Chapter 27 - FILL IN HERE
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Vatican II
in the Light of Tradition
Religious liberty…does not involve any prejudice to traditional Catholic doctrine…
Moreover, speaking of this religious liberty, the holy Council intends to develop the doctrine of the most recent Sovereign Pontiffs on the inviolable rights of the human person…1
It is this preamble, which is supposed to be reassuring, that immediately precedes the conciliar declaration on religious liberty. It is presented thus as being written down in the line of tradition. What is it in reality? The question arises about the fact that, as we have seen, the popes of the nineteenth century condemned, under the name of liberty of conscience and of forms of worship, a religious liberty which resembles, like a sister, that of Vatican II.
I | Quanta Cura and Vatican II
Propositions condemned by Pius IX in Quanta cura:
Propositions asserted by Vatican II in Dignitatis humanae:
(A) “The best condition of society is that in which there is not conceded to the authorities the duty to repress the violators of the Catholic religion by legal penalties, except when the public peace demands this.”
(AA) “In religious matters, let no one be impeded from acting according to his conscience, in private or in public, alone or associated with others, within just limits.”
(B) “Liberty of conscience and of forms of worship is a right proper to every man.”
(BB) “The person has a right to religious liberty. This liberty consists in what…follows:"=(AA)
(C) “Which must be proclaimed and guaranteed in every correctly established society.“2
(CC) “This right of the human person to religious liberty must be recognized in the juridical order of society, in such a manner that it constitutes a civil right.“3
The parallel is striking. The analysis of this4 brings us to conclude that the doctrines are contradictory. Father Congar himself admits that Dignitatis humanæ is contrary to the Syllabus of the same Pius IX:
It cannot be denied that the affirmation of religious liberty by Vatican II materially says something other than what the Syllabus of 1864 said, and even just about the opposite of propositions 16, 17, and 19 of this document.5
Vatican II is materially contrary to Pius IX, but not formally. That is what the supporters of the conciliar text pretend. They are specific, as I have besides already told you:6 the condemnation of religious liberty in the nineteenth century is a historical error; the popes condemned it, but in fact they intended only to condemn the indifferentism which was then inspiring it: “Man is free to have the religion that pleases him; therefore he has a right to religious liberty.” In other words, the popes struck too hard, blindly, without discernment, through fear of that absolute Liberalism which furthermore was threatening the temporal pontifical power. Father Congar takes up this explanation and quotes his sources:
Father John Courtney Murray, who belonged to the intellectual and religious elite of the elite, has shown this by materially saying quite the opposite from the Syllabus—the latter is from 1864 and it is, as Roger Aubert has proven, conditioned by precise historical circumstances—the Declaration [of the Council on religious liberty] was the consequence of the battle by which, in the face of Jacobinism and the totalitarianisms, the popes led the fight more and more strongly for the dignity and the liberty of the human person made to the image of God.7
On the contrary, we have seen that Roger Aubert and John Courtney Murray are prisoners themselves of the historicist prejudice which makes them erroneously relativize the doctrine of the popes of the nineteenth century!8
In reality, the popes have condemned religious liberty in itself, as a freedom that is absurd, ungodly, and leading the peoples to religious indifference and this condemnation remains. Along with the authority of the constant ordinary magisterium of the Church (if not of the extraordinary magisterium, with Quanta Cura), it weighs on the conciliar declaration.
II | Religious Liberty, a Fundamental Right?
Is religious liberty written down, as Father Congar assures us above (and Dignitatis humanæ in its preamble), in the line of the fundamental rights of the human person defined by the recent popes in the face of Jacobinism and the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century?9 Let us first read a few statements of the “fundamental right of the cult of God”:
Man, insofar as [he is] a person, possesses rights that he holds from God and that must remain, with regard to the community, beyond any injury that would tend to negate them, to abolish them, or to neglect them.10
…The believer has an inalienable right to profess his faith and to revive it as it needs to be revived. Laws which stifle or make the profession and the practice of this faith difficult are in contradiction with natural law.11
To promote respect for the practical exercise of the fundamental rights of the person, namely: the right to maintain and develop the corporeal, intellectual, and moral life, in particular the right to a religious formation and education: the right to the private and public worship of God, including charitable religious action….12
Objectively, the “worship of God” in question can be the only true cult of the true God for, when we speak of an objective right (the concrete object of the right: such as a cult), it can be a question only of something that is true and morally good. Pius XII teaches:
What does not correspond to the truth and to moral law does not objectively have any right to exist, or to propaganda, or to action.13
This is moreover the obvious sense of the text of Pius XI: “believers” and “faith” refer to the followers of the true Religion, under the circumstances of the German Catholics persecuted by Nazism.
What finally, did and always do the totalitarian and atheistic regimes attack, if not the foundation itself of all religious rights? The antireligious action of the Soviet Communist regime aims at ridiculing and suppressing all religious worship, whether it be Catholic, Orthodox, or Moslem. What they want to abolish is the right, implanted in the subject, and corresponding to the duty of this person to honor God, leaving out of account its concrete practice in such or such a cult, Catholic, Orthodox, etc. Such a right is called a subjective right, because it concerns the subject and not the object. For example, I have the subjective right to render worship to God, but it does not follow from the fact that I have the objective right to exercise the Buddhist cult!
In the light of this completely classical and elementary distinction, you will understand that, in the face of militant atheism, the popes of this century, especially Pius XII, have insisted precisely on the subjective right to the worship of God, a right that is totally fundamental; and it is this meaning that must therefore be given to the expression “fundamental right to the worship of God.” This has not kept these popes from claiming besides, when it was necessary, explicitly and concretely, the subjective and objective right of Catholic “souls.“14
The perspective of Vatican II is completely different. The Council, as I am going to show you, defined a right not only subjective but objective to religious liberty, an entirely concrete right, that every man would have, to be respected in the exercise of his form of worship, whatever it may be. No! The religious liberty of Vatican II is situated at the antipodes of the fundamental rights defined by Pius XI and Pius XII!
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1 Dignitatis humanae, n.1.
2 PIN. 40, Denz. 1689-1690.
3 Dignitatis humanae, n.2.
4 Cf. Michel Martin, “Courrier de Rome,” n. 157, and the special issue of November, 1985; Father Bernard Lucien, Appendix on the opposition between Vatican II and the Encyclical Quanta Cura, in Letter to a Few Bishops, Société Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Paris, 1983.
5 Yves Congar, O.P., quoted by Father Georges de Nantes, CRC, no. 113, p. 3 For the Syllabus see our Chapter X. Cardinal Ratzinger, for his part, sees in the conciliar text Gaudium et spes a counter-Syllabus, “to the extent that it represents an attempt at an official reconciliation of the Church with the world such as it has become since 1789,” since the rights of man (The Principles of Catholic Theology, Tequi, Paris, 1985, p.427.)
6 Chapter X.
7 Yves Congar, DC. 1704, 789.
8 Cf. Chapter X.
9 Cf. Ph. I. Andre-Vincent, O.P., Religious Liberty, a Fundamental Right, Paris, Téqui, 1976; cf. Archbishop Lefebvre and the Holy Office, ltinéraires, no. 233, pp. 68-81.
10 PIN. 667.
11 Pius XI, Encyclical “Mit brennender Sorge” of March 14, 1937; DC. 837-838, p. 915.
12 Pius XII, Radio message, December 24, 1942.
13 Pius XII, allocution Ci riesce to jurists, December 6, 1953; PIN. 3041.
14 Cf. Pius XI, Encyclical Non Abbiamo, of June 29, 1931.