Amidst the gathering frenzy by some leaders, and some lay groups, within the Catholic Church to turn back the clock and re-establish a pre-Vatican II mindset on the institution, here is a timely and rigorously argued commentary by Dr Graham English. The issue he puts under the microscope is our changing understanding of the meaning of "religious freedom". He argues that the Second Vatican Council brought about far reaching changes in how we ought to understand and interpret this term. His commentary is effectively a strong argument as to why we need to collectively defend this advance in thinking that the Council introduced.

Pre-Vatican II RE — mainly about "reproduction"...

When I began teaching, in a small primary school in Sydney in 1964, religious education was mostly about "reproduction". I had learnt the catechism, word perfect. I was expected to teach the catechism word perfect. The main aim was the reproduction of good Catholics. In a book written in the 1950s the Church was described, typically:

The Catholic Church is a divinely instituted society, of which all the members profess the doctrine of Christ and are united under the teaching and rule of the Roman Pontiff and the Bishops subject to him, that thereby they may strive after holiness and obtain salvation. Like all other societies it has, therefore, a system of authority by which it is ruled, and by which it was established.

Schooldays in the 1960s — doing as we were told!

The Catholic Church was monolithic (if you ignored the Labor Party split and its divisive effects on the Australian church especially in Victoria) and, as a young man I presumed the Church was an organization that was essentially very successful.

It was still a time of established customary social order where Catholics did not have and did not seem to need reasons for what they were doing, other than 'we are doing as we are told'; except when they were arguing with Protestants, and then the answers they gave were learnt word perfect from a book of apologetics.

It was a Church where ideology acted as a system of images and symbols which preserved the identity of the Church and its members against external and internal threats. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur describes this as the utopian side of ideology; it had a creative effect or at least one that held the line and ensured that the institution survived.

This preservative function was the aim of the Catholic Church in the centuries following the Reformation, and it was the ideology that worked behind religious education and pastoral practice in Australia until the period around the Second Vatican Council.

But this kind of ideology like all ideology, acting behind the backs of those who use it (as Paul Ricoeur says), became destructive of the institution it claimed to preserve. An example of this was the Catholic Church's attitude to religious freedom.

The Catholic conscience…

The Catholic view of religious freedom that underlay religious education for children and adults in Australia, and in the whole Church, up until Vatican II was based on the idea of the Catholic conscience.

In the teaching of the Church, the 'Catholic conscience' possessed the fullness of religious freedom because religious freedom was rooted in objective and absolute truth. The true and the good were objectively proposed by the eternal law of God and authentically declared by the Church.

In this understanding of conscience, religious freedom was the requirement of the dignity of the human person, as rational and moral beings humans were properly dignified by adhering to what was true and good.

The good person therefore was the one who lived according to those higher norms that were objectively true, and these norms were found in all the teachings of the Catholic Church.

On the other hand a sincere but erroneous person, who was acting according to higher norms, but norms that were not objectively true or that were objectively wrong, had internal freedom. They could not be forced to act in accordance with Church teaching but they were still wrong.

The sincere but erroneous were, in charity to be tolerated though they had no right to public expression of their beliefs in witness, worship or teaching, or, in Catholic states, to their ethical choices if they conflicted with Catholic teaching. For example, many of the laws established in the Republic of Ireland against divorce, contraception and inter-faith adoptions in the time from the 1920s until well after the Vatican Council discriminated against non-Catholics but were deemed good laws by the Catholic Church under this view of religious freedom.

The person who recognized no norms other than his or her own subjective imperatives was in bad conscience and possessed neither rectitude nor truth and therefore had no rights to religious freedom. Wrong had no rights.

In the 1950s this fixed view of freedom was the official teaching of the Catholic Church. It was a teaching that had developed over centuries but in the first half of the twentieth century its proponents argued that progress within the tradition had finished with Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903, and that Catholic doctrine on this matter had reached its final and definitive mode of conception and statement.

Ecclesiastical authority was claiming that nothing new need be said on this topic ever again in the whole future of humankind.

Teaching had become ideology in the destructive sense; it was a fixed view of meaning where information was being expressed in a way that justified one sectional interest while it concealed the suppression of other meanings and misrepresented other interests.

This kind of ideology quickly leads to corruption.

