for the final, adopted draft, which calls care for the “common
21
temporal good” the state’s “distinctive purpose,” 96 no longer its single purpose, 97 and only
disallows the state “to hinder or take charge of religious activity.” 98 Fr. Harrison gives further
evidence that the council did not adopt Murray’s view that legal recognition could have no
“juridical consequences.”
Although the Vatican did later revise its concordats with countries such as Italy, Spain,
and Argentina in order to allow for more religious liberty, it left its concordats intact with the
Dominican Republic, which invoked “the name of the Most Holy Trinity,” clearly meaning that
the state had judged at least one Catholic teaching to be true. 99 Ten years after the council, the
Vatican signed a concordat with Columbia that made similar religious judgments. 100 Moreover,
both of these concordats had “juridical consequences,” giving Catholicism privileges in policies
regarding “marriage legislation, public education, the designation of public holidays, the civil
Given all this evidence from the text itself, from what was left out of the text, and from
how the Vatican acted after the declaration, I must side with those who find a significant
discrepancy between what Murray wanted the document to say and what it actually said. A
perhaps overly simple—and maybe overly American—way of explaining what the declaration
said is to say that it mostly affirmed the American constitutional guarantee of free exercise of
religion, though allowing for restrictions for various reasons, but it did not adopt the First
Although Dignitatis Humanae did not develop doctrine as far as Murray wanted it to, it
seems clear that some sort of development did occur. According to Murray, the Church had
22
already taught that man has a right to immunity from coercion to act contrary to his beliefs. What
is new (but still “in harmony” with the older teaching) is that the declaration states that man also
has an immunity from being restrained from acting in accordance with his religious beliefs. 102 As
The Church had long taught that there were three kinds of rights: the right to do something
(agendi), to have something (habendi), or to have something done or not done by someone else
(exigendi). 103 However, in the past exigendi rights had generally been attributed to rulers: they
could demand things from their subjects. In a more democratic spirit, Vatican II declared that
citizens could make demands on those that governed them. 104 As noted earlier, Pius XI and Pius
XII had already moved in this direction in the 1930s and 40s. Moreover, the declaration seems to
have adopted a line of thought that was begun by St. Thomas Aquinas: a person has a subjective
duty to follow an “objectively erroneous conscience, when the error is inculpable.” 105 This is due
to the modern insight that people are less rational than once thought and are therefore very often
not culpable for their doctrinal errors. Therefore, they ought to be immune from coercion when
following this erroneous conscience. Harrison says that it is more common today to separate the
objective moral duty to accept the truth from the subjective moral duty to follow one’s
conscience. Modern Catholics see that it may be quite common that following an erroneous
conscience could be motivated by a love of God and could in some cases be an occasion for
sanctification. Such ideas are not new, but the instances of such sanctification are now seen to be
Russell Hittinger also sees some new developments in Dignitatis Humanae. For one
thing, it insists that the Church’s freedom be complemented by guarantees for the freedom of
23
others. The Church’s liberty “does not require political hegemony.” 107 For another, he sees the
declaration as a signal that the Church has a greater “spirit of detachment from the problem of
the state” than it did for much of its history. 108 Hittinger sees not so much doctrinal development,
but a shift in attitude and emphasis. According to Hittinger, the problem that the Catholic Church
faced after the loss of the Papal States and after Vatican I was that it lacked a “middle-level
policy that could bring together the speculative and diplomatic poles.” 109 What he means by this
is that the Church had theoretical doctrines and it also had various concordats with states.
However, there was no “middle-level” explanation of how these theological doctrines should be
Dignitatis Humanae provided this “middle-level” missing position. 110 The declaration
can be seen as more on the level of philosophy than theological doctrine. Hittinger also places
emphasis on the near silence of the declaration concerning the issue of establishment. He
considers this silence to be deliberate. First, “it would have taken a Herculean effort to sort
through fifteen hundred years of history for the purpose of identifying which government
expressions of Catholicism (or for that matter, of religion) were good, merely acceptable, or
unacceptable.” 111 Second, by the time of the council “the most pressing problems facing the
Church were how to induce secularist regimes to respect freedom of religion and how to use the
Church’s moral and spiritual resources to support constitutionally limited government in the
wake of the world wars.” 112 Finally, he argues that “the Catholic Church did not, and does not,
believe that disestablishment is a principle superior to free exercise.” 113 The declaration is
interesting both for what it says and what it does not say.
