Reconsidering Religious Liberty

Two years ago Pope Francis made a visit to the United Arab Emirates where he spoke at an interreligious meeting, offering several comments on fraternity, peacemaking, and religious liberty. At the outset of his message, he spoke of the need to build fraternity through the peaceful means of recognizing the other as other, as being open to one’s neighbor as the possessor of an undeniable dignity due to their status as a human person. Building on these topics, he moved to a short discussion of the nature of religious liberty and personal duty. “Each belief system is called to overcome the divide between friends and enemies,” he stated, “in order to take up the perspective of heaven, which embraces persons without privilege or discrimination.”¹

He went on to speak of religious liberty and the freedom of worship, and how there exists a “fundamental freedom to profess one’s own beliefs,” and that such a freedom is “an intrinsic requirement for a human being’s self-realization.”² At the time of this address there were quite a number of pieces that addressed the Holy Father’s words, but I wish to revisit the principal topic here at a deeper and more fundamental level. In other words, rather than attempt to parse the intention behind a few simple remarks made in a speech to a crowd of varying backgrounds, religions, and political clout, I would like to examine the nature of the concepts of religio and libertas in our current liberal context.

There is no debate that under the influence of nominalist principles, enshrined in Western thought by the Enlightenment, modernity has increasingly identified religion primarily with privately held opinion. Regardless of what specific nuances may accrue to any one conception of religion, it is on the whole defined subjectively: religion is a private matter to be considered under the jurisdiction of the individual, and has no relation to objective truth (at least in the public square). This is, to put it lightly, a bastardization of the term. The classical view of religion defines religion as a virtue, knowable by natural reason, demanded by the natural law, and ordered to God under the ratio of justice.

Far from the traditional Christian teaching that religion is a virtue demanded by natural law (and further specified by divine and human law), modernity sees religion as that area of life where one is free to think most anything one wishes — with the caveat, of course, that it not affect anyone else, and that it not influence the way in which one might vote, for instance. In many ways, at least in recent years, the Catholic response to the modern take on religious liberty has been much too weak, too preliminary, and too defensive.

In typically modern (American) fashion, liberty has been construed consistently as “freedom from” rather than “freedom for.” Certainly there is a sense in which the Church must always fight for freedom from many things: tyranny, abuse, attempts to silence the preaching of the Gospel. This construal of freedom, however, has always been and can only be merely a preliminary consideration, a first step in the effort to make disciples of all nations. Furthermore, a misunderstanding of the true nature of religious liberty will be nothing short of disastrous as time goes on.

Unfortunately, it can be argued that it is the Church’s own magisterial teaching which has given rise to this new concept of libertas in regard to religion, specifically as formulated in Dignitatis humanae. After all, does not the document state that each individual is free to seek the truth as they see fit, and to follow their own judgment in matters of religion? Take this passage, for example: “Each person has a duty, and therefore also a right, of seeking the truth in matters of religion — in order that each person, through those means truly suited to him, might wisely form his own correct and true judgments of conscience” (Dignitatis humanae, §3).³ Taking this text in isolation, one could come to the conclusion that religion is in fact a private matter, best left to the individual as a matter of conscience and personal judgment. After all, who are we to judge?

It is my contention, however, that there are only two ways by which one could read Dignitatis humanae as departing significantly from the traditional formulations of Catholic Social Teaching. First, one could be completely ignorant of the magisterial teaching prior to the Second Vatican Council; if one’s first exposure to the question of freedom in regard to religion were Dignitatis humanae, then one can well imagine quite a number of errors being possible. The second way in which the document could be misread is if it is approached deliberately with a hermeneutic of discontinuity, and read in such a light so as to purposefully import any number of contrary principles and conclusions which in themselves find no place within the text. For this second mode of error, there is no solution. For the first, however, there is a clear and reasonable solution. By approaching Dignitatis humanae with a very specific hermeneutic, and by tracing the Church’s teaching on the matter through a few key texts, we can place the document in its proper historical, political, and theological context.

This essay will proceed in two major steps. The first major step will consist in an exposition of two key magisterial texts. I will briefly examine a programmatic statement delivered by Benedict XVI in the well-known Regensburg Lecture that places faith and reason in proper order. Next, the Church’s teaching regarding liberty in relation to religion will be examined in what I contend is the clearest statement of the issue in the pre-conciliar papal magisterium: Leo XIII’s Libertas praestantissumum. After setting the stage with the Church’s traditional teaching on the matter, the second stage in the argument will entail a reading of Dignitatis humanae in light of all that has been laid out to that point. In sum, I will argue that if Dignitatis humanae is read in continuity with the Church’s perennial teaching, it is unproblematic in laying out basic principles regarding human freedom in an age when confessional states are (in the main) a thing of the past.

