Dignitatis Humanae and Social Kingship, Part One

Editor’s note: This is Part One of a two-part essay on the teachings of the Second Vatican Council on religious freedom.

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One of the constant criticisms from traditionalist Catholics of Vatican II’s document on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae (henceforth, DH), is that it contradicts previous Church teachings on that topic and so undermines the doctrine of the social kingship of Christ. Furthermore, it is alleged that when this “novel” teaching is paired with the Council’s robust affirmation of the importance of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, you end up with an overall theological ethos of religious relativism and indifferentism.

The FSSPX represents an extreme case of this dissent from DH. But it is also a central complaint from many otherwise observant and faithful Catholics who self-identify as members of one of the varieties of “traditionalism”. And to make the point that they are not dissenting from anything dogmatic, they frequently point out that the Council as a whole was a pastoral one and did not issue any new dogmas.

Therefore, they argue, since DH is not an infallible text, it can be rejected as contrary to previous teachings and will hopefully be repudiated by a future pope or council. This seems, for example, to be the view of Bishop Athanasius Schneider, who prefers to call such teachings “ambiguous” rather than “heretical,” although he makes it quite clear that he thinks DH teaches error on the matter of religious freedom.

The focus on coercion

I reject all of these criticisms. Obviously, I cannot untie so many thorny knots in a short essay such as this. Therefore, I will focus on the three main questions in play. Namely, that DH contradicts previous Church teaching, that it undermines the concept of the social kingship of Christ, and that dissent from it is allowed due to its “merely pastoral” nature.

If one reads DH as a direct repudiation of the very idea of a confessional Catholic State, or a direct rejection of the moral duty of every person to pursue the truth about God, or of the obligation of civil society to acknowledge and promote this duty as central to the life of the polis, then it would indeed be in contradiction to previous teachings. Fortunately, DH does none of these things and instead states clearly that its teaching “leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.” (§1)

The true focus of the text is clearly spelled out in the opening sentence of DH: “Religious freedom, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society.” The issue at hand is not at all about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of Catholic confessional states. Drawing from some of the deepest theological wellsprings of the Tradition, DH reaches a pastoral conclusion in terms of how the Church should approach the question of forced coercion in religious matters. And it is making the thoroughly traditional argument–an argument that goes back to the Church Fathers–that true faith must never be coerced.

Prescinding from the actual history of the Church’s checkered praxis in this regard (since that would take another article in its own right), the point here is a simple one. DH is not teaching error in this matter and even leaves open the possibility of some level of punitive action from civil authority in the religious domain when “public order” is threatened. This latter point was a matter of great debate during the Council, and if there is any “ambiguity” in DH it is that it leaves open just what “public order” means. But at the very least, it is simply not true that DH is embracing modern notions of religious relativism in a social sense and is focused instead on the specific issue of the essence of true faith as non-coerced.

In short, what DH teaches is that even if you have a Catholic confessional State–or better, especially if you have a Catholic confessional State–you must still avoid coercive and punitive laws that are designed to repress the freedom to pursue one’s moral conscience in religious matters. Furthermore, none of this entails the rejection of the idea of a State enshrining Catholicism as the preferred religion and granting it privileges, such as state-funding, which other forms of religion do not enjoy. This might be viewed as a form of coercion, and it probably is, but it is not oppressively so since it affirms a wide right to religious freedom in the civil sphere for any religion that does not threaten public order in dangerous ways (e.g., one can envision restrictions on religions that advocate for forms of race-based murder).

Criticism of pastoral practice

Thus, it can be clearly discerned that DH is in subtle ways questioning some aspects of the Church’s previous pastoral praxis. That would include the Inquisitions, which—although not as awful as the anti-Catholic mythmakers would have us believe—were still bad enough in themselves and are still a part of our Western cultural memory. The Council wanted to make it clear that no matter the actual historical severity of such things, the Church repudiates strong-armed coercion as a means for saving souls. And going beyond the issue of the violation of religious consciences, the pastoral reality is that such measures are counterproductive in the long run since they breed resentment and hostility toward the Church, which is now viewed, not as a bearer of a liberating message, but as an oppressor of freedom. The Enlightenment used this hostility toward the Church and perception of the Church to great advantage.

The Australian theologian Tracey Rowland, in Introducing Communio Theology deftly argues therefore for a minimalist reading of DH wherein no major political theory regarding an “establishment of religion” is put forward, and certainly not a full-throated endorsement of an American-style “separation of Church and State”. She endorses the minimalist reading of DH put forward by the philosopher Russell Hittinger, who rejects the notion that DH is attempting to articulate a broad new political theory about Church and State. He states: “It might prove surprising, if not frustrating, that DH puts to one side any theoretical treatment of the complexus of issues which directly touch, in American terms, upon establishment of religion” (quoted in Rowland, p. 104).

Hittinger then goes on to criticize those who see in DH a favorable “reckoning” with modern liberalism:

The correct answer is that [this] isn’t possible because DH does not undertake such a reckoning. … DH should not be made to resolve every kind of theoretical or practical issue which might touch upon the relationship between the Church and governments. … My point is that DH should not be made to carry freight it wasn’t meant to bear. (Rowland, p. 105)

Unfortunately, after the Council, many Catholic thinkers spun this differently and viewed DH as an endorsement of the views of the American theologian John Courtney Murray, who viewed it as a conciliar approval for the American constitutional arrangement. This is but one example of the many ways in which false readings of the Council were allowed to take root and spread like a cancer through the Church. Traditionalists such as Athanasius Schneider claim that it is precisely the ambiguity of the Council on many such issues that led directly to these ruptures with Tradition. And even Rowland acknowledges that such “spinnings” constitute a part of the Council’s reception tradition.

