Dignitatis humanae
Dignitatis humanae is the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom. In the context of the council's stated intention "to develop the doctrine of recent popes on the inviolable rights of the human person and the constitutional order of society", Dignitatis humanae spells out the church's support for the protection of religious liberty. It set the ground rules by which the church would relate to secular states.
The passage of this measure by a vote of 2,308 to 70 is considered by many to be one of the most significant events of the council. This declaration was promulgated by Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965.
Dignitatis humanae became a point of dispute between the Vatican and traditionalist Catholics who argued that the council document was incompatible with previous authoritatively stated Catholic teaching.
Background
Earlier Catholic view
Historically, the ideal of Catholic political organization was a tightly interwoven structure of the Catholic Church and secular rulers generally known as Christendom, with the Catholic Church having a favoured place in the political structure. In 1520, Pope Leo X in the papal bull Exsurge Domine had censured the proposition "That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit" as one of a number of errors that were "either heretical, scandalous, false, offensive to pious ears, or seductive of simple minds and against Catholic truth".However, during the same period, the Catholic Church condemned the Regalist, Gallican and Caesaropapist heresies that aspired to a State, under the pretext of its Confessionality, with inherent rights to intervene in religious matters that were typically a protest of the ecclesiastical Jurisdiction. So, the Church rather defended the Augustinian and Thomist doctrine which stated that, only by concession of the Spiritual Power of the Papacy, is that a Christian Government could use its Temporal Power in such matters, so that the civil Authority then could represses heresy or apostasy, but teaching as magisterial doctrine that it was not an inherent right of the State to be an institution with religious faculties, and therefore, the Church strongly condemned the Christian rulers who, during the European Wars of Religion, abused such concessions of the Church with the Patronato in order to violate the rights of people who were not attached to the true Church, who according to the Holy See should be treated with compassion and called to correct themselves so that they return to Orthodoxy while also condemning rulers who wanted to repress or ignore the rights of non-Christians, such as Muslims or Jews, who were not under the jurisdiction of Christians because they were in a different religious communion, and therefore even outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.
In short, the Church reserved for the Clergy the right to judge the religious conscience of souls to determine who was a Heretic and how to deal with them judicially, while the State did not have such Prerogatives by themselves, but by the grace of the true Church of Christ, which also did not consider it morally acceptable to interfere with the conscience of non-Christians that lacked of Baptism, these having to be respected in their condition as natural non-Christians and to have the freedom to profess their religion among their communities as long as they do not proselytize what the Church understands as false religions whose expansion would endanger Salvation in Christianity.
Late modern pre-Conciliar teaching
Following the French Revolution, the Papacy had found itself in a bitter clash against liberalism and revolutionary ideas: harsh anti-clerical measures such as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had drawn harsh condemnation from the Holy See. The Magisterium was particularly concerned with the rise of indifferentism and relativism and the ideas of religious pluralism and freedom of conscience were seen as expression of both and were strongly rejected by several Pontiffs. Thus, the Catholic Church condemned religious freedom as a heresy during the Papacy of Pius IX with the encyclical Quanta cura, and this condemnation was reaffirmed with the Syllabus of Errors. Both condemnations were a continuation of a long series of reactionary condemnations against the Modernist Heresy and Liberal Theology that had arisen since the end of the 18th Century, in which was relevant the opposition of the Church to the "philosophical innovations" of the Enlightenment under the argument that political Liberalism, through the right to Freedom of worship, encouraged religious Indifference and forced Secularization that violated the political duties of Catholic societies to defend religious practice and Christian values in the public sphere, as well as for violating the socio-political rights of the Church in the face of the Anticlerical policies of the Secularists.In this context of hostility between Catholics and Liberals in politics due to irreconcilable differences about Philosophy of Law, the Church would strongly condemn the right to Religious Freedom, but only as was formulated by liberal ideologues such concept, which was understood under the heretical proposition that "all religions are equally true and valid" on which liberal jurists based their definition of Religious Freedom. However, this never implied that the Church sought to deny the rights of people who were by birth non-Catholic people, only to affirm that, as a consequence of the Catholic Faith being considered the only true religion, the rest of the religious positions by Logic couldn't have the same rights as the Catholic faith in the political order, arguing that error has no rights, and so the Church sought to call on Catholic Rulers to not alter those historical relations of Catholic supremacy in the political sphere, because for the Holy See, Rulers with a sincere Catholic faith had a duty to condemn the Separation of Church and State as a heresy, and not be badly influenced by liberal preaching arguing that the abolition of the privileges of the Catholic Church was necessary to achieve "public peace". Leo XIII, Pius XI and Pius XII, while reiterating traditional Catholic teaching, had also argued that "every man in the State may follow the will of God and, from a consciousness of duty and free from every obstacle, obey His commands" and that "laws which impede this profession and practice of Faith are against natural law". John XXIII had made a distinction between "error as such" and the person in error, who preserves his dignity.
Vatican II and religious freedom
Third session (1964)
The debate on a separate Declaration on Religious Liberty was held on September 23 – September 25, as promised by Pope Paul the year before. However, in October an attempt was made by the Curial party to return this declaration to review by a special commission, which contained many hostile members and was outside the jurisdiction of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Protest by bishops to Pope Paul resulted in the declaration staying under Unity with a different working commission which reviewed and amended it.Fourth session (1965)
This re-revised text was approved by the council on October 25, with only minor amendments allowed afterward. The final vote was taken and the declaration was promulgated at the end of council on December 7, 1965. The claim by some that this overwhelming majority was due to intense lobbying by the reformist wing of Council Fathers among those prelates who initially had reservations or even objections.Traditionalist reception
Society of Saint Pius X
The Society of Saint Pius X rejects in particular point 2 of the Dignitatis Humanae which states: "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. This natural right ought to be acknowledged in the juridical order of society in such a way that it constitutes a civil right."The SSPX's claims its doctrine comes from the teachings of Pius XII and Leo XIII. They claim that Pope Pius IX, in his encyclical Quanta cura, while admitting the tolerance of error on the part of public authorities, stated that the right to freedom of public expression and dissemination could not be recognized for those religions that did not serve the truth, such as the Catholic religion. They also state that Leo XIII, in his encyclical Libertas, explained that a false religion has no right to spread.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre cited Libertas as one of the fundamental reasons for his difficulties with the Second Vatican Council. It remains a focus for attacks from Traditionalists in the 21st century.
The Society of St. Pius X criticized how Dignitatis humanae approached religious freedom with an argument from history:
The Vatican's position that the SSPX must acknowledge Dignitatis humanae and Nostra aetate as authoritative remained as of 2017 a key point of difference between the two.
Interpretation in continuity
The interpretation of the document, according to the Hermeneutics of Continuity, is that the Second Vatican Council's defense of religious freedom, along with other concepts commonly associated with the Charter of Human Rights, is a defense that is always given as long as they are subordinated to natural law and the common good, not understanding them as subjective rights that allow a false right to believe in error, but as objective rights where there are duties of every State to protect the rights of the human person to believe in the true religion.Thus, it is inferred that Dignitates Humanae considers implicit that a Christian State has commitments to safeguard the salvation of souls and to avoid apostasies or the spread of heresy. Therefore, its emphasis of the document aims to make explicit that a secular Government, to be legitimate in view of the eternal law and the natural order, should allow the right for all human person to be able to search for the true religion, instead of imposing Secularism or State Atheism on the one hand, as well as imposing Forced Conversions or a Sacerdotal State on the other hand.
On the contradictions some see between Dignitatis humanae and Pope Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors, the SSPX has argued that: