Religious Freedom

The expression "religious freedom" is one of those we think we understand and often misunderstand. Many hear it as a philosophical claim: all religions are equal, each his own truth, it does not matter what one believes. But that is not at all what the Church teaches. To grasp Catholic doctrine, three confusions must first be set aside.

An immunity from coercion, not a right to error

Religious freedom, as the Church defines it, is an immunity: the absence of external coercion. It states what the State and other men have no right to do — force a conscience — and not what man would have the right to believe before God. The Catechism formulates this with almost juridical precision:

"The right to religious liberty is neither a moral license to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error, but rather a natural right of the human person to civil liberty, i.e., immunity, within just limits, from external constraint in religious matters by political authorities." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2108^[3]

The distinction is crucial. Before God, error has no rights: no one has the moral right to be mistaken about God or to refuse the truth once known. But before the State, the person has the right not to be coerced — not because his belief would be true, but because the person bears a dignity that political power must respect. It is the subject of the right (the person), not the object of the belief (true or false), that founds the immunity.

Religious freedom, indifferentism and relativism: not to be confused

Indifferentism is the thesis that it would be indifferent to belong to one religion or another, all leading equally to God. Relativism goes further: there would be no objective religious truth at all. These two positions are condemned by the Church, yesterday as today — Benedict XVI denounced the "dictatorship of relativism"^[4]. Dignitatis Humanae takes care, from its very first doctrinal sentence, to rule out any indifferentist reading:

"This religious freedom [...] leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ." — Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, no. 1^[5]

In other words: affirming that the State must not coerce consciences in no way amounts to saying that all religions are equal. The duty to seek the true religion — and to embrace it once found — remains whole. It is Dignitatis Humanae itself that recalls it: "All men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and His Church, and to embrace it and hold on to it as they come to know it."^[6]

Religious freedom and freedom of conscience: two distinct notions

Religious freedom and freedom of conscience are often confused. The two are linked but do not coincide. Freedom of conscience concerns first the inner forum: the soul's relation to moral truth, the duty to follow one's conscience and to form it rightly (see the dedicated article Freedom of conscience). Religious freedom, by contrast, concerns the social and juridical order: immunity from coercion in the city, that is, the relations between the person, religious communities and political power. Dignitatis Humanae indicates this in its very subtitle: it proclaims "the right of the person and of communities to social and civil freedom in matters religious"^[7]. This article therefore treats the social and political dimension; the interior dimension belongs to conscience.

The foundation: the dignity of the human person

Why must the State refrain from coercing? Because the human person possesses a dignity that neither error nor sin removes. The very title of the declaration says it: Dignitatis Humanae, "Of human dignity". The Council founds the right not on a subjective disposition, but on the objective nature of the person:

"The right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself." — Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, no. 2^[8]

This foundation is decisive for understanding that religious freedom is not a concession to liberalism: it flows from Christian anthropology, which sees in every man a creature made in the image of God, freely called to salvation. The development of this foundation belongs to the article The dignity of the human person.

Religious freedom was not invented in 1965. The Council itself affirms that in "searching into the sacred tradition and doctrine of the Church — the treasury out of which the Church continually brings forth new things that are in harmony with the old"^[9]. Benedict XVI would say that the declaration had "taken up anew the deeper patrimony of the Church", recovering "the teaching of Jesus himself" and "the Church of the martyrs"^[10].

Christ coerced no one

The first argument is christological. Christ preached the truth with authority, but He refused all coercion. He let the rich young man walk away free; He did not call down the legions of angels; He rendered to Caesar what is Caesar's without confusing the Kingdom with a political power. Dignitatis Humanae insists on this:

"Christ [...] patiently invited and attracted His disciples [...] to arouse and strengthen the faith of His hearers, not to exercise coercion upon them." — Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, no. 11^[11]

Faith is thus presented as a free response to an invitation, never as an extorted submission. It is the very opposite of forced conversion.

Tertullian and Lactantius: "it is contrary to religion to compel religion"

From the very first centuries, while Christians were themselves persecuted, the apologists formulated a principle of astonishing modernity. Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 220), in his letter Ad Scapulam addressed to the proconsul of Africa, writes:

"It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions: one man's religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion — to which free-will and not force should lead us." — Tertullian, Ad Scapulam, ch. 2^[12]

It is to Tertullian that we owe, it seems, the first formulation of the expression libertas religionis, "freedom of religion"^[13]. Lactantius (c. 250 – c. 325), tutor to the son of Constantine, carries the idea further in his Divine Institutes: true religion defends itself by dying for it, not by putting others to death; faith cannot be imposed by torture, for "nothing is so much a matter of free-will as religion"^[14]. These texts, written by persecuted men, show that the defence of freedom of belief was born at the heart of primitive Christianity, not against it.

