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Religious Liberty

Condemned by the Popes

“The civil liberty of all these cults propagates the pestilence of indifferentism.”

Pius IX

I am going to collect in this chapter, at the risk of repeating myself, the texts of the main condemnations of religious liberty in the nineteenth century, in order that you may see clearly what has been condemned, and why the popes have condemned it.

I | The Condemnation

Pius VI

Quod aliquantulum,

Letter of March 10, 1791

to the French Bishops of the National Assembly:

The necessary effect of the Constitution decreed by the assembly is to annihilate the Catholic Religion and, with it, the obedience due to the kings. It is with this purpose that there is established, as a right of man in society, that absolute liberty which not only assures the right of not being disturbed about one’s religious opinions, but grants besides that license to think, to speak, to write, and even to have printed with impunity in matters of religion everything that the most unregulated imagination can suggest; a scandalous right that nevertheless seems to the assembly to result from the natural equality and freedom of all men. What could there be that is more senseless than to establish among men this equality and this unrestrained liberty which seems to stifle reason, the most precious gift that nature has given to man and the only one that distinguishes him from the animals?1

Pius VII

Post tam diuturnitas,

Apostolic Letter to the Bishop of Troyes, France,

Condemning the “Freedom of Cults and of Conscience,” granted by the Constitution of l814 (Louis XVIII):

A new source of pain with which Our heart is afflicted still more sharply and which, We acknowledge, causes us an extreme torment, dejection, and anguish, is the twenty-second article of the constitution. Not only is the freedom of forms of worship and of conscience permitted there, to use the very terms of the article; but there is promised support and protection to this liberty, and besides to the ministers of what are called the cults. There is to be sure no need of long discourses, addressing Ourselves to such a bishops as you, to make you recognize clearly with what a mortal wound the Catholic Religion in France finds itself struck by this article. By the fact itself that the liberty of all the cults without distinction is established, truth is intermingled with error, and the holy and immaculate Spouse of Christ, the Church outside which there can be no salvation, is put into a class with the heretical sects and even with the Jewish perfidy. Moreover, by promising favor and support to the sects of the heretics and to their ministers one tolerates and favors not only their persons but also their errors. It is implicitly the disastrous and forever deplorable heresy that St. Augustine mentions in these terms: “It affirms that all the heretics are on the right path and speak the truth, an absurdity so monstrous that I cannot believe that any sect really professes it.“2

Gregory XVI

Mirari vos,

Encyclical of August 15, 1832,

Condemning the Liberalism of Félicité de Lamennais:

From this poisoned source of Indifferentism is derived that false and absurd maxim or rather that delirium, that liberty of conscience must be procured and guaranteed for everyone. This is an error among the most contagious, to which the way is smoothed by this liberty of opinions, absolute and without restraint, which, for the ruin of the Church and the State, goes on spreading itself everywhere and which certain men, by an excess of impudence, do not fear to represent as advantageous to religion. “What death more fatal for souls than the freedom of error!” said St. Augustine.3 By thus seeing removed from men all restraint capable of keeping them on the paths of truth, drawn along as they are, already to their loss by a natural inclination to evil, we say in truth that this shaft of the abyss is open, from which St. John saw smoke come up which obscured the sun, and locusts come out for the devastation of the earth.4 From this, indeed, comes the lack of stability of minds; from this, the ever-growing corruption of the young people; from this, among the people, the contempt for the sacred laws, the most holy things and laws; from this, in a word, the most deadly scourge that can ravage the States; for experience attests it and the most remote antiquity teaches us this: in order to bring about the destruction of the richest, most powerful, most glorious, most flourishing States, all that was necessary was this liberty of opinion without restraint, this license for public discourses, this ardor for innovations.5

Pius IX

Quanta cura,

Encyclical of December 8, 1864

Reiterating the Condemnation of His Predecessor:

It is perfectly well known to you, Venerable Brethren, that today there are not lacking men who apply to civil society the impious and absurd principle of naturalism, as they call it: they dare to teach “that the perfection of the governments and civil progress demand absolutely that human society be established and governed without taking any more account of religion, as if it did not exist, or at least without making any difference between the different religions, between the true Religions and the false ones.” Furthermore, contrary to the teaching of Scripture, of the Church, and of the holy Fathers, they do not fear to affirm that “the best government is that in which there is not conceded to the authorities the duty of curbing the violators of the Catholic Religion with the sanction of penalties, except when public tranquility demands it.”