Angela Carmella sees the declaration as a “rejection of the ideal confessional state,” the
thesis-hypothesis concept that Murray had so vehemently argued against, and “an acceptance of
24
political liberalism.” 114 Dignitatis Humanae does not condemn establishment (in the sense of a
state that takes the “care of religion” into its own hands) as Murray had wanted, but neither does
it require establishment or hold it up as an ideal. And it only allows establishment of religion that
do not entail oppression of dissenters. Avery Cardinal Dulles describes the change as a shift in
the “means” advocated for the support of religion. The nineteenth-century popes had a
paternalistic view of the state and thus advocated establishment, whereas mid-twentieth-century
Catholics “placed greater reliance on indirect support.” 115 Although these various scholars
emphasize different things when describing the developments found in Dignitatis Humanae,
their views seem to be relatively harmonious and easy to reconcile with one another. There
seems to be a general agreement that Dignitatis Humanae marked a major step toward the
human rights. However, the scholars all recognize that the arguments found in the declaration, as
well as almost of all Murray’s arguments, in favor of religious liberty that are authentically
Catholic. They are almost entirely derived from the Bible and Aquinas, as well as various
When studying Dignitatis Humanae one can see evidence of all three of the types of
change mentioned earlier. There was aggiornamento in the sense that the Church attempted to
adapt its stance towards religious liberty in the context of a modern world largely made up of
oppressive, atheistic dictatorships on the one hand, and pluralistic liberal democracies on the
other. As for ressourcement, one can see in the declaration the heavy influence of the Bible and
popes and theologians from ancient and medieval times. Lastly, Dignitatis Humanae was an
organic, logical development of the teachings of the popes from Leo XIII to John XXIII.
25
Implications of Dignitatis Humanae and Conclusion
What are the implications of Dignitatis Humanae? There seems to be a consensus among
those who have studied Dignitatis Humanae that it overturns, or at least severely weakens, the
Harrison has pointed out, the Vatican revised several of its concordats with Catholic nations
towards more liberal, pluralistic policies after Vatican II. However, decades after the declaration,
the Vatican signed or kept on the books concordats that explicitly embraced Catholicism as more
than just a nominal state religion. Moreover, he points out that there are states, such as Ireland
and the Philippines, which officially have no established church, yet which have tended to have
very Catholic political cultures and laws. Harrison sees this as another type of non-liberal
arrangement that continues to be allowed under Church teaching. 116 Harrison also suggests that
the requirement in Dignitatis Humanae that restrictions on religious liberty be justified according
to the requirements of public order, public peace, or public morality leaves a lot of leeway for
what can be banned or discouraged by societies. For example, in 1985 Pope John Paul II
The above examples suggest that, at least from a libertarian’s point of view, many of the
Catholic Church’s political emphases have not changed so much. But what has changed is of
great importance. The Council Fathers at Vatican II, aided by John Courtney Murray, developed
generally regarded as one of the most fundamental human freedoms. They did this by appealing
to Biblical and Thomistic arguments about human dignity and the duty of human beings to
search for God, rather than making arguments based on religious skepticism about religious
truth, 118 as liberals such as John Stuart Mill had done, or on consideration of political expediency
26
as other liberal thinkers have. Many religious believers in the world, including non-Catholics,
who wish to embrace religious liberty but not indifference or skepticism, can find a lot to admire
in Dignitatis Humanae.
Moreover, as we saw above, George Weigel has argued that the declaration has played a
major role in the Catholic Church’s transformation in the last half-century or so from what many
perceived as a hindrance to human liberty to one of the most effective champions of liberty.
When faced with human rights violations by secular democracies, anti-religious dictatorships,
and even paternalistic Catholic states, the Catholic Church now has a more consistent and more
convincing response than ever before. The Church has not adopted all of John Courtney Murray's
ideas. However, like Fr. Murray, and in no small part due to his influence, the Catholic Church
now preaches and demands religious liberty for people of all faiths.
27
1
George Weigel, Freedom and Its Discontents (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1991), 25.
2
Robert M. McClory, Faithful Dissenters: Stories of Men and Women Who Loved and Changed the Church
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000), 9.
3
Quoted in: Weigel, 28.
4
Quoted in: Brian Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception (Melbourne: John XXIII Fellowship Co-op. Ltd.,
1988), 15.
5
Ibid.
6
In this case “liberal” is used in the nineteenth-century political sense, which means an emphasis on individual
rights and freedom from the state.
7
Russell Hittinger, “Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903)” in The Teachings of Modern Roman Catholicism on Law, Politics,
& Human Nature, ed. John Witte Jr. and Frank S. Alexander (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 43.
8
Weigel, 29.
9
Quoted in: Brian Harrison, “John Courtney Murray: A Reliable Interpreter of Dignitatis Humanae?,” Living
Tradition, 33, (January 1991), <http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt33.html>, accessed 1 May 2009.
10
Weigel, 29.
11
Ibid., 38.
12
Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 23-30.
13
Weigel, 32.
14
Angela C. Carmella, “John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967)” in The Teachings of Modern Roman Catholicism
on Law, Politics, & Human Nature, 197.
15
Weigel, 32.
16
Hittinger, “Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903),” 60.
17
Ibid., 61-63.
18
Ibid., 64.
19
Ibid., 66.
20
Russell Hittinger, “Introduction to Modern Catholicism” in The Teachings of Modern Roman Catholicism on Law,
Politics, & Human Nature, 22.
21
Weigel, 37.
22
Quoted in Ibid., 35.
23
Quoted in John Courtney Murray, The Problem of Religious Freedom (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman
Press, 1965), 69.
24
Russell Hittinger, “The Declaration on Religious Liberty” in Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition, ed. Matthew
L. Lamb and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 361-362.
25
Ibid., 377.
26
Carmella, 201.