Saint Thomas Aquinas: no one is forced to believe

In the 13th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas distinguishes two cases with precision. Those who have never received the faith (pagans, Jews) must in no way be compelled to believe, for "to believe depends on the will":

"Unbelievers who have never received the faith, such as heathens and Jews, are by no means to be compelled to believe, because to believe depends on the will." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 10, a. 8^[15]

Dignitatis Humanae explicitly builds on this text of Saint Thomas^[16]. Honesty requires it to be said: Thomas also held that baptized heretics, having once professed the faith, could be compelled by the Church to keep their commitment — the logic that underlay the medieval Inquisition. It is precisely this second part that history and doctrinal reflection have led to abandon. But the first principle — no one is forced to enter the faith — runs through the whole tradition and provides the foundation of the modern doctrine.

The theological heart of the doctrine holds in one sentence: a forced faith is not faith. Adherence to God engages the most intimate part of the person; it can only be free, on pain of being a mere outward pretence.

"No one is to be forced to embrace the faith against his own will"

Dignitatis Humanae makes the free nature of the act of faith the central argument of its whole teaching:

"It is one of the major tenets of Catholic doctrine, contained in the word of God and constantly proclaimed by the Fathers, that man's response to God in faith must be free; no one therefore is to be forced to embrace the faith against his own will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act." — Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, no. 10^[17]

The Catechism takes up this logic: "To be human, the act of faith must be free", for "the reasonable and free character of the act of faith" excludes all coercion^[18]. A religion imposed by fear or force produces hypocrites, not believers.

Consequence: respect for freedom in religious matters

From this principle follows a social requirement. If faith must be free, then society and the State must preserve the space of that freedom: they can neither impose it nor hinder it. The Catechism translates this principle into a rule of law, quoting the Council:

"In religious matters no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2106, quoting Dignitatis Humanae no. 2^[19]

Note the double immunity: neither being forced to act against one's conscience, nor being restrained from acting according to it. Religious freedom is therefore not only interior: it includes public worship, preaching, the education of children, religious association.

To understand the difficulty, one must go back to the very firm condemnations that the 19th-century popes issued against what they called "freedom of conscience" and "freedom of worship". Read out of context, they seem to contradict Vatican II head-on. Read in their context, they were aimed at a precise ideology.

Gregory XVI and Mirari Vos (1832): the "raving" of indifferentism

Pope Gregory XVI, in the encyclical Mirari Vos (15 August 1832), condemns in very harsh terms the "freedom of conscience" as promoted by the anticlerical liberalism of his time:

"From this poisoned source of indifferentism flows that false and absurd maxim, or rather that raving: that liberty of conscience is to be claimed and vindicated for everyone." — Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, 1832^[20]

The Latin word used is deliramentum — a raving. But the sequence is illuminating: what the pope condemns is a freedom of conscience that flows from indifferentism, that is, from the idea that religious truth is of no importance. He is aiming at a freedom erected into an absolute principle, detached from all duty toward the truth — not at the immunity from coercion that Vatican II would defend.

Pius IX: Quanta Cura and the Syllabus (1864)

Pius IX hardens the position still further. In the encyclical Quanta Cura and the annexed Syllabus (8 December 1864), he lists among the "errors of our time" several propositions touching religious freedom. The Syllabus condemns for example as erroneous the proposition that:

"In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship." — Pius IX, Syllabus, proposition 77 (condemned)^[21]

The Syllabus also targeted proposition no. 15, affirming that each man is free to embrace the religion his reason leads him to judge true, and proposition no. 79, reducing freedom of worship to a mere advance^[22]. The full record of these condemnations is treated in the article The Syllabus of Pius IX.

What were these popes really condemning?

The decisive point is the context. In the 19th century, "freedom of conscience" and "freedom of worship" were the slogans of a militant liberalism that intended to drive God out of public life, to subject the Church to the State, and to posit that religious truth is of no political importance. The popes condemned this indifferentist and statist philosophy, not the principle — which they admitted besides — that converts are not made by force. As Benedict XVI would write, these pontifical decisions contained a permanent principle (the rights of God and of truth) but also contingent elements, bound up with the polemics of an age^[23]. It is this distinction that would allow, a century later, the development of Dignitatis Humanae without repudiation.

