The Catholic Interpretation of Religious Liberty: A Square Circle
Fr. Antoine-Marie de Araujo, who belongs to the Fraternity of Saint Vincent Ferrer, criticizes, quite courteously, in an article in Sedes Sapientiæ, entitled‘Religious Neutrality of the State?’[1], our own article, entitled ‘The Ralliement at the Origin of Vatican II’s Pastoral Magisterium’, published on the Res Novæ[2] website.
The proposal we offered, which was then criticized by Fr. de Araujo, reads as follows: “N° 2 of Dignitatis humanæ makes it the State’s duty to allow (not prevent) the peaceful diffusion of truth and falsehood on an equal footing. This is tantamount to enshrining the intrinsic religious neutrality of the state, a considerable innovation.”
According to Fr. de Araujo: “This text [Dignitatis humanæ n° 2] does not speak of permitting truth and falsehood on an equal footing. It does not even speak of error or truth. The criterion is fidelity to conscience. This means that religious liberty does not protect acts that man commits against his conscience, that is, it does not protect formal sin (committed knowingly): for instance, the formal sin of blasphemy or the formal sin of heresy.”
Protecting the Propagation of Truth and Goodness, (Prudently) Preventing the Propagation of Falsehood and Evil
Let us look at the text of Dignitatis humanæ n° 2: “This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that 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 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. The council further declares that 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. This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed and thus it is to become a civil right.”
Our article did not include all the explanations that preceded our conclusion, but they are worth recalling. The affirmation of religious liberty falls within the domain of what is known as the traditional public law of the Church. The latter imposed requirements that seem utterly at odds with the reality of a political world governed by the secular principles that emerged from the Revolution. Nevertheless, it is important to safeguard these traditional principles and to bear them in mind so as to defend the liberty of the Church in spite of everything.
From Pius VI to Pius XII, the Church expected a state that respected these principles ‒which still existed in 1965, at the time of Dignitatis humanæ ‒ to protect and encourage by law the worship organized by the Church along with its dissemination of Catholic doctrine, and to prevent by law the public propagation of error. Thus, for example, in the encyclical Libertas by Leo XIII, we read: “Men have a right freely and prudently to propagate throughout the State what things soever are true and honorable, so that as many as possible may possess them; but lying opinions, than which no mental plague is greater, and vices which corrupt the heart and moral life should be diligently repressed by public authority, lest they insidiously work the ruin of the State.”
Conversely, Dignitatis humanæ demands that in religious matters no coercion be exercised by any human power whatsoever ‒ that is, in fact, essentially by the State ‒ over public action exercised in conscience. Therein resides the conflict between the traditional magisterium and the declaration of the Second Vatican Council. According to the traditional magisterium, if such action is in accordance with truth and goodness, it must not only not be impeded, but, on the contrary, be protected and encouraged by law. On the other hand, if it goes against objective truth and goodness, it must be impeded by law.
In very concrete terms, the reversal brought about by Vatican II consisted in informing the Catholic state that, henceforth, public acts of worship by those Christian communities separated from the Church, along with those by non-Christian religions, in addition to the dissemination of their doctrines, could not be prevented: thus the right to religious liberty became a civil right. This is why it has been made incumbent upon the state to allow (not prevent) the spread of Protestantism, Islam, etc. If words have any meaning, this clearly signifies allowing (not preventing) the peaceful propagation of both truth and falsehood on an equal footing.
Admittedly, Dignitatis humanæ grants, somewhat as a concession, that there may be confessional states, particularly Catholic states, but on condition that they respect religious liberty: “If, in view of peculiar circumstances obtaining among peoples, special civil recognition is given to one religious community in the constitutional order of society, it is at the same time imperative that the right of all citizens and religious communities to religious freedom should be recognized and made effective in practice.” (DH 6).
Conscience and the Law
This is where Fr. de Araujo’s subtlety comes in: when n° 2 of DH states that religious liberty requires that no one be prevented from acting according to his conscience, it must, according to him, be understood that “religious liberty does not protect acts that man performs against his conscience, that is, it does not protect formal sin.”
