To Sanctify the World by George Weigel

Author:George Weigel [WEIGEL, GEORGE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

14

Truth, Liberty, and the Limits of State Power

The Declaration on Religious Freedom

IN THE LIGHT OF JOHN XXIII’S ORIGINAL INTENTION FOR the Second Vatican Council and the intellectual trajectory of Catholic social doctrine between Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) and John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (1991), Dignitatis Humanae, the Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, comes into focus as both a major development in the tangled history of Catholicism and political modernity and a further specification of Vatican II’s design for a revitalized Western humanism.

Taking its Latin incipit from the “human dignity” in which it grounds the right of religious freedom, the declaration boldly called for a modernity in which men and women are free to fulfill their innate desire for communion with the divine. Living out the theotropic nature of the human person and thereby meeting the human obligation to seek and adhere to the truth are essential to genuine human flourishing, the declaration taught. Concurrently, Dignitatis Humanae extended the analysis of the just state sketched in Gaudium et Spes. In doing so, it achieved a true development of Catholic social doctrine while urging the modern state to recognize the limits of its competence and the boundaries of its authority.

Dignitatis Humanae was the primary reason for the only formal fissure in the unity of the Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council: the schism initiated in 1988 by the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers. The Lefebrvists took offense at many of the Council’s reforms and were especially critical of the implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. At the root of their dissent, however, was Dignitatis Humanae’s teaching on the inalienable right of religious freedom. This, Lefebvre insisted, was a fatal concession to political modernity and a betrayal of previous Catholic teaching on the right relationship between the Church and states. It was neither. But as similar charges continue to be made in the twenty-first century, a brief review of the struggle between Catholicism and political modernity will help set the stage for understanding what Dignitatis Humanae taught; why that teaching was both orthodox and necessary; and how that teaching poses a greater challenge to political modernity than anything proposed by the followers of Archbishop Lefebvre, by defenders of the ancien régime’s church-state arrangements, and by twenty-first-century Catholic integralists.1

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