But there is also such a thing as the deliberate manipulation of the facts. There can also be a deceptive mendacity at work by those who harbored ill will toward traditional Church teachings and wanted them changed, by hook or by crook, to suit the liberal aggiornamento project of cultural accommodation. This was the point made by Pope Benedict when he contrasted the actual texts of the Council with the false Council of the media. And regarding the specific example of DH, one sees clearly that its minimalist teaching was falsely inflated beyond its narrow intentions to mean more than it meant.

Past the current impasse

I remember reading the actual documents of Vatican II for the first time in 1978, after entering minor seminary. I had grown up in the 60s and 70s and been fed a certain narrative about the Council, which implied that it was a revolution that had broken with the “old bad Catholicism” and had “finally” embraced the modern world. To my shock and surprise as I read the texts, I discovered beautiful and theologically profound documents, fully traditional and orthodox, and therefore I saw no evidence of the revolution I was told was in its pages.

And that is an analysis I stand by today. I am fully aware of the fact that the Council had flaws. All councils do. I am not reading it through “Boomer rose-colored glasses,” and I think it is okay to critique elements of the Council, as even Pope Benedict did at times. The issue then is not the oft-repeated meme by some, in the context of the current SSPX debate, that the Church “does not allow for any criticism of the Council.”

This is simply false and is easily refuted by anyone with even a passing knowledge of the theological literature on the Council from all ideological quarters. Many very orthodox and sound theologians have questioned some aspects of the Council, and yet they remain in good standing with the Church.

The issue, rather, is truth. The issue thus goes beyond the “traditionalists vs. progressives” impasse, as if those are our only real options. That has become such a tiresome distraction. The issue is, beyond all the ideological spinning, what did DH actually teach? I think that matters. Call me old-fashioned and quaint, but I still think that the truth of the Council matters. And I further think that it is not as difficult as some make it seem to determine what it was that the Council actually taught, including what it was that DH taught.

And the fact is, we are not without sufficient scholarly resources to make such adjudications about what it is DH actually taught. There are numerous examples to choose from, but one in particular stands out from the rest. And that is the book, titled Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom (Eerdmans, 2015), by the late David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy Jr., that provides all of the various drafts from the Council that led up to the final text of DH. [Editor’s note: See CWR’s 2015 interview with Schindler and Healy about their book.]

And those drafts are instructive since it shows clearly how much the Council Fathers desired to remain within the Tradition and how their focus was on the question of coercion and the manner in which the moral dignity of the human religious conscience must be valorized as an essentially free act of the person when embracing the truth of religion.

The text also contains lengthy and helpful commentary from both Schindler and Healy that draws out these essential features of DH and places them in continuity with the Tradition. One can perhaps disagree with their analysis, but the entire text gives the lie to the notion that DH is this hopelessly ambiguous thing that opens the door to religious relativism.

Contrary to previous magisterial teachings?

Of course, there is also still the issue of whether any acknowledgment of the necessity of religious freedom is contrary to previous magisterial teachings. The text also deals with that issue. Suffice it to say that there can be no denying that, superficially at least, DH seems to contradict previous Church praxis and the teachings of 19th-century popes who explicitly rejected religious freedom as a danger to be avoided.

Regarding Church praxis, all I can say is that if you think that torturing and/or executing heretics is something that the Church has every right to do “for the sake of souls, then DH is going to disagree with you. Likewise, if you think that the State should enforce Catholicism in draconian ways via the punitive criminalization of all other religions, then DH is going to disagree with you. But more than DH actually, since even many pre-conciliar popes began the process of rethinking such hard integralist tactics as pastorally disastrous exercises in oppression. It makes the Church appear publicly as the enemy of freedom, which, ultimately, comes back to bite the Church in various anti-clericalist political programs governed by a spirit of retribution.

As for the religious freedom teachings of the 19th-century magisterium, what becomes clear is that for the popes of that era, they had in mind the particular version of religious freedom that had gained widespread popularity in Europe and which was the poisoned fruit of the French Revolution. The magisterial teaching of that era concluded that there was no way to allow for religious freedom that did not entail the relativistic and indifferentist consequences that they saw rising all around them.

Take, for example, the encyclical Mirari Vos of 1832, promulgated by Gregory XVI, which explicitly ties together the blight of religious indifferentism with allowing for liberty of conscience in religious matters. But what if such assumptions are not true? What if it is possible to have religious freedom and to avoid religious indifferentism? Or, what if the indifferentism that Gregory noted was not caused by religious freedom but was instead the result of a multi-focal set of cultural, scientific, philosophical, and political causes reaching back to the fratricidal self-immolation of Christian Europe in its various post-Reformation fractious conflicts?

What if the indifferentism, therefore, was more the result of an exhausted laity, fed up with ecclesial debates that were beyond their ability to understand, and who chose instead to focus on the mundane affairs of life and to enjoy the new affluence of bourgeois Europe?

What DH is saying is that those popes were correct to condemn secular, Enlightenment-based concepts of religious freedom, and indeed of a false sense of freedom in general. But the unspoken assumption of DH is that these same popes were empirically in error to view religious freedom as such in its proper Christian sense as inextricably intertwined with these false views. This indeed constitutes a kind of “correction” of previous teaching, not on the level of central principles (since DH affirms the duty to seek the truth about God) but on the level of the empirical adjudication that religious freedom always entails the result of indifferentism.

As such, this is what Pope Benedict was referencing in his now famous remark that a “hermeneutic of reform” involves at times certain “micro corrections” but always within an overarching continuity with the tradition.

In Part Two of this essay, I will explore the question of the pastoral nature of DH as well as the consequences of all of this for a proper concept of what we mean by the social kingship of Christ.

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