Dignitatis Humanae - Aftermath

Aftermath

Dignitatis Humanae was quickly recognized as one of the foundations of the relations of the Church to the world, and was particularly helpful in relationships with other faith communities: it was a key part of establishing the church’s credibility in ecumenical actions. It became, however, almost immediately a lightning rod for conservative attacks. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre cited this document as one of the fundamental reasons for his difficulties with the Second Vatican Council. It remains a focus for such attacks to this day.

The key issue was not religious freedom itself: almost all parties in the various arguments supported some kind of religious tolerance. The dispute was over the traditional understanding of the relationship of the Catholic Church to secular states and how it supported relations with “confessional” states such as Spain and Italy. The declaration presented a view that fully supported the model of the Church in the United States and the UK, while allowing for confessional states, and freely stated that it was based on development of doctrine from recent popes. Doctrinal development went from being somewhat suspect to a bedrock theological concept with Vatican II.

The extreme level of conflict between 80 to 90% of the bishops at the Council with the Curial minority masked the serious differences within the majority. Soon after the end of the council, theologians tended to split into two general groups:

• a more conservative party stressing a return to the patristic and scriptural sources (ressourcement) and a close and literal reading of the conciliar documents;
• another stressing to some extent the continuation of aggiornamento and some amount of extrapolation from the documents.

This split remains to this day, and is a key division on Dignitatis Humanae. Some commentators still continue to try to show that the document is fully consistent with the 19th century papal statements on these issues.

Murray wrote the initial commentaries on Dignitatis Humanae, and perhaps made the first translations into English, which remain influential in how the Declaration is perceived. As a result of the Council process of amendment and compromise there were differences between Murray’s own working out of the issue, which is more detailed and is considered by some more “political”, and the final Declaration.

On the apparent contradictions between Dignitatis Humanæ and Pope Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors—seeming contradictions that, e.g., the Society of St. Pius X mention—Brian Mullady, O.P., has argued that the

the religious freedom condemned in the Syllabus of Errors refers to religious freedom looked at from the point of view of the action of the intellect, or freedom respecting the truth; whereas the freedom of religion guaranteed and encouraged by Dignitatis Humanae refers to religious freedom looked at from the point of view of the action of the will in morals. In other words, those who see in these different expressions a change in teaching are committing the fallacy of univocity of terms in logic. The terms "freedom" refer to two very different acts of the soul.