Dignitatis Humanae

Dignitatis Humanae makes a narrower claim than it is usually credited with, and the narrowness is what allowed it to pass. It does not say that one religion is as good as another, and it says explicitly that it leaves untouched the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion. What it asserts is a right held against coercion: that in religious matters no one is to be forced to act contrary to conscience, and no one is to be prevented from acting according to conscience in private or in public, within due limits.

The ground of the right is the dignity of the human person, known both by revelation and by reason. That move matters. Earlier Catholic argument had run from the rights of truth: error has no rights, therefore the state may restrain the propagation of error. The declaration relocates the question from the content of belief to the standing of the believer, and a right that belongs to the person survives the person being wrong.

It then draws the civil conclusion. This right is to be recognised in the constitutional order of society and made a civil right. The state's competence in religion is limited to public order, and it may not command or forbid religious acts. Religious bodies are to be free to govern themselves, teach, worship publicly, and take part in public life.

The difficulty was not what the declaration said but what the papacy had said before. In 1832 Gregory XVI had called freedom of conscience an absurd and erroneous opinion, indeed a madness. In 1864 the Syllabus of Errors condemned the proposition that every man is free to embrace the religion he believes true by the light of reason. The Catholic states of the nineteenth century had drawn the practical conclusion, and Spain still had a confessional constitution when the council opened.

The council's answer was development rather than contradiction: the earlier condemnations addressed an indifferentism that denied any obligation to seek truth, whereas the declaration addresses immunity from coercion. Whether that distinction holds is the question the text has never escaped. The strongest objection came from within: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the group of bishops around him voted against, and the Society of Saint Pius X, which he founded in 1970, has made this document the centre of its refusal of the council. It remains the hardest single point in the discussions between the Holy See and that society.

The wider consequences were considerable. American constitutional practice, long viewed with suspicion in Rome, became a model rather than a concession, and the theologian John Courtney Murray, silenced in the 1950s for arguing the case, drafted much of the final text. The Holy See has since argued for religious liberty as a universal civil right in international forums, which it could not coherently have done before 1965.