The difficulty is that the public authorities would then have to sound the depths of conscience and discern, for each individual who performs public acts contrary to the true religion, whether or not he is acting in accordance with his conscience. The state would have to judge, if we understand correctly, whether the conscience of every individual who spreads error or evil is invincibly erroneous or not. The scope of the liberty to err would thus be reduced to evil acts in religious matters performed in good faith, or more precisely, according to an invincibly erroneous conscience. However, all other public acts contrary to the truth could be impeded, notably the sins of heresy. To this, Fr. de Araujo adds that “truth imposes itself more forcefully upon the conscience than does error,” which is indisputable, but from which he concludes, rather optimistically, not to say liberally, that “to affirm the freedom to act peacefully according to one’s conscience is to grant far more liberty to truth than to error.” All things being equal, Charles de Montalembert, in his speech in Malines on 20 August 1863, was filled with a like-minded optimism: “Of all the abuses that liberty allows, there is perhaps not a single one that, in the long run, can withstand the opposition and the defiance of the moral sense which liberty arouses and arms with its indomitable vigor.”
The fact remains that wrongful acts in religious matters (atheism and false religions) are obviously very widespread. Should we conclude that they are primarily committed against the conscience of their perpetrators? And that, consequently, they are not protected by law? As formal sins, committed knowingly, they can be legitimately impeded. On the other hand, acts contrary to true religion committed according to an invincibly erroneous conscience ‒ very rare according to Araujo’s hypothesis ‒ could not be impeded.
However, on 6 December 1953, Pius XII had reiterated a principle in his speech Ci riesce to Catholic jurists: “That which does not correspond to the truth and to the moral law possesses no objective right to exist, nor to be propagated, nor to be acted upon.” Objectively speaking, we are in the realm of the law. Religious liberty, as interpreted by Fr. de Araujo, would not directly negate, but would introduce a mitigating factor to the principle laid down by Pius XII: evil and error have no right, unless the person who commits this error or moral evil acts according to an invincibly erroneous conscience. This small opening granted by Fr. de Araujo to religious liberty is thus clarified: “DH 2 allows the State to prevent deliberate sin in religious matters and requires that it grant various beliefs a degree of liberty proportionate to their credibility [emphasis added].” He concludes: “This is far from [the State’s] neutrality.” This is true, since the State is thus recognized as having the right to sound the sincerity of false beliefs so as to determine whether or not to allow them.
Religious liberty, properly understood, would therefore consist in “grant[ing] various beliefs a degree of liberty proportionate to their credibility.” However, Fr. de Araujo has just rightly explained, quoting Abbé Bernard Lucien, that when the intellect is seriously confronted with its object, the truth, it cannot fail to grasp it[3]. The credibility of the true religion is absolute, that of other beliefs is nil. This seems to imply that religious liberty is granted only to the one true belief.
One thus has the impression that, in order to eliminate the discontinuity with the traditional magisterium, Fr. Araujo equates religious liberty with the liberty of the Church. This is an attempt full of good will, reminiscent of that of Benedict XVI in his speech on the two hermeneutics of the Council[4], which seemed to equate religious liberty with the liberty of the act of faith: religious liberty is “an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction,” which all traditional teaching approves.
Yet, Dignitatis humanæ does not speak of the liberty enjoyed solely by the truth expressed by the one Church of Christ, namely the liberty of the Church, nor of the impossibility of forcing anyone to believe, that is, the liberty of the act of faith. Dignitatis humanæ, as Benedict XVI also states in the aforementioned speech, sought to Christianize “an essential principle of the modern State.” The criterion of the law, with regard to the organization of the public religious sphere, is no longer that objective criterion which is the Church’s magisterium, but rather the respect for individual conscience. To summarize, we can say that the aim of this text, notably inspired by the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, was twofold:
- It demanded that those in government who, at the time, were attempting, as best they could, to implement the “Christian constitution of the State” advocated by Immortale Dei, refrain, henceforth, from impeding the public dissemination of error out of respect for conscience.
- And to those in power who were applying a persecutorial or aggressive form of secularism, it requested that they adopt a form of religious neutrality favorable to the free expression of various religions, implicitly modeled on the exemplar of the United States[5].
Fr. Claude Barthe
[1] n° 173, pp. 41-45.
[2] 7 May 2025, The Ralliement at the Origin of Vatican II’s Pastoral Magisterium.
[3] Bernard Lucien, ‘Petite suite sur la liberté religieuse de Vatican II’ (‘A Brief Follow-up on Religious Liberty in Vatican II’), Sedes Sapientiæ 97, p. 31.
[4] Address to the Curia, 22 December 2005.
[5] Benedict XVI, referring positively to Tocqueville, said that the United States is that “country in which religion and freedom are ‘intimately linked’ in contributing to a stable democracy that fosters social virtues and participation in the communal life of all its citizens.” (Address given at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center, Washington D.C., 17 April 2008).