Religious liberty: a common challenge for Catholic-Muslim dialogue.

• Author: Bernardini, Paola
• Position: The Foundation of Human Rights: Catholic Contributions, part 2

Comparing the struggles of the Church on the subject of religious liberty with those in course of progress within Islam may be conducive to greater interreligious understanding. It is not by chance that Muslim and Christian scholars have adopted this approach on more than one occasion. (1) Even Pope Benedict XVI, speaking to the Roman Curia at the end of 2006, seemed to implicitly acknowledge this fact when he stated that "the Muslim world today finds itself facing an extremely urgent task ... very similar to the one ... imposed upon Christians beginning in the age of the Enlightenment" (2): namely the task of recognizing the freedom of faith and finding appropriate solutions in this regard. Starting from this presumption, the present paper will be divided mainly into two parts. Part I will briefly illustrate the positions of the Church before and after the Second Vatican Council. Part II will delve into the positions of some modern Islamic Organizations, countries, and scholars on the civil right to religious freedom.

1. RELIGIOUS LIBERTY: THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

   To begin with, it must be recalled that the journey of the Catholic Church towards the full proclamation of human rights has gone through at least three phases: rejection, discernment, and finally, proclamation. (3) The phase of initial rejection--which lasted roughly from the Papacy of Gregory XVI to that of Pope Pius XII--was mostly driven by the fear that the language of rights, as first portrayed by the 1789 French Declaration and then by the 1948 U.N. Declaration, might lead to indifferentism and relativism.

   "The Church saw the French [R]evolution as proclaiming a 'liberty' that was total and without limits." (4) More precisely, the right to religious liberty--as conceived by the French revolutionaries--had not been simply understood as the right to be free from any political or external coercion in matters pertaining to Faith, (5) or as what we now define a legal right as pertaining to, or regulating the external forum. Rather, it was understood in ethical, relativistic terms as the right to think and believe whatever one wants, and even to be free from any religion.

   Against this background, Pope Leo XIII stated that "the eternal law of God is the sole standard and rule of human liberty." (6) Going as far as saying that "the liberty of worship"--which is a specific instance of modern freedom--"is so opposed to the virtue of religion." (7)

   The sub-titles of the Papal Encyclicals issued during this period are all quite evocative of the general suspicion of the Catholic Church with respect to religious liberty. Mirari Vos. On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism (1832), Quanta Cura: On Condemning Certain Errors (1864), Immortale Dei: On the Christian Constitution of States (1885) all reacted against the 'absolutist' notion of freedom portrayed by the French Declaration.

   Likewise, the 1948 U.N. Declaration was initially passed under silence by Pope Plus XII. This Document had been drafted with the help of communist countries, a fact which in itself constituted a motive of suspicion. Secondly, the Document did not mention either the word God or natural-moral law--two notions which the Vatican Observer to UNESCO (who then became Pope John XIII) had pressed the Human Rights Committee to include, but without success.

   For such reasons, the Church believed once again that human rights, including the right to religious liberty as then portrayed, (8) might be conducive to the idea that all religions are the same, and that even error has its rights. Whereas Pope Pius XII subscribed to the view that "that which does not correspond to truth or to the norm of morality objectively has no right to exist, to be spread or to be activated." (9)

   A turning point in history was the acquisition, starting with the papacy of Pope John XXIII, of the distinction between the legitimate content, on the one hand, and the ambiguous intention, on the other, of human rights rhetoric) (10) With Pope John XXIII, the phase of discernment of the Church on the subject of human rights and religious liberty begins.

