It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to offer some prefatory remarks to the English edition of Catholicism and Religious Freedom. The book offers what is arguably the most comprehensive account of the tortuous road through which the Catholic Church arrived at the official recognition of the modern principle of religious freedom as an inalienable individual human right grounded in the sacred dignity of the human person. The Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, was in fact the last official document of the Second Vatican Council. The highly revised and amended final draft was finally voted upon and approved by an overwhelming majority of the Council Fathers and was officially promulgated by Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965, the last day before the closing of the Council.
The account is comprehensive in its interdisciplinary approach, its multifaceted and multivariable analysis, and its nuanced and balanced interpretation of the complex historical processes, before and during the Council, which culminated in the Declaration. Nobody can seriously question the fact that the Declaration represents a historical watershed in the official doctrine of the Catholic Church vis a vis church-state relations, the modern secular world, the use of coercion in upholding Truth, constitutional civil liberties and individual rights.
In this respect, the Declaration can be interpreted rightly as a paradigm shift from “the right of Truth and tolerance of error” to “the rights of the person”, as well as a shift in emphasis from the defense of libertas ecclesiae to libertas personae.
What has remained controversial and highly contested since the end of the Council until the present is whether such historical watershed and paradigm shift ought to be interpreted as an accommodation to liberal secular principles, which amounts to a radical rupture with the Catholic tradition, as famously argued by the German Constitutional Judge and legal scholar Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde. Or, alternatively, whether it represents a theological reformulation which maintains nonetheless “strict continuity” with the Church’s teachings, as argued by the German scholar Arthur Fridolin Utz. The argumentative thrust of the book through its many layers is to show that the alternative of rupture vs continuity entails a simplistic and false dichotomy.
Instead, the book reconstructs the historical path that led Catholicism to the recognition of religious freedom as a complex collective learning process, which was historically contingent and open-ended. The argument emphasizes three different though interrelated important points. First, one should not regard “Catholicism as a self-contained unity”, apart from and untouched by its socio-historical surroundings, nor should one assume “an internally homogeneous Catholicism that changes at the same time in its entirety.” That means recognizing the plurality of hierarchies and actors, of traditions and theological interpretations, of religious and lay organizations, of socio-cultural and socio-political milieus of the many different local churches, which together constitute the global Catholic Church. Only then can one take into account the crucial relevance that the experience of American Catholicism, the argumentation of the American theologian John Courney Murray and the interventions of the North American bishops had for the redefinition of the meaning of religious freedom for the entire Catholic Church at the Council. This could explain how “the position of the Church’s periphery suddenly seemed more plausible than the traditional position held by the Church’s center.”
Secondly, one needs to take into account the entire context of world-historical transformations – from the catastrophic experience of National-Socialism and World War II, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations, the Cold War between “the Free World” and “Atheist Communism” and the triumph of Christian Democracy within Catholic Western Europe –, which made possible the redefinition of the meaning of religious freedom, outside as well as within Catholicism, and prepared the ground for the convocation of the Second Vatican Council by Pope Johannes XXIII as a process of aggiornamento.
Finally, one must take into account the crucial relevance of the collective experience of the Council itself as a contingent yet highly relevant world-historical event full of unintended consequences for the history of the Church and one can say confidently today for the history of the world. The book reconstructs in detail the history of the seven preliminary drafts of the Declaration, the first two pre-conciliar drafts and the four different drafts that were produced by different committees with much bureaucratic intrigue, theological disputation and factional divisions throughout the sessions of the Council. It also emphasizes the role of Johannes XXIII’s 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris in first legitimating the modern discourse of human rights in general and religious freedom as a human right in particular. No less relevant for the final conciliar debates on religious freedom was the discourse of Pope Paul VI before the United Nations General Assembly on October 4, 1965. In his address the Pope “praised and supported the United Nations for its proclamation of the fundamental rights and duties of the human being, of his dignity and freedom, and above all of religious freedom. For precisely in this is expressed the sacred character of human reason and existence.”
There is little doubt that ultimately it was the experience of the Council itself that explains how the majority of Council Fathers came to support the paradigm shift from the traditional defense of tolerance of error to the unambiguous defense of religious freedom, not as a break with the Catholic tradition, but as a new revelation of the fundamental truth always present in Biblical revelation and in the authoritative tradition of the Church, namely, that God’s gift of salvation can only be accepted freely and without coercion. In theological language, this means that the Council itself was experienced by the Council Fathers, in the words of Pope Johannes XXIII, “as a new Pentecost.” In Durkheimian sociological language, one can explain the same phenomenon as the experience of creative “collective effervescence” which serves as the social foundation for new moral norms and sacred values.
While the book’s analysis recognizes the role of the American Catholic periphery in transforming the Catholic center, the entire argument is still framed within a predominantly German and Western European perspective, which fails to recognize sufficiently the role of all the other global Catholic peripheries from Latin America and the Caribbean, from Africa, from Asia and from Oceania in the great paradigm shift that all the Documents of the Second Vatican Council, and not just the Declaration on Religious Freedom, represent for the Catholic tradition and for the tradition of ecumenical councils of the Church. The great German theologian, Karl Rahner, was the first to call attention to the fact that this was the first truly global ecumenical council of the Church, with tremendous repercussions for the experience of all the Council Fathers, for the synodal dynamics present in the lengthy drafting and debates that accompanied most of the documents, and most particularly the last three Documents of the Council: the Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae; the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate; and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes.
The drafting and the passage of Dignitatis Humanae cannot be understood or explained properly without reference to the drafting and passage of Nostra Aetate and Gaudium et Spes. The drafting of all three documents was closely interrelated. The draft of the document on religious freedom was originally intended as chapter 5 of a decree on ecumenism, of which the draft of the Decree on the Jews, which eventually became Nostra Aetate, was going to serve as chapter 4. Both drafts and the debates on the entire document on ecumenism became from 1964 till the end of the Council also closely related with the famous and equally contested and controversial Schema VIII, “On the Church in the Modern World.”
All three documents went through lengthy and heated debates through various sessions of the Council. This meant that they were not so much drafted before the Council, but truly emerged from the floor of the council itself in the synodal debates. All three were the last documents to be approved in the last and final session of the Council: Nostra Aetate on October 28, 1965, and Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes literally on the last working day of the Council, on December 7, 1965. All three were passed by similar overwhelming majorities, while being opposed by the same traditionalist minority. Nostra Aetate was passed with 2,221 votes in favor and 88 against. Gaudium et Spes was passed with 2,307 votes in favor and 75 against, while Dignitatis Humanae was approved with almost identical support, 2,308 yes and 70 nay. The opposition came from the same core group of traditionalist Curia cardinals, a large number of Italian bishops and the majority of Spanish bishops, who came to the Council convinced that the Franco authoritarian National-Catholic regime represented the ideal Catholic traditional model of church-state relations.
What united the three documents moreover was the similar hermeneutic of discerning “the signs of the times,” to which all three refer. Gaudium et Spes in the introduction states that “the Church has always the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and interpreting them in the light of the Gospel.” Nostra Aetate, the document which recognizes religious pluralism as an irremediable fact and as “signs of the times” of “our global age,” begins with the words, “In our time, when day by day mankind is being drawn closer together, and the ties between different peoples are becoming stronger, the Church examines more closely the relationship to non-Christian religions. In her task of preaching unity and love among men, indeed among nations, she considers above all in this declaration what men have in common and what draws them to fellowship” (#1). Interreligious dialogue would seem to follow naturally from such fellowship and thus, the text continues, “The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions … they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values fund among these men.” (#2)
It is obvious that the defense of religious freedom here has a very different source than the secular reason of the liberal state or of European secular modernity. European secular modernity advocates freedom of religion as the freedom of individual conscience from the confessional state church but has little interest in or experience of religious pluralism, as the Westphalian principle, cuius regio eius religio, led throughout Western Europe first to homogeneous religious confessionalization and then to homogeneous secularization without the recognition, preservation or promotion of religious pluralism.
Dignitatis Humanae recognizes the same reality of a post-secular global age characterized by religious pluralism, when in its concluding paragraph it discerns “among the signs of the times,” “the fact that men of the present day want to be able to freely profess their religion in private and public” and that therefore “religious freedom is greatly necessary especially in the present condition of the human family … All nations are coming into even closer unity. Men of different cultures and religions are being brought together in closer relationship.” (#15)
Without yet having a word for it, the global Council Fathers were clearly recognizing the reality of globalization among “the signs of the times”, that humanity was entering indeed a new global age distinct from the preceding age of hegemonic Western secular modernity. The entire text of Gaudium et Spes can be read as a critical and prophetic discernment of both the positive dynamics and the negative consequences brought by globalization:
“This Second Vatican Council, having probed more profoundly into the mystery of the Church, now addresses itself without hesitation, not only to the sons of the Church and to all who invoke the name of Christ, but to the whole of humanity.” (#2)
“Today the human race is involved in a new stage of history … Never has the human race enjoyed such an abundance of wealth, resources and economic power, and yet a huge proportion of the world citizens are still tormented by hunger and poverty. Although the world of today has a very vivid awareness of its unity and of how one man depends on another in needful solidarity, it is most grievously torn into opposing camps by conflicting forces …” (#4)
“The history of the human community has become all of a piece, where once the various groups of men had a kind of private history of their own.” (#5)
This was not a self-referential church, nor one still obsessed with its conflict with liberalism and Western secular modernity. It was rather a global church, open to the entire world in dialogue with global humanity, a church scrutinizing prophetically global trends decades before those ideas became platitudes in global media and in social science jargon. This fact, better than anything else, explains in my view the paradigm shift which the Declaration on Religious Freedom represents in the history of the Church’s proclamation of Catholic doctrine.