Dignitatis Humanae

Background and Occasion

Few questions at Vatican II were as contested as religious freedom. Nineteenth-century popes, especially Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos (1832) and Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), had condemned “liberty of conscience” as it was then promoted by liberal movements: a freedom grounded in religious indifferentism, the claim that all religions are equally true or that truth in religion does not matter. The classical Catholic position held that the state should ideally profess the true religion and might tolerate others for the sake of peace.

By the twentieth century the situation had changed. Catholics lived as minorities in pluralist democracies and as persecuted communities under Communist regimes, and the dignity of the person had become central to Catholic teaching. The American Jesuit John Courtney Murray was among the theologians who shaped the debate, and bishops from Eastern Europe, including Archbishop Wojtyła of Kraków, supported a declaration out of their experience of persecution. The text went through six drafts. Paul VI promulgated it on 7 December 1965 after a final vote of 2,308 to 70.

Central Teaching

What the right is

The core of the declaration is in its second article. The Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all people are to be immune from coercion by individuals, social groups or any human power, so that no one is forced to act against his conscience in religious matters, nor prevented from acting according to it, privately or publicly, alone or with others, within due limits (DH 2).

Several features of this definition are important:

• It is a negative right, an immunity, not a claim that every belief is true or that error has rights. The declaration concerns the relation between persons and civil power, not the relation between the person and truth.
• It extends to public and communal religious life, not only private belief.
• It has limits: the requirements of just public order, the protection of the rights of others, public peace and public morality (DH 7).

Its foundation

The right is grounded in the dignity of the human person, known both by revelation and by reason (DH 2). Persons are bound by their nature to seek the truth, especially religious truth, and to hold to it once known. They can meet this obligation in a way that befits their nature only if they enjoy psychological freedom and immunity from external coercion. For this reason the right continues even in those who do not live up to their duty to seek the truth.

What is left intact

The declaration is explicit about what it does not change. In its first article the Council says that God has made known the way by which people can be saved, that this one true religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church, and that all are bound to seek the truth and embrace it. Religious freedom therefore leaves untouched the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ (DH 1). The Council presents its teaching as a development of the doctrine of recent popes on the rights of the person and the constitutional order of society.

Revelation and the act of faith

The second part of the declaration (DH 9–15) shows that religious freedom is in harmony with revelation. The act of faith must by its nature be free; no one may be forced to embrace the faith (DH 10). Christ and the apostles called people to faith by word and example, not by compulsion (DH 11). The declaration admits that the Church’s members have at times acted in ways contrary to this spirit (DH 12), and it insists on the freedom of the Church to carry out her mission (DH 13).

Theological Significance

Dignitatis Humanae is the clearest test case for the question of doctrinal development at Vatican II. Critics, notably Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, argued that it contradicts the nineteenth-century magisterium. Defenders answer that the earlier condemnations targeted a freedom founded on indifferentism and the denial of any duty toward truth, which the declaration also rejects, and that the object of the declaration is different: the limits of the state’s coercive power, not the rights of error. Benedict XVI, in his address to the Roman Curia of 22 December 2005, offered this declaration as a key example of reform in continuity: a change in the application of principles to new circumstances, while the principles themselves remain.

The Catechism (2104–2109) presents religious freedom within its treatment of the first commandment, together with the duty to worship God and the social duty of Christians to make the Church’s teaching known.

For readers of the apologetics and moral theology tracts on this site, the declaration complements the classical teaching on the freedom of the act of faith: faith is a free assent under grace, which neither argument nor force can compel.