OF HUMAN DIGNITY: THE DECLARATION ON RELIGIOUS LIBERTY AT 50
CatholicPhilly.com
March 18 2015
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, Wynnewood
March 17, 2015
Vatican II ended in December 1965 with an outpouring of enthusiasm and
hope. The Council’s hope was grounded in two things: a renewed Catholic
faith; and confidence in the skill and goodness of human reason.
Half a century has passed since then. A lot has happened. The world
today is a very different place from 1965. And much more complex.
That’s our reality, and it has implications for the way we live our
faith, which is one of the reasons we’re here tonight.
Hope is one of the great Christian virtues. Christians always have
reason for hope. As we read in John 3:16, “God so loved the world that
he gave his only son, that he who believes in him should not perish but
have eternal life.” God is alive. God loves us. God never forgets us.
But Christians also need to see the world as it really is, so as
better to bring it to Jesus Christ.
In some ways, the Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty –
Dignitatis Humanae in Latin, or “Of Human Dignity” in English – is
the Vatican II document that speaks most urgently to our own time. The
reason is obvious. We see it right now in the suffering of Christians
and other religious believers in many places around the world.
Pope Paul VI, who promulgated Dignitatis Humanae, saw it as one of
the most important actions of the Council. It changed the way the
Church interacts with states. And it very much improved the Church’s
relations with other Christians and religious believers. So I’m
grateful to Father Billy and Bishop Senior for organizing these talks
on the declaration. And I’m glad to offer my own thoughts this evening.
My job tonight is to give an overview of religious liberty issues:
the problems we currently have, and the ones we’ll face in the years
ahead. I’ll do that in three parts. First, I’ll outline what the
Church teaches about religious freedom. Second, I’ll list some of
the key religious liberty challenges heading our way. Third, I’ll
talk about why the Council was right. Not just right in its teaching
about religious liberty, but right in its spirit of hope. And that
spirit of hope needs to live in our hearts when we leave here tonight.
So let’s turn first to what the Church teaches about religious
freedom. And we should start by recalling the nature of the world
that the Church was born into.
One of the themes of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, which
still has great influence today, was a kind of “anything but Jesus”
attack on religious superstition, and a special distaste for the
legacy of the Catholic Church. Enlightenment philosophers wanted to
recover the habits of reason and learning they thought were embodied
in ancient Classical culture. But this is rich in irony, because the
Classical age itself was deeply religious at every level of life. The
gods were everywhere in daily routines and civic power.
To put it another way: Early Christians weren’t hated because they were
religious. They were hated because they weren’t religious enough. They
weren’t killed because they believed in God. They were killed because
they didn’t believe in the authentic gods of the city and empire. In
their impiety, they invited the anger of heaven. They also threatened
the well-being of everyone else, including the state.
The emperor Marcus Aurelius – one of history’s great men of intellect
and character – hated the Christian cult. He persecuted Christians not
for their faith, but for what he saw as their blasphemy. In refusing
to honor the traditional gods, they attacked the security of the state.
Why does this matter? The reason is simple. T.S. Eliot liked to argue
that “no culture has appeared or developed except together with a
religion.” Nor can a culture survive or develop for long without
one.[i] Christopher Dawson, the great historian, said the same.
Religious faith, whatever form it takes, gives a vision and meaning to
a society. In that light, pagans saw the early Christians as a danger,
because they were. Christianity shaped an entirely new understanding
of sacred and secular authority. Christians prayed for the emperor
and the empire. But they would not worship the empire’s gods.
For Christians, the distinction between the sacred and the secular
comes straight from Scripture. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus himself
sets the tone when he tells us to render unto Caesar the things
that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.[ii] But
if that’s true, then how do we explain 16 centuries of the Church
getting tangled up in state affairs? The details are complicated,
but the answer isn’t. Christians are amphibian creatures. God made
us for heaven, but we work out our salvation here on earth.
As the Roman world gradually became Christian, the Church gained
her freedom. Then she became the dominant faith. Then she filled the
vacuum of order and learning left by the empire’s collapse. Religious
and secular authority often mixed, and power is just as easily abused
by clergy as it is by laypeople. The Church relied on the state to
advance her interests. The state nominated or approved senior clergy,
and used the Church to legitimize its power.
Of course, the idea of the “state” is a modern invention. I use it
here to mean every prince or warlord the Church has faced through the
centuries. The point is this: Over time, and especially after the Wars
of Religion and the French Revolution, the “confessional state” – a
state committed to advancing the true Catholic religion and suppressing
religious error – became the standard Catholic model for government.
That’s the history Dignitatis Humanae sought to correct by going
back to the sources of Christian thought. The choice to believe any
religious faith must be voluntary. Faith must be an act of free will,
or it can’t be valid. Parents make the choice for their children at
baptism because they have parental authority. And it’s important that
they do so. But in the end, people who don’t believe can’t be forced
to believe, especially by the state. Forced belief violates the person,
the truth and the wider community of faith, because it’s a lie.
Or to put it another way: Error has no rights, but persons do have
rights – even when they choose falsehood over truth. Those rights
aren’t given by the state. Nor can anyone, including the state, take
them away. They’re inherent to every human being by virtue of his or
her creation by God. Religious liberty is a “natural” right because
it’s hardwired into our human nature. And freedom of religious belief,
the freedom of conscience, is – along with the right to life – the
most important right any human being has.
Having said this, we should recall what Dignitatis Humanae doesn’t do.
It doesn’t say that all religions are equal. It doesn’t say that
truth is a matter of personal opinion or that conscience makes its
own truth. It doesn’t absolve Catholics from their duty to support
the Church and to form their consciences in her teaching. It doesn’t
create a license for organized dissent within the Church herself. It
doesn’t remove from the Church her right to teach, correct and admonish
the baptized faithful – including the use of ecclesial penalties when
they’re needed.
It also doesn’t endorse a religiously indifferent state. It doesn’t
preclude the state from giving material support to the Church, so long
as “support” doesn’t turn into control or the negative treatment of
religious minorities. In fact, the declaration says that government
“should take account of the religious life of its citizenry and show
it favor [emphasis added], since the function of government is to
make provision for the common welfare.”[iii]
In its own words, Dignitatis Humanae says “religious freedom … has
to do with immunity from coercion in civil society [emphasis added].
Therefore 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.”
In the same passage, the Council Fathers stress that the “one true
religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church,” and that
“all men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns
God and his Church, and to embrace the truth they come to know,
and to hold fast to it.”[iv]
To put it another way, Dignitatis Humanae is not just about freedom
from coercion. It’s also about freedom for the truth. The issue of
truth is too easily overlooked.
The declaration took four drafts to complete. And it created a great
deal of internal debate. Karol Wojtyla took part in Vatican II as
a young bishop. He supported Dignitatis Humanae and became a great
defender of religious freedom as John Paul II. But he resisted an
early draft of the declaration precisely because it failed to make
a strong connection between freedom and truth. The two go together.
What John Paul saw, and what the Council Fathers addressed in the
declaration’s final draft, is that words like goodness, freedom and
beauty don’t mean anything without an anchor. They’re free-floating
labels — and very easily abused — unless they’re rooted in a
permanent order of objective moral truth.[v] We see that abuse of
language every day now in our public discourse. But I’ll come back
to that in a moment.
In the mind of the Council, religious liberty means much more than
the freedom to believe whatever you like at home, and pray however you
like in your church. It means the right to preach, teach and worship
in public and in private. It means a parent’s right to protect his
or her children from harmful teaching. It means the right to engage
the public square with moral debate and works of social ministry. It
means the freedom to do all of this without negative interference
from the government, direct or indirect, except within the limits of
“just public order.”
Before we turn to the second part of my remarks, it’s also worth
noting that the full title of Dignitatis Humanae is: On the right of
the person and of communities to social and civil freedom in matters
religious. Religious liberty belongs not just to individuals, but
also to communities. Civil society precedes the state. It consists
of much more than individuals. Alone, individuals are weak.