As a consequence of this absolutely false idea of social government, they do not hesitate to favor that erroneous opinion, most fatal to the Catholic Church and to the salvation of souls, which Our Predecessor of happy memory, Gregory XVI, called a delirium,6 namely, “that the liberty of conscience and of forms of worship is a right proper to every man; that it must be proclaimed in every well-established State, and that the citizens have a right to full freedom to manifest their opinions loudly and publicly, whatever these may be, by word, by printing, or otherwise, without the ecclesiastical or civil authority’s being able to limit it.” Now, by supporting these foolhardy affirmations, they do not think, they do not consider that they are preaching “a freedom of perdition,“7 and that “if it is always permitted to human opinions to enter into the conflict, there will never be lacking men who will dare to resist the truth and to put their confidence in the verbiage of human wisdom, an extremely harmful vanity that Christian faith and wisdom must carefully avoid, in accordance with the teaching of Our Lord Himself.“8

Pius IX

Syllabus:

A Collection of Condemned Modern Errors,

Extracted from Acts of the Magisterium of Pius IX,

published at the same time as Quanta cura:

In our time, it is no longer useful that the Catholic Religion be considered as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all the other cults.

Therefore, it is with reason that, in some Catholic countries, the law has provided that the foreigners who go there enjoy the public exercise of their particular forms of worship there.

It is false that the civil liberty of all the cults and the full power left to all to manifest openly and publicly all their thoughts and all their opinions, throws the peoples more easily into corruption of morals and of the mind, and propagates the pestilence of Indifferentism.9

Leo XIII

Immortale Dei,

Encyclical of November 1, 1885

On the Christian Constitution of States:

…and from the moment when the people is supposed to be the source of all law and of all power, it follows that the State does not believe itself tied to any obligation towards God, does not officially profess any religion, and is not held to search out which is the sole true one among them all, or to prefer one to the others, or to favor one in the main; but that it should grant them all equality under the law, from the moment when the discipline of the republic suffers no detriment from this. Therefore everyone will be free to embrace the religion that he prefers, or not to follow any if none of them please him…

What follows has already been quoted in Chapter VIII,10 and I refer the reader back to that.

What is Condemned?

What is common to all these pontifical condemnations is religious liberty, designated under the name of “freedom of conscience,” or “liberty of conscience and of forms of worship,” namely: the right conceded to every man publicly to exercise the cult of the religion of his choice, without being disturbed by the civil power.

II | Motive for the Condemnation

You will have noticed in the preceding texts that the popes are concerned to go back to the causes and to denounce the liberal origins of the right to religious liberty; it is essentially naturalistic and rationalistic Liberalism that is denounced, the one that pretends that human reason is the only arbitrator of good and evil (rationalism); that it belongs to each one to decide whether he should adore or not (indifferentism); finally, that the State is the origin of all law (state monism).

From this, certain modern theologians have felt able to infer three theses:

The popes have condemned religious liberty not in itself but only because it seemed “as if flowing from a naturalistic conception of man;“11 or, because it “derived from the first premise of naturalistic rationalism,“12 or, from the two others: “beyond the consequences (religious liberty) it is the principles that are alluded to here: the Church condemns rationalism, indifferentism, and state monism,“13 no more.
Faced with the concrete interpretations of the modern principles (struggle against the temporal power of the papacy, laicization of the Constitutions, plundering of the Church, etc.), the popes would have “lacked the necessary serenity to judge the system of modern liberties in all objectivity by seeking to take into account the true and the false”; “It was inevitable that the first reflex of defense was an attitude of total condemnation.“14 It was difficult for these popes to “recognize any value in the contents when the motivation was hostile to religious values…thus, for a long time, they were not friendly towards the ideal signified by the rights of man, because they did not succeed in recognizing there the remote heritage of the Gospel.“15
It is possible today to rediscover the portion of Christian truth contained in the principles of 1789 and thus, to reconcile the Church with the modern liberties, with religious liberty in particular. Father Congar was the first to trace the line to be followed in this regard:

