Catholic Constitutionalism from the Americanist Controversy to Dignitatis Humanae

ABSTRACT This Article, written for a symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of Dignitatis Humanae, or the Roman Catholic Church's Declaration on Religious Freedom, traces a brief history of Catholic constitutionalism from the Americanist controversy of the late nineteenth century up until the issuance of Dignitatis Humanae as part of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. It argues that the pluralist experiment enshrined in the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution was a crucial factor in shaping Church attitudes towards religious freedom, not only in the years immediately preceding the revolutionary Second Vatican Council but ever since the late nineteenth century, when Catholicism became a potent social force in the United States. This history offers an opportunity to reflect on what the new global geography of Catholicism portends in the future. INTRODUCTION Dignitatis Humanae is best known as a watershed moment in the doctrinal history of the Roman Catholic Church's stance on freedom of religion. More than any other document produced by the Second Vatican Council, it was both an exercise in, and the very expression of, the spirit of aggiornamento that ushered the Catholic Church into the modern world. Prior to the issuance of the Declaration in 1965, the Church held the view that religious freedom was doctrinally and conceptually erroneous because error possessed no rights. "Truth and error are incompatible; to dialogue with error is to put God and the devil on the same footing," or so went the ultra-traditionalist narrative that persisted even after the conciliar moment but which has since fallen into complete disrepute. (1) In addition, only a Catholic confessional state could ensure the protection and promotion of religious truth because religious error was considered damaging to the common good. Dignitatis Humanae, also known as the Declaration on Religious Freedom, thus embodied a principled volte-face in its categorical pronouncement that "the human person has a right to religious freedom." (2) In doing so, it created the conditions for a new kind of Catholicism that made a dialogue between the Church and the secular world possible. Easily the most celebrated document of the Second Vatican Council, and certainly among non-Catholics, the text of the Declaration itself appears modest. Religious freedom is minimally defined as immunity from coercion in civil society and was explicitly grounded in the dignity of the human person. (3) It appeared to be silent on the issue of the confessional state, notwithstanding the amount and the intensity of the discussion that surrounded the topic preceding the Council. But by emphasizing freedom of religion rather than religious tolerance as held in then-existing church teachings, it was clear that the days of a preferred Catholic establishment were gone. The document thus represented an important paradigm shift. As a principle, religious freedom could attract consensus on many grounds, but it was the first time that Catholic political thought and theology could endorse its substantive basis as innately its own. It is impossible to discuss Dignitatis Humanae without canvassing the biography and intellectual contributions of John Courtney Murray S.J., the American Jesuit priest who briefly served as peritus, or expert, during the Council proceedings and who had been writing on the subject of religious freedom long before Pope John XXIII made the surprise announcement of convening a council in 1959. Murray, one of the two towering Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century, alongside the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, was the one responsible for developing a principled Catholic defense of religious liberty. From his prodigious writings on the subject between the 1940s and 1950s, the defense roughly involved three main, intertwined components: the dignity of the human person, freedom of religion, and the nature of the state. …