Faith, Reason, and Human Freedom

I propose that the specific hermeneutic by which Dignitatis humanae should be interpreted is the principle elucidated in Benedict XVI’s renowned address given at Regensburg, repeated numerous times, and clearly stated at the outset: “Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.”⁴ Though set within the context of Benedict’s discussion of faith and reason in relation to the contrary notions of the divine in Christianity and Islam, the axiom is universally true. Anticipating the objection to the contrary, he raises the rhetorical question: “Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?”⁵ Commenting on Logos, the Greek term which most embodies this notion, he states that “Logos means both reason and word — a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason.”⁶ In sum, to act contrary to reason, in opposition to Logos, is also to act contrary to the nature of the God who has disclosed himself to the human race.

Acting with reason, then, is seen as a hallmark of what it means to be in right relation to God. This shall be our first necessary principle. Moving on, we must examine the Church’s traditional teaching on libertas, which will shed light on the nature of what it means to be free, and what it means to exercise true liberty in the realm of faith and religion. Let us begin with a text from that most august of documents, Libertas praestantissimum, issued by Leo XIII near the close of the 19th century. I shall here quote a passage that, while lengthy, is crucial to our examination of this topic:

Liberty, then, as We have said, belongs only to those who have the gift of reason or intelligence. Considered as to its nature, it is the faculty of choosing means fitted for the end proposed, for he is master of his actions who can choose one thing out of many. Now, since everything chosen as a means is viewed as good or useful, and since good, as such, is the proper object of our desire, it follows that freedom of choice is a property of the will, or, rather, is identical with the will in so far as it has in its action the faculty of choice. But the will cannot proceed to act until it is enlightened by the knowledge possessed by the intellect. In other words, the good wished by the will is necessarily good in so far as it is known by the intellect; and this the more, because in all voluntary acts choice is subsequent to a judgment upon the truth of the good presented, declaring to which good preference should be given. No sensible man can doubt that judgment is an act of reason, not of the will. The end, or object, both of the rational will and of its liberty is that good only which is in conformity with reason (LP, §5).⁷

As should be abundantly clear from a text which shines with such clarity as this, true liberty has nothing in common with that unbridled license for which it is often mistaken by society at large.

What Leo stresses in his exposition and defense of liberty is its relation to the intellect, drawing attention to the reality of the dual roles of both intellect and will. Far from being a simple act of the will as separate from the intellect, liberty and choice need to be ordered and restrained, in a sense, by the power of the intellect. The will is only truly free to obtain to its object, the good, if the intellect is likewise able to apprehend its own object, truth. As was stated above, “choice is subsequent to a judgment upon the truth of the good presented . . . judgment is an act of reason, not of the will” (LP, §5). This is the fundamental principle with which Dignitatis humanae must be read and interpreted, for if the principle of religious liberty is reduced to the possibility of holding to whatsoever beliefs seem appealing and personally acceptable, apart from any notion of objective truth and grounding in reality as such, it will be false.

As true liberty, then, is the power to choose and pursue what is judged to be good — subsequent to the intellect’s apprehension of what is true — it must also be the case that a proper understanding of religious liberty necessarily concerns the question of truth and falsehood. As a necessary corollary, therefore, it must be the case that one is only truly free to choose that religion that is perfectly true; any choice made for a “religion” or way of life that falls short of this ultimate and perfect truth is a choice that restricts personal freedom. The further one gets from true religion, the further one sinks into a kind of intellectual and moral slavery. Was it not our Lord who summed the matter up most succinctly: “The truth shall make you free”? (Jn 8:32) Though speaking of Himself and adherence to His very person, the notion holds in the natural realm as well: true freedom is both a requirement for, and a result of, the pursuit of what is true and good.

Bringing his remarks on liberty to a sharpened point, Leo proposes that “the true liberty of human society does not consist in every man doing what he pleases,” contrary to popular belief (LP, §10). In fact, he continues, “the real perfection of all creatures is found in the prosecution and attainment of their respective ends . . . [and] the supreme end to which human liberty must aspire is God” (LP, §11). Human persons are free insofar as they direct themselves to their true and proper end, God, the supreme and highest common good, and this itself is an act of right reason. To act reasonably is to act in accordance with our nature, to act in accord with what is apprehended by the intellect as true and with what is judged to be good. It should be clear now how Benedict’s statement at Regensburg — “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature” — must be the guiding light for our interpretation of Dignitatis humanae and its conception of religious liberty, the question to which we will now turn.