27
John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), 206.
28
Ibid.
29
Carmella, 197.
30
Quoted in Ibid.
31
Ibid., 191.
32
John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005,
originally published in 1960), 274.
33
McGreevy, 191.
34
John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2008), 36.
35
Murray, The Problem of Religious Freedom, 19.
36
Ibid.
37
Quoted in Carmella, 187. Italics in the original.
38
Quoted in Ibid., 188.
39
Murray, The Problem of Religious Freedom, pg. 33.
40
Ibid., 34.
41
Ibid.
28
42
Ibid., 36-38.
43
Ibid., 38.
44
Ibid., 39.
45
Ibid., 40.
46
Ibid., 40.
47
Ibid., 41.
48
Ibid.
49
Ibid., 96.
50
Carmella, 189.
51
Murray, The Problem of Religious Freedom, 88-89.
52
Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 109.
53
Avery Dulles, “Religious Freedom: Innovation and Development,” First Things 118 (2001).
54
Carmella, “John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967),” 200, and Harrison, “John Courtney Murray: A Reliable
Interpreter of Dignitatis Humanae?”
55
A detailed account of the Murray's silencing can be found in Joseph A. Komonchak, “The Silencing of John
Courtney Murray” in Cristianesimo nella storia: saggi in onore di Giuseppe Alberigo, ed. Alberto Melloni
(Bologna: Il mulino, 1996), 657-702.
56
Robert Nugent, “The Censuring of John Courtney Murray: Part Two,” The Catholic World 1445 (March/April
2008), <http://www.thecatholicworld.com/archived_files/issue_3-4_08/PDFs/article_2_pdf.pdf>, accessed 1 May,
2009.
57
Ibid.
58
O’Malley, 83-86.
59
Xavier Rynne, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 34.
60
O’Malley, 87.
61
McClory, 18-19.
62
Donald E. Pelotte, John Courtney Murray: Theologian in Conflict (New York: Paulist Press, 1975), 75.
63
Nugent.
64
McGreevy, 237.
65
Ralph M. Wiltgen, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber (Chawleigh, England: Augustine Publishing Company, 1978,
originally published in 1967), 160.
66
Ibid., 163.
67
Rynne, 300.
68
Ibid., 299.
69
Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 66-67.
70
Dignitatis Humanae, 1, in The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter M. Abbott, (New York: Herder and Herder,
1966), 675-696. Hereafter DH.
71
DH, 1 in Ibid.
72
DH, 1 in Ibid.
73
DH, 2 in Ibid.
74
DH, 2 in Ibid.
75
DH, 2 in Ibid.
76
DH, 2 in Ibid.
77
DH, 3 in Ibid.
78
DH, 4 in Ibid.
79
DH, 6 in Ibid.
80
DH, 6 in Ibid.
81
DH, 3 in Ibid.
82
DH, 7 in Ibid.
83
DH, 7 in Ibid.
84
DH, 7 in Ibid.
85
DH, 7 in Ibid. This requirement was included at the suggestion of Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, who was worried
that otherwise Communist governments could argue that their persecutions of religion were being done in the name
of public order. See: Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 98-99.
86
DH, 7 in Ibid.
29
87
Murray, The Problem of Religious Freedom, 96.
88
Murray, “Religious Freedom”, in The Documents of Vatican II, 693.
89
Quoted in Harrison, “John Courtney Murray – A Reliable Interpeter of Dignitatis Humanae?”
90
Quoted in Hittinger, “The Declaration on Religious Liberty”, 365.
91
Ibid., 373.
92
Carmella, 205.
93
Ibid., pg. 205.
94
DH, 6 in The Documents of Vatican II.
95
See footnote 87.
96
This is how Harrison translates the phrase “proprius finis.” His translation seems reasonable in the context, and
other translations, such as the one in Abbott, give no alternative translation for the word “proprius”, rather they give
no translation of the word at all. See: Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 67-8.
97
Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 67-8.
98
Ibid., 67. This is Harrison’s translation of “dirigere vel impedire”, but is not far from the translation in Abbott,
which says “direct or inhibit.” See: The Documents of Vatican II, 681.
99
Harrison, “John Courtney Murray: A Reliable Interpreter of Dignitatis Humanae? (Part II),” Living Tradition, 34,
(March 1991), <http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt34.html>, accessed 1 May 2009.
As of 1991, twenty six years had elapsed since the council, but the concordat had not been revised.
100
Ibid.
101
Ibid. Studying post-Dignitatis Humanae Vatican history regarding concordats and responses to allegations of
human rights violations in majority Catholic countries would provide a fascinating topic for future study.
102
The Documents of Vatican II, 678.
103
Harrison, Contraception and Religious Liberty, 117-18.
104
Ibid.
105
Ibid., 130.
106
Ibid.
107
Hittinger, “The Declaration on Religious Liberty,” 375.
108
Ibid.
109
Ibid., 361.
110
Ibid., 362.
111
Ibid., 365.
112
Ibid., 366.
113
Ibid.
114
Carmella, 206.
115
Dulles, 38.
116
Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 79-80.
117
Ibid., 111.
118
Ibid., 127.
30