Between the condemnations of Pius IX and the declaration of Vatican II, the pontificate of Leo XIII (1878–1903) marks an essential intermediate stage: the doctrine of tolerance. His encyclicals Immortale Dei (1885) and Libertas Praestantissimum (1888) set out a nuanced framework that would remain the reference until the Council. Leo XIII is also the pope of Rerum Novarum (1891): see Leo XIII.

Immortale Dei and Libertas: true freedom is not licence

Leo XIII carefully distinguishes true freedom — the capacity to choose the good — from licence, the false freedom that claims the right to do anything, including rejecting God. He therefore criticizes "freedom of conscience" understood as the right to worship God or not at one's pleasure, and "the liberty of expressing by word of mouth or in writing whatever one wishes" when it "has overstepped due limit and measure"^[24]. But he refuses to let it be said that the Church is the enemy of all freedom:

"It cannot, however, be justly charged with being an enemy to a just tolerance or to a sound and lawful liberty." — Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 1885^[25]

Tolerating an evil to avoid a greater evil

Leo XIII's key is the notion of tolerance. A government may, without approving error, tolerate in practice the existence of diverse forms of worship, "for the sake of achieving some great good or of avoiding some great evil"^[26]. Tolerance is not a positive right of error: it is a political prudence that endures a lesser evil to preserve peace and a greater good. People would later speak of the doctrine of "thesis and hypothesis": in thesis (the ideal), the State should recognize the true religion; in hypothesis (concrete circumstances), it can and must tolerate other forms of worship. Vatican II would shift the axis: no longer tolerance conceded by the State to error, but the right of the person to immunity from coercion. The passage from one to the other is precisely the object of the debate on continuity.

On 7 December 1965, on the closing day of the Second Vatican Council, Paul VI promulgates the declaration Dignitatis Humanae "on religious freedom". The final vote was massive: 2,308 for, 70 against. No conciliar document had been so debated, nor so reworked — six successive schemas.

Genesis and significance of the declaration

The text is born of a twofold historical experience. On the one hand, the American experience of a Catholic Church flourishing under a regime of religious freedom — defended notably by the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, an influential expert at the Council^[27]. On the other, the experience of the 20th-century totalitarianisms — Nazism and Communism — which had claimed to enslave consciences and persecuted believers. Faced with these regimes, the Church understood that it had to defend, for all, the principle that the State has no power over the religious conscience.

What exactly the text declares

The heart of the declaration is a precise definition of immunity from coercion, applying to persons as to communities:

"All men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that in matters religious no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits." — Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, no. 2^[28]

And the Council specifies the juridical nature of this right: "This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the law of society in such a manner that it becomes a civil right."^[29] It is therefore not a judgment on the value of religions, but a civil status guaranteed in the social order.

"Leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine" (DH 1)

Aware of the difficulty, the Council inserted an explicit continuity clause, already quoted above: religious freedom, because it concerns "exemption from coercion in civil society", "leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ"^[30]. This sentence is the hermeneutical key intended by the Council itself: it did not mean to deny the duty of men and societies toward the truth, but to affirm that this duty is not realized by coercion.

Just limits and the just public order (DH 7)

Religious freedom is not absolute. The Council specifies that it is exercised within the bounds of the "just public order":

"Its exercise is therefore subject to certain regulatory norms [...] in accordance with juridical norms which are in conformity with the objective moral order." — Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, no. 7^[31]

The Catechism warns against a lax reading: this right "can of itself be neither unlimited nor limited only by a 'public order' conceived in a positivist or naturalist manner"^[32]. In other words, the limits of religious freedom are not fixed by the mere balance of power or by a purely material order: they are rooted in justice, in the rights of others and in public morality — which belongs to the common good and to the just competence of authority, in respect for the principle of subsidiarity.

Here lies the crux of the matter. Does Dignitatis Humanae contradict Gregory XVI and Pius IX? Three readings confront each other.

The traditionalist objection (Lefebvre, SSPX)

For Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the Society of Saint Pius X, the answer is yes: the religious freedom of Vatican II would contradict the constant teaching of the popes, in particular the Syllabus. This was one of the major motives for their refusal of the Council. The objection is serious and deserves an argued answer, not contempt: if the Church had truly contradicted itself on a grave point, its doctrinal credibility would be damaged. That is why the question of continuity is not a detail of erudition, but a matter of faith.