Communities give each one of us friendship, meaning, a narrative, a
history and a future. They root us in a story larger than ourselves or
any political authority. Which means that communities, and especially
religious communities, are strong – and a necessary mediator between
the individual and the state.
So let’s move now to some issues we’ll face in the years ahead. We’ll
start on the global level.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
Armenians were the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity in
A.D. 301. Starting in 1915, Turkish officials deliberately murdered
more than 1 million members of Turkey’s Armenian minority. The ethnic
and religious cleansing campaign went on into the 1920s. The victims
were men, women and children. And they were overwhelmingly Christian.
Turkey has never acknowledged the genocide. It’s one of the worst
unrepented crimes in history.
That kind of ugliness may sound impossible in our day. But today we
have our own tragedies – from church bombings in Pakistan to the
beheading of Christians in North Africa. More than 70 percent of
the world now lives with some form of religious coercion. Tens of
thousands of Christians are killed every year for reasons linked to
their faith. North Korea has wiped religion out of its culture.
China runs a sophisticated security system to interfere with, and
control, its religious communities. Islamic countries have a very mixed
record. Muslim states range from relative tolerance to repression and
forced conversion of religious minorities. And the persecution has
grown worse as Islam has radicalized. Shari’a law claims to protect
religious minorities. In practice, it slowly smothers them.
Even in Europe, laws that interfere with religious dress, practice and
public expression are on the rise. The postwar founders of European
unity — committed Catholic men like Alcide de Gasperi, Robert Schuman
and Konrad Adenauer — assumed the Christian heritage of their
continent. Today the European Union ignores it, and in practice,
repudiates it. In doing so, Europe robs itself of any real moral
alternative to the radical Islam spreading in its own countries.
And what about the United States? Compared to almost anywhere else
in the world, our religious freedom situation is good. Religious
believers played a very big role in founding and building the country.
Until recently, our laws have reflected that. In many ways they
still do. A large majority of Americans still believe in God and
still identify as Christian. Religious practice remains high. But
that’s changing. And the pace will quicken. More young people are
disaffiliated from religion now than at any time in our country’s
past. More stay away as they age. And many have no sense of the role
that religious freedom has played in our nation’s life and culture.
The current White House may be the least friendly to religious
concerns in our history. But we’ll see more of the same in the future –
pressure in favor of things like gay rights, contraception and abortion
services, and against public religious witness. We’ll see it in the
courts and in so-called “anti-discrimination” laws. We’ll see it in
“anti-bullying” policies that turn public schools into indoctrination
centers on matters of human sexuality; centers that teach that there’s
no permanent truth involved in words like “male” and “female.”
And we’ll see it in restrictions on public funding, revocation of
tax exemptions and expanding government regulations. We too easily
forget that every good service the government provides comes with a
growth in its regulatory power. And that power can be used in ways
nobody imagined in the past.
We also forget Tocqueville’s warning that democracy can become
tyrannical precisely because it’s so sensitive to public opinion. If
anyone needs proof, consider what a phrase like “marriage equality” has
done to our public discourse in less than a decade. It’s dishonest. But
it works.
That leads to the key point I want to make here. The biggest problem
we face as a culture isn’t gay marriage or global warming. It’s
not abortion funding or the federal debt. These are vital issues,
clearly. But the deeper problem, the one that’s crippling us, is that
we use words like justice, rights, freedom and dignity without any
commonly shared meaning to their content.
We speak the same language, but the words don’t mean the same thing.
Our public discourse never gets down to what’s true and what isn’t,
because it can’t. Our most important debates boil out to who can
deploy the best words in the best way to get power.
Words like “justice” have emotional throw-weight, so people use them
as weapons. And it can’t be otherwise, because the religious vision
and convictions that once animated American life are no longer welcome
at the table. After all, what can “human rights” mean if science sees
nothing transcendent in the human species? Or if science imagines
a trans-humanist future? Or if science doubts that a uniquely human
“nature” even exists? If there’s no inherent human nature, there can
be no inherent natural rights – and then the grounding of our whole
political system is a group of empty syllables.