The dignity of the person…

Pope John XXIII author of Pacem in Terris

In 1963 Pope John XXIII's encyclical letter Pacem in Terris – Peace on the earth, changed this view. He said, among other things:

The aspirations of the minds of men, about which we have been speaking, also give clear witness to the fact that in these our days men are becoming more and more conscious of their dignity. For this reason they feel the impulse to participate in the process of government and also demand that their own inviolable rights be guaranteed by the order of public law. [#279]

John XXIII spelled out what this dignity demands:

The dignity of the human person requires that a man should act on his own judgment and with his own freedom. Wherefore in community life there is good reason why it should be chiefly on his own deliberate initiative that a man should exercise his rights, fulfil his duties, and co-operate with others in the endless variety of necessary social tasks. What matters is that a man should make his own decisions and act on his own judgement out of a sense of duty. He is not to act as one compelled by external coercion or instigation. In view of all this, it is clear that a society of men which is maintained solely by force must be considered inhuman. [#265]

New teachings…

John contributed two things that were new to Catholic teaching. The first was that, as long as our conscience is formed by higher norms, and not just by our own subjective imperatives, it is 'among the rights of man, that he should be able to worship God in accord with the norm approved by his conscience and to profess his religion privately and publicly'. [# 260]

And he made it clear that in order that the conscience possesses the status of personal and civil right it is not even required that the norms that form it should be true.

'Since all men are equal in their dignity', John affirmed, 'no one has the power to force another to act out of inner conviction. Only God can do this, since He alone scrutinizes and judges the secret counsels of the heart'. Not only was John asserting the role of conscience here, he was also acknowledging the contemporary human consciousness.

He thus demonstrated the development of doctrine, and the inadequacy of using a reproductive approach to religious education.

Possibly the most startling of John's contributions was that, unlike the popes before him, he added freedom as coequally essential to truth, justice and love when he described the spiritual forces that sustain human society.

John affirmed that the human quality of society depends on the freedom of the people. Truth, justice and love assure the stability of society; but freedom is the dynamism of social progress toward fuller humanity in communal living.

Freedom is a political end demanded by justice and is also the political method by which the people achieve their highest political good, which is their unity as a people. In Pacem in Terris John XXIII affirmed religious freedom as a civil and human right both personally and corporately, a right immune from restriction by any legal or extralegal force.

The Second Vatican Council documents took the same attitude to freedom as Pacem in Terris. Three of the Vatican Council documents are particularly relevant in a consideration of the role of freedom in Catholic thought. These are Gaudium et spes – The Church in the Modern World, Gravissimum educationis – On Christian Education, and Dignitatis humanae – On Religious Freedom.

For example Dignitatis humanae declares that religious freedom is a human right both for the person and for the group. John Courtney Murray in his introduction to the document in the Abbott edition of the Vatican Documents, commented on Dignitatis humanae, 'it must be admitted that the Church is late in acknowledging the validity of the principle'.

Late or not, the Church changed its teaching!

Conclusion…

But the course has not been easy since then. 'Oh, but it doesn't mean that kind of freedom!' is the cry of many a person in power, in the Church as much as politics to hold on to their little acre of influence. But attempts to limit the definition of words such as freedom do not work any more. The Church does not have the power, nor does any organization or institution, to own the meaning of words especially words that are part of the meaning of a particular age.

Freedom, at least since the French Revolution and the anti-slavery movements of the nineteenth century, has carried such a wealth of meaning that once it was accepted by the Church, as it was at the Council, as a sign of the dignity of humans, it cannot be contained even by later papal pronouncements, even if, as in the case of the apostolic letter of Pope John Paul II, Ad tuendum fidem – For the defence of the faith, in July 1998, dissenters are threatened with 'a just penalty'.

Since burning people, metaphorically and physically has become impossible what can those in authority do that frightens the ordinary Catholic?

My favourite twentieth century pope, Paul VI, after Vatican II, declared Dignitatis humanae 'one of the major texts of the Council'. One further quote from it might be written in large letters above any place where Catholicism is taught; not facing the people in the pews, because they already know, but in a place where the teacher cannot avoid it:

The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth,
as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.

'For freedom, Christ has set us free!' the writer to the Galatians (5:1) assures us. Anyone in authority telling us THEY know what freedom is is no substitute for us all being invited to live it.

Graham English
Australian Catholic University

References:
Beside Pacem in Terris and the Vatican II documents (Abbott edition) I am influenced here by two John Courtenay Murray books:
Murray, J.C. (1965) The problem of religious freedom. London: Geoffrey Chapman.
Murray, J.C. (1992) Religious liberty: Catholic struggles with pluralism. (Ed. Hooper) Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox Press.
and
White, E.G. (1986) Itineraries of meaning: Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic of the idea of the sacred. PhD thesis. Department of Religious Studies, University of Sydney.
Image Credits:
The image of the burning of Giordano Bruno at the stake is from a poster image on the Idea Fine Art website: www.durand-gallery.com/exhibitions/giordanobruno.html. Click on the other images for the original source.

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©2008 Dr Graham English

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