Catholic constitutionalism from the Americanist controversy to 'Dignitatis Humanae'.

• Author: Su, Anna
• Position: Religious Liberty and the Free Society: Celebrating 50 Years of 'Dignitatis Humanae'

ABSTRACT

This Article, written for a symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of Dignitatis Humanae, or the Roman Catholic Church's Declaration on Religious Freedom, traces a brief history of Catholic constitutionalism from the Americanist controversy of the late nineteenth century up until the issuance of Dignitatis Humanae as part of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. It argues that the pluralist experiment enshrined in the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution was a crucial factor in shaping Church attitudes towards religious freedom, not only in the years immediately preceding the revolutionary Second Vatican Council but ever since the late nineteenth century, when Catholicism became a potent social force in the United States. This history offers an opportunity to reflect on what the new global geography of Catholicism portends in the future.

INTRODUCTION

Dignitatis Humanae is best known as a watershed moment in the doctrinal history of the Roman Catholic Church's stance on freedom of religion. More than any other document produced by the Second Vatican Council, it was both an exercise in, and the very expression of, the spirit of aggiornamento that ushered the Catholic Church into the modern world. Prior to the issuance of the Declaration in 1965, the Church held the view that religious freedom was doctrinally and conceptually erroneous because error possessed no rights. "Truth and error are incompatible; to dialogue with error is to put God and the devil on the same footing," or so went the ultra-traditionalist narrative that persisted even after the conciliar moment but which has since fallen into complete disrepute. (1) In addition, only a Catholic confessional state could ensure the protection and promotion of religious truth because religious error was considered damaging to the common good. Dignitatis Humanae, also known as the Declaration on Religious Freedom, thus embodied a principled volte-face in its categorical pronouncement that "the human person has a right to religious freedom." (2) In doing so, it created the conditions for a new kind of Catholicism that made a dialogue between the Church and the secular world possible.

Easily the most celebrated document of the Second Vatican Council, and certainly among non-Catholics, the text of the Declaration itself appears modest. Religious freedom is minimally defined as immunity from coercion in civil society and was explicitly grounded in the dignity of the human person. (3) It appeared to be silent on the issue of the confessional state, notwithstanding the amount and the intensity of the discussion that surrounded the topic preceding the Council. But by emphasizing freedom of religion rather than religious tolerance as held in then-existing church teachings, it was clear that the days of a preferred Catholic establishment were gone. The document thus represented an important paradigm shift. As a principle, religious freedom could attract consensus on many grounds, but it was the first time that Catholic political thought and theology could endorse its substantive basis as innately its own.

It is impossible to discuss Dignitatis Humanae without canvassing the biography and intellectual contributions of John Courtney Murray S.J., the American Jesuit priest who briefly served as peritus, or expert, during the Council proceedings and who had been writing on the subject of religious freedom long before Pope John XXIII made the surprise announcement of convening a council in 1959. Murray, one of the two towering Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century, alongside the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, was the one responsible for developing a principled Catholic defense of religious liberty. From his prodigious writings on the subject between the 1940s and 1950s, the defense roughly involved three main, intertwined components: the dignity of the human person, freedom of religion, and the nature of the state. Of the three, Murray's, and by extension, the Catholic, conception of the state has not merited much scholarly discussion. This lack of attention is unfortunate. While the first two find secure and solid ground in international law and have been the subject of much scholarly treatment, it is the nature of the state that complicates what freedom of conscience or freedom of religion encompasses and what it might actually look like in practice. In Murray's own words, the central question is the "care of religion by government." (4) Indeed, his tract, The Problem of Religious Freedom, which formed his last substantive contribution to the Declaration before a collapsed lung pulled him out of the proceedings, focused on the juridical instantiation of religious freedom as a civil and political right.

Dignitatis Humanae and its underlying intellectual foundations navigated the waters between the Aristotelian state of Leo XIII, where the government had a thick substantive duty to "care for religion," and the agnostic and indifferent state that emerged half a century later. In that agnostic mode, the state is neutral with regard to the truth or merit of different religions. And the Declaration's crowning achievement lies precisely in reconciling the notion of separation between church and state with upholding the common good within the context of an objective moral order. A person's right to freely profess his conscience and to seek an objective moral truth requires immunity from government interference. An important premise of this line of argument was a Catholic insistence on the limited nature of government. This was partly Murray's answer to the complaint of Reinhold Niebuhr, a renowned American Protestant theologian, that the Roman Catholic Church had yet to endorse religious liberty in principle. It does now. And it is for this reason that this document is celebrated today.

This Article traces a brief history of Catholic constitutionalism from the Americanist controversy of the late nineteenth century up until the issuance of Dignitatis Humanae in 1965 and explains the resulting reconciliation. To be sure, Catholic constitutionalist thought could trace its origins to a variety of historical moments: from Jesus's biblical admonishment to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," to the Gregorian struggle of the high Middle Ages, (5) or to the conciliarist movement of the late medieval period. (6) But this period of relatively more recent vintage was notable for one distinctive factor: the United States as a living experiment. In a 2006 epistolary exchange with Marcello Pera, President of the Italian Senate, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI himself, then writing as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, acknowledged the unique American contribution to Dignitatis Humanae. (7) It would be inaccurate, however, to confine the focus to the American contribution during the immediate years surrounding the Second Vatican Council, when the American pluralist challenge to extant Catholic doctrines could be deemed as old as the United States itself. Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the changing views of the Catholic hierarchy in Rome on the proper relationship between church and state were for the most part influenced by the sharp contrast between two kinds of Catholic polities: the confessional Catholic lands of continental Europe and the religiously pluralistic society of the United States where Catholics formed a distinctive minority. It should not be a surprise then that Murray and the American episcopate played such a pivotal role on matters of ecumenism and religious freedom in the Second Vatican Council. (8) More important to the European clerics who supported the Declaration, the church-state arrangement in the United States provided a more preferable alternative than the dismal Catholic-majority models of Spain or Portugal.

Together with Nostra Aetate--the Declaration of the Church in relation to non-Christians, most notably Jews (9)--and Gaudium et Spes, which declares the Church's new stance with respect to the modern world, (10) Dignitatis Humanae embodied the vision of Vatican II and formed the new core of Catholic constitutionalist thought. What can we take away from recounting its historical trajectory? For one, it shows the importance of the ability to speak with doctrinal authenticity from within the tradition of believers, even if internally contested, in giving the faithful compelling reasons for accepting new ways or reorienting old ones. Legitimacy of argument can only be had by making use of language and resources internal to the faith community, and it is even more important when it comes to non-hierarchical religions. Equally necessary is the underlying condition of this sea change in Catholic doctrine: the freedom of the Church. There is no shortage of struggles over the compatibility of orthodox interpretation and practice of religions and the tenets of modern liberal democracy, as well as the reciprocal more subtle, and yet ubiquitous attempts of liberal constitutionalism to shape religion in more palatable ways. (11) In the current moment, when religion is seen and portrayed in popular discourse more as a source of danger instead of a positive good, it bears repeating that any modicum of religious reform can only take place within an atmosphere of freedom. Moreover, as a general contribution, the surrounding history of the Declaration also showed the capacity of one of the most ardent traditional institutions in the world--the Roman Catholic Church--to change its stance in light of new historical experiences. Finally, while this is an American-centric account, what it portends in the future is coextensive with the new cultural geography of Catholicism. (12) Dignitatis Humanae is arguably the turning point that unmoored the Catholic Church from its predominant Western paradigm and reoriented it towards the world. If an aptitude for reading the signs of the times is indeed the legacy of Vatican II, the global...