   In his Encyclical Pacem in Terris (published on April 11, 1963), Pope John XXIII explicitly praised, not without some reserve, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which had been issued by the United Nations in 1948. (11) He also welcomed the right to freedom of conscience and religion, re-defining them respectively in non-relativistic, ethical terms as the "right to be free to seek out the truth, to follow moral principles, discharge the duties imposed by justice, and lead a fully human life," (12) and the right "of being able to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience." (13)

   The notion of freedom of worship "in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience," however, left the faithful and the bishops to wonder whether those, whose conscience was erroneous, or mistaken, could still legitimately claim a right to religious freedom and worship)(14) The Encyclical--however formally espousing the contents of the U.N. Declaration--was still based on the premise, expressed by Pope Pius XII, in Ci Riesce, (15) and Pope Leo XIII, in Libertas(16): namely the assertion that a genuine right is only based on what is objectively true and good. (17) This basic premise--which essentially reduces rights to ethically justified claims, coupled with another main tenet, that "The Roman Catholic faith is the true religion"--had led for a long time the Popes to deny that the other faiths and religions stand on an equal footing before the law. (18) The State could at best tolerate them, in virtue of the fact that "no one must ever be forced to act against his conscience either in public or private" and in virtue of the fact that "no one must be prevented from acting in accordance with his conscience in private." Nonetheless, even these negative liberties--which were not yet recognized in terms of rights (but only in terms of lesser evils to be at best tolerated)--were very restricted. (19) Their limit being the natural moral law, on which the Catholic State itself should be based.

   Finally, it is only under the Papacy of Pope Paul VI, and the Second Vatican Council Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, that a more fundamental turning point is reached: namely the acquisition of the further distinction between the legal notion of religious liberty and the theological notion of religious liberty. (20) Thus opening the way for the phase of full proclamation of the civil right to religious liberty.

   In the Declaration, the Council Fathers precisely stated that the civil right to religious freedom has to do with immunity from coercion and discrimination in the exercise of one's religion, in such a way that no one is to be forced by civil society to act in a manner contrary to his own conscience, or restrained from acting in accordance with it. This idea of religious liberty, then, does not have anything to do with the freedom to believe in whatever one wills, nor with the idea that any religion is equivalent to another. Thus preserving, on a theological level, the traditional belief that you can claim a moral right only to the truth, and that men and societies have a duty toward true religion. (21) A duty which includes the obligation "to adhere to the truth, once it is known, and to order their whole lives in accord with the demands of the truth." (22)

   This implies, for example, that the liberty to change one's religion is not properly conceived in moral terms as the freedom to change one's religion, in oblivion of the truth. Rather it is conceived in negative and legal terms as the right not to be obliged by the State, "by force or fear or other means ... [to leave] a religious community." (23) The Declaration, that is, grounds the right to change religion on the natural duty of non-interference on the part of the State, rather than on a natural-ethical claim to do whatever one wants to, in matters of freedom and conscience. (24)

   It is interesting to point out that some of the most conservative, fundamentalist strands of the community of Bishops taking part in the discussions and works around the Declaration failed to recognize the continuity of the Second Vatican Council's notion of religious liberty with the Catholic Church's traditional teaching. (25) In particular, they failed to realize that Dignitatis Humanae's civil right to religious liberty was not in dire contrast with the tradition's doctrine that error may not be the object of a positive moral claim. (26) Thus, as the recent Pope's Message for the World Day of Peace has recalled, the modem Catholic Church's teaching on religious freedom stands equally apart from the perils of secularism and religious fundamentalism. (27)

2. THE FOUNDATIONS OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN DIGNITATIS HUMANAE

   Dignitatis Humanae grounds the civil right to religious liberty on both theological and socio-political premises. The former mostly reiterate the ancient, spiritual tradition of the Church, whereas the latter--in as much as they are applied to the issue of religious liberty--constitute the real breakthrough of the whole Encyclical.

   Particularly crucial is the socio-political distinction between the role of the State and the role of the Church as part of civil society. In the Declaration's own words, "[t]he religious acts whereby men, in private and in public and out of a sense of personal conviction, direct their lives to God transcend by their very nature the order of terrestrial and temporal affairs." (28) Therefore, a government "would clearly transgress the limits set to its power, were it to presume to command or inhibit acts that are religious." (29)

   This distinction had been partially acquired in previous papal teachings, but not yet applied coherently to the issue of religious liberty. In the Encyclical Immortale Dei (1885)...