To reconcile the Church with a certain modern world could not be done by introducing as such into the Church the ideas of this modern world; this task implied a work in depth, by which the permanent principles of Catholicism take a new development by assimilating, after having decanted and if need be purified them, the worthwhile contributions of this modern world.16

Roger Aubert made himself the faithful echo of this view the following year; speaking of the collaborators of l’Avenir, Lamennais’ Catholic-Liberal newspaper of the nineteenth century, he says:

They had not taken enough care to rethink the principles which, by means of the necessary discernments and purifications, would permit to be assimilated to Christianity the ideas of democracy and of liberty, which born outside the Church, had been developed in a spirit hostile to Christianity.17

Now, the work of purification and of assimilation of the principles of 1789—Vatican II affirmed that this was its primary objective:

The Council intends above all to judge by this light (of the Faith) the most prized values for our contemporaries (rights of man, liberty, tolerance) and to join them to their divine source. For these values, to the extent in which they proceed from the human character, which is a gift from God, are indeed good; but it is not rare that the corruption of the human heart turns them away from the required order: this is why they need to be purified.18

This is indeed what the Council brought to reality. Cardinal Ratzinger tells us:

The problem in the 1960s was to acquire the best expressed values of two centuries of “liberal” culture. They are in fact values which, even if they are born outside the Church, can find their place—purified and corrected—in its vision of the world. This is what has been done.19

I have wished to quote for you all these texts which show the overwhelming consensus of all those theologians who prepared, brought about, and carried out the Council. Now, these affirmations, which go so far as literally to repeat themselves from one to the other, are only an appalling imposture. To state that the popes did not see what there is of true Christianity in the principles of 1789—this is dramatic! Let us see a little closer:

To be sure, the popes have condemned rationalism, indifferentism of the individual, and state monism. They have not merely condemned these! They have quite condemned the modern liberties in themselves. It is for what it really means that religious liberty is condemned, and not by reason of its historic motivations of the age; for, to take only one example, the Liberalism of a Lamennais (condemned by Gregory XVI) is not the absolute and atheistic Liberalism of the philosophers of the eighteenth century (condemned by Leo XIII in Immortale Dei); and yet all those Liberals, whatever were their sometimes very diverse principles or their nuances, insisted on the same religious liberty. What is common to all the liberal philosophies is the claiming of the right not to be disturbed by the civil authority in the public exercise of the religion of their choice; their common denominator (as Cardinal Billot puts it) is the liberation from all restraint in religious matters. The popes have condemned this, as I am going to show you momentarily.
It is an impiety and an injustice towards the popes to say to them, “You have wrapped up in the same condemnation the false principles of Liberalism and the good liberties that it proposes; you have committed an historical error.” It is not the popes who have made an historical error or who were prisoners of historical circumstances; it is rather the theologians, who are imbued with a historicist prejudice, even if they deny it.20 However, it suffices to read the historical exposés of Roger Aubert and John Courtney Murray on religious liberty to establish that they systematically relativize the statements of the Magisterium of the popes of the nineteenth century, according to a principle that can be expressed thus: “Every doctrinal pronouncement of the Magisterium is strictly relative to its historical context, in such a way that, if the context changes, the doctrine can change.” I do not need to tell you how much this relativism and this doctrinal evolutionism are opposed to the stability of the rock of Peter in the midst of human fluctuations, and permanently contrary to the immutable Truth which is Our Lord Jesus Christ. These theologians, in fact, are not theologians, or even good historians; for they have no idea of the truth or of a permanent doctrine of the Church, above all in social and political matters. They lose their way in their erudition and are prisoners of their own systems of interpretation; they are stuffed heads, but not good heads. Pius XII was right to condemn their weathercock theology under the name of historicism:

To that there is added a false historicism which, devoting itself to the bare events of human life, overthrows the foundations of all truth and all absolute law, in that which concerns as much the philosophy as the Christian dogmas themselves.21

As for reconciling the Church with the new liberties, this will be in actual fact the effort of Vatican II, in Gaudium et spes and in the Declaration on Religious Liberty. I will come back to this attempt, doomed to failure beforehand, to marry the Church to the Revolution.