The Pursuit of Religious Liberty

Let us now return to the document in question, Dignitatis humanae, and offer a commentary on those propositions which seem most likely to be interpreted falsely and as representing a rupture with the teaching found in the Tradition. First, let us note that the declaration itself offers the proper lens through which it must be read when it states the following: “Religious liberty therefore leaves whole and entire the traditional Catholic teaching concerning the mortal duty, owed by men and by societies, towards the true religion and the sole Church of Christ” (DH, §1). This is the bedrock of all subsequent interpretation of Dignitatis humanae, and without which it cannot be interpreted properly and in continuity with the mind of the Church; any interpretation which leaves behind the Church’s previous teaching on true liberty, and the nature of religion and justice, is necessarily deficient and pernicious.

In light of this, the various statements found within the declaration on individual conscience and personal duty, then, take on a wholly new light. Take, for example, that proposition stated at the very outset of this essay: “Each person has a duty, and therefore also a right, of seeking the truth in matters of religion—in order that each person, through those means truly suited to him, might wisely form his own correct and true judgments of conscience” (DH, §3). If read with a voluntarist, post-Enlightenment conception of freedom and personal right, one easily comes to the conclusion that the post-Vatican II Church is one that has substituted license for liberty, and that would allow any man to make any choice at all as long as he wills it; this would be to exchange Servais Pinckaers’ “freedom for excellence” for Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power.”

Rather than make this a statement concerned with choice and individual conscience, however — as though they could ever be separated from questions of truth and goodness — I propose that the emphasis here should be placed on two key terms: “wisely,” and “own.” To form one’s conscience wisely means to form it in accord with reality, with the truth — to be wise is to possess knowledge of reality at its most foundational principles, and it is to be intimately acquainted with the truth. As there is no other truth which surpasses the Truth who is Jesus Christ, and that truth which he has bequeathed to the Church, to form one’s conscience wisely means to conform it to the teaching of the Church, whole and entire. In addition, to form one’s “own” conscience means to make it a personal act which engages the entirety of one’s whole being, his whole person, to make it an act that engages the intellect and the will.

While this particular text (and others like it) could be read as if they advocate an elevation of the individual will over that of objective truth, it makes much more sense to read it as encouraging the conscious conformity of one’s will to embrace that which is truly good. The declaration says as much just a few lines later in the very same section: “The exercise of religion, of its very nature, consists most fundamentally in interior and free acts of the will, by which a man orders himself directly to God” (DH, §3). The true aim of Dignitatis humanae seems to be directed against any type of coercion in matters of religion as encouraged by the state, specifically in politically sponsored repression of religion, which is a totally different aim than almost any magisterial document that had come before.

Even as recently as the nineteenth century, Christianity was still considered to be a cultural and moral norm present in the vast majority of civilized societies, but this changed with the advent of the twentieth century, when Europe began to become increasingly secular and modernized. Taking into account the two world wars that dominated the first half of the century, followed by massive societal and moral upheaval in the 1960s, the council fathers had to take an entirely new context into account.

This new cultural context which the council had to address, for better or worse, considered an increasing secularization of world politics as a serious obstacle to the fostering of religion. This time, a document was needed in which two key points needed to be issued once again: first, that there can be no coercion in matters of faith and religion; second, that it is in man’s nature to seek the truth, and that he cannot be kept from doing so. Instead of viewing the declaration as kowtowing to a kind of moral relativism and cultural indifferentism, proposing that adherence to any system whatsoever is within man’s rights, it makes a plea that the state allow man the freedom to pursue the truth, especially in regard to religion and the search for God.

As stated time and again by the Church down through the ages, true liberty is that state in which we are able to correctly apprehend the truth, judge and discern what is good, and then choose it freely and without coercion. As the council fathers state: “Man, in the act of believing, must respond to God of his own accord . . . [and] it is entirely consonant with the inherent nature of faith that, in matters of religion, any type of external force on the part of men be excluded” (DH, §10). In a world that is now creeping ever closer to complete secularity, where God and true religion have been pushed out of the public square, there is an ever greater need to proclaim the truth of the natural right and duty of living justly and ordering ourselves to God according to our nature.