Benedict XVI's answer: the hermeneutic of reform (2005)

The decisive magisterial answer came from Benedict XVI, in his address to the Roman Curia of 22 December 2005. There he opposes two ways of reading Vatican II: a "hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture", which he rejects, and a "hermeneutic of reform", of "renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church", which he adopts^[33]. The key is the distinction of levels:

"Only the principles express what is lasting, remaining in the background and motivating decisions from within. Conversely, the concrete forms are not so permanent [...] The basic decisions can remain valid, while the forms of their application in new contexts can vary." — Benedict XVI, address to the Roman Curia, 22 December 2005^[34]

Applied to religious freedom: the permanent principle (the State has no competence to coerce faith; truth is not imposed by force) remains; the historical form (the confessional State of the 19th century, or conversely the rejection of freedom of worship in the face of liberal indifferentism) was a contingent application, bound to a precise context.

The contemporary theological debate: Pink, Rhonheimer, Harrison

The debate continues among theologians. Martin Rhonheimer maintains that there was a genuine revision of the earlier doctrine — a real development, not a mere reformulation — but homogeneous and legitimate. Thomas Pink, philosopher at King's College London, proposes a subtler reading: the right defined by Dignitatis Humanae no. 2 holds with regard to the State, which is by nature incompetent in religious matters, but not with regard to the Church, which keeps a coercive power of its own over its baptized; the Council would thus have changed not the underlying doctrine, but the Church's policy toward the State^[35]. Brian Harrison for his part defends a strict continuity. This debate, in which Thomas Pink and Martin Rhonheimer notably took part, shows that continuity is held by all serious interlocutors: the discussion concerns the mode of development, not the existence of a contradiction^[36].

Permanent principles and contingent forms: the synthesis

The Catholic synthesis holds in a few distinctions. What does not change: the duty to seek the truth and to adhere to it; the rights of God; the refusal of forced conversion; the condemnation of indifferentism. What has developed: the explicit awareness that immunity from coercion is a civil right of the person, and not a mere tolerance conceded by the State. The development is real — the Church knows more today than in the 19th century about the consequences of State coercion in religious matters — but it is organic: it draws, in the Council's own words, "new things that are in harmony with the old"^[37].

Far from being secured, religious freedom is today the fundamental right most violated in the world, according to several international observatories.

A fundamental right recognized and defended by the Church

After the Council, the Church made religious freedom a constant axis of its social doctrine. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church calls it a "fundamental human right", rooted in the "transcendent dignity" of the person^[38]. John Paul II, who had lived under Communist totalitarianism, made it a major theme: in Redemptor Hominis (1979), he names it among the first of human rights; his message for the 1988 World Day of Peace is entitled "Religious Freedom, Condition for Peaceful Coexistence"^[39]. Religious freedom is thus linked to peace and to a sound democracy.

Christians, the most persecuted community in the world

The reports of organizations such as Aid to the Church in Need and Open Doors converge: several hundred million Christians suffer discrimination or persecution because of their faith, making them, in absolute numbers, the most persecuted religious community on the planet^[40]. Added to this are persecutions targeting other religious minorities. Defending religious freedom is therefore not, for the Church, a concession to liberalism: it is defending brothers and sisters who are truly oppressed, and reminding every power that it has no authority over the sanctuary of conscience.

Religious freedom, secularity and the common good

The Catholic doctrine of religious freedom is neither laicism — which would relegate faith to the strictly private sphere and neutralize public space — nor State confessionalism constraining consciences. It defends a positive secularity: a State that sets itself up as judge of no religion, but that recognizes the religious fact, guarantees the free public exercise of worship and cooperates with believing communities for the common good. It is the narrow path between the atheist State and the theocratic State — a path which, paradoxically, protects truth better than coercion ever did, for "truth imposes itself only by the force of the truth itself"^[41].

• Freedom of conscience — the inner forum, the duty to follow and to form one's conscience.
• The dignity of the human person — the anthropological foundation of all rights.
• The Syllabus of Pius IX — the record of the 1864 condemnations and their context.
• Leo XIII — the doctrine of tolerance and the rise of social doctrine.
• The Second Vatican Council — the council that promulgated Dignitatis Humanae.
• Totalitarianism — the enslavement of consciences that religious freedom opposes.
• The common good and Subsidiarity — the framework within which religious freedom is exercised.