Liberal democracy doesn’t have the resources to sustain its own
purpose. Democracy depends for its meaning on the existence of some
higher authority outside itself.[vi] The Western idea of natural rights
comes not just from the philosophers of the Enlightenment, but even
earlier from the medieval Church. Our Western legal tradition has its
origins not in the Enlightenment, but in the 11th and 12th century
papal revolution in canon law.[vii] The Enlightenment itself could
never have happened outside the Christian world from which it emerged.
In the words of Oxford scholar Larry Siedentop — and in contrast
to ancient pagan society — “Christianity changed the ground of
human identity” by developing and uniquely stressing the idea of the
individual person with an eternal destiny. In doing that, “Christian
moral beliefs emerge as the ultimate source of the social revolution
that has made the West what it is.”[viii]
Modern pluralist democracy has plenty of room for every religious
faith and no religious faith. But we’re lying to ourselves if we
think we can keep our freedoms without revering the biblical vision –
the uniquely Jewish and Christian vision – of who and what man is.
Human dignity has only one source. And only one guarantee. We’re made
in the image and likeness of God. And if there is no God, then human
dignity is just elegant words.
Earlier I said we need to leave here tonight with a spirit of hope.
So let’s turn to that now in these last few minutes before we have
questions and discussion.
We need to remember two simple facts. In practice, no law and no
constitution can protect religious freedom unless people actually
believe and live their faith – not just at home or in church, but in
their public lives. But it’s also true that no one can finally take
our freedom unless we give it away. Jesus said, “I am the way the
truth and the life” (Jn 14:6) He also said, “You will know the truth,
and the truth will make you free” (Jn 8:32). The Gospel of Jesus
Christ is for people who want to be free, “free” in the truest sense.
And its message is meant for all of us; for all men and women –
unless we choose to be afraid.
Looking back over the past 50 years, and even at our lives today,
I think it’s too easy to see the problems in the world. It’s too easy
to become a cynic.
There’s too much beauty in the world to lose hope; too many people
searching for something more than themselves; too many people who
comfort the suffering; too many people who serve the poor; too many
people who seek and teach the truth; too much history that witnesses,
again and again, to the mercy of God, incarnate in the course of human
affairs. In the end, there’s too much evidence that God loves us, with
a passion that is totally unreasonable and completely redemptive, to
ever stop trusting in God’s purpose for the world, and for our lives.
The Second Vatican Council began and ended in the aftermath of the
Holocaust and the worst war in human history. If there’s an argument to
be made against the worthiness of humanity, we’ve made that argument
ourselves, again and again down the centuries, but especially in
the modern age. Yet every one of the Council documents is alive with
confidence in God and in the dignity of man. And there’s a reason.
God makes greatness, not failures. He makes free men and women,
not cowards. The early Church father Irenaeus said that “the glory
of God is man fully alive.” I believe that’s true. And I’d add that
the glory of men and women is their ability, with God’s grace, to
love as God loves.
And when that miracle happens, even in just one of us, the world
begins to change.
[i] T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Harcourt,
Brace and Company, New York, 1949; 13, 28
[ii] See Mark 12:13-17, 1 Peter 2:13-17, etc.
[iii] Dignitatis Humanae, 3
[iv] Ibid., 1
[v] See Avery Dulles, S.J., “John Paul II and the Truth About
Freedom,” First Things, August 1995, for a fuller discussion.
[vi] Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy,
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD, 1996; 85-86.
See also Robert Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, God
and Politics in the Fallen World, University of Notre Dame Press,
Notre Dame, IN, 2001. Note also Kraynak’s essay “Justice without
Foundations,” The New Atlantis, Summer, 2001.
[vii] On the origin of natural rights, see Brian Tierney, The Idea
of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church
Law, 1150-1625, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 1997. On the roots of the
Western legal tradition, see Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The
Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1985.
[viii] Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins
of Western Liberalism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,
2014; 352-353
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