For the moment, here are the true, immediate, and concrete motives for the condemnation of religious liberty by the popes of the nineteenth century, motives that are always valid, as we can judge: it is absurd, impious, and leads the peoples to religious indifferentism. I take up again the very words of the popes:

Absurd, religious liberty is this, because it grants the same rights to truth and to error, to the true Religion and to the heretical sects. Now as Leo XIII says, “Right is a moral faculty; and, as we have said and as cannot be repeated too often, it would be absurd to believe that it belongs naturally and without distinction or discernment to the truth and to a lie, to good and to evil.22

Blasphemous, religious liberty is this also, because it “concedes to all religions equality under the law” and “puts the holy and immaculate Spouse of Christ on the level of the heretical sects and even of Jewish perfidy.” Furthermore it implies “the religious indifferentism of the State,” which is equivalent to being its “atheism”: that which is the legal impiety of societies, the forced apostasy of the nations, the rejection of the social royalty of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the negation of the public law of the Church, its elimination from society or its subjugation to the State.

Finally, it leads the peoples to religious indifference, as the Syllabus declares in condemning Proposition 77. This is evident: if now in these times, the conciliar Church and the majority of Catholics are coming to see the ways of salvation in all religions, it is because this venom of indif-ferentism has been administered to them, in France and elsewhere, by almost two centuries of this diet of religious liberty.

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1 1 PIN. I

2 PIN. 19.

3 Commentary on Psalm 124.

4 Apoc. 9:3.

5 PIN. 24; cf. Denzinger 1613-1614.

6 Cf. above, Mirari vos, which Pius IX quotes very freely.

7 St. Augustine, Letter 105 (166).

8 St. Leo, Letter 164 (133); PIN. 39-40; cf. Denz. 1689-1690.

9 PIN. 53; cf. Denz. 1777-1779.

10 PIN. 143-146.

11 Roger Aubert, The Ecclesiastical Magisterium and Liberalism, in Tolerance and Human Community, Casterman, 1951, p. 81.

12 John Courtney Murray, Towards an Understanding of the Development of the Teaching of the Church on Religious Liberty, in Vatican II, Religious Liberty, p. 112.

13 Jéröme Hâmer, O.P., History of the Text of the Declaration, in Vatican II, Religious Liberty, Cerf, Paris, 1967.

14 Roger Aubert, op.cit, p.82.

15 International Theological Commission, The Christians of Today Before the Dignity and the Rights of the Human Person, Pontifical Commission Justice and Peace, Vatican City, 1985, p. 44, quoted by Documents épiscopat, Bulletin of the Secretariat of the French Episcopal Conference, October 1986, p. 15.

16 Yves Congar, O.P., True and False Reform in the Church (Unam Sanctam, 20), Cerf, Paris, 1950, p. 345; quoted by Roger Aubert, op. cit, p. 102.

17 Roger Aubert, op. cit, pp. 81-82.

18 Gaudium et Spes, ll, #2.

19 Conversation with Vittorio Messori, in the monthly Gesu, November 1984, p. 72.

20 Fr. Murray, attempting to explain how the Magisterium could pass from condemning religious liberty in the nineteenth century to proclaiming it at Vatican II, declares at first: “This intelligibility is not accessible a priori, or simply by the play of the application of some general theory of the development of doctrine. For the moment we have no general theory of this type.”

21 Encyclical Humani generis, of August 12, 1950; Pontifical Documents of Pius XII, XII, 303; cf. DS. 2306.

22 Libertas, PIN. 207.

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