j o u r n a l o f u n d e r g r a d u a t e r e s e a r c h

136

GREGORY BARR graduated from Notre Dame in 2009, having double majored in Economics and History. He lived in Knott Hall for four years, serving as an RA his senior year. He is now work-ing as an intern for Congressman Michael Castle of Delaware and Congressman Randy Forbes of Virginia. He chose this topic for his senior history research paper because he had long been fascinated by the history of Christianity and because he wanted to work with Professor Mark Noll. He would like to extend his deepest thanks to Professor Noll for being patient and approachable and for helping him to fi nd a thought-provoking research question. Gregory enjoys history trivia, such as naming the U.S. presidents in order.

j o u r n a l o f u n d e r g r a d u a t e r e s e a r c h

137

John Courtney Murray,Aggiornamento, and Vatican II’s Declaration

on Religious Freedom

GREGORY BARR

In the nineteenth century the Catholic Church was largely hos-tile to liberal democracy and other aspects of modernity, includ-ing the freedom of religion for people of other faiths. In the 1960s the Church at Vatican II supported religious liberty as a basic hu-man right. Th is essay explores the reasons for and the nature of this evolution.

1

Religious liberty is a topic on which the Catholic Church has developed its doctrine more

significantly and more dramatically than it has on any other issue. Popes as late as the nineteenth

century condemned freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, and liberalism in very

strong terms. But in 1965, the Second Vatican Council completed its “Declaration on Religious

Freedom” (also referred to as Dignitatis Humanae), which strongly advocated constitutional

guarantees by states for the religious liberty of Catholics and non-Catholics alike, based on their

inherent dignity as human persons. These two stances, less than a century apart, are not easily

reconciled with the Church’s claim to be consistent in its teachings. Thus, religious liberty can be

seen as an area where the doctrinal integrity of Catholicism is at stake. This topic is also of

interest because more than almost any other issue it frequently causes the Catholic Church to

insert itself into the world of public policy. The debate over the Church’s teaching on this issue is

not only doctrinally important, but also politically important. Catholic intellectual George

Weigel has approvingly paraphrased the Oxford historian Sir Michael Howard, saying that the

twentieth century saw two earth-shattering revolutions: the first was Lenin’s Bolshevik

Revolution and the second was “the transformation of the Roman Catholic Church from a

bastion of the ancien régime into perhaps the world’s foremost institutional defender of human

rights.”1

The theologian most associated with this revolution is Fr. John Courtney Murray. Fr.

Murray was silenced by his Jesuit order under pressure from the Vatican’s Holy Office in 1954

for his liberal views on religious liberty and separation of church and state, and yet nine years

later the Second Vatican Council would invite him as one of its experts on those very matters.

While there, he helped author Dignitatis Humanae. According to one strand of conventional

wisdom, the Church’s stance regarding religious liberty was unchanged between the 1800s and

2

the Second Vatican Council. Then, due to the strength of Murray’s arguments formed in the

1950s and ‘60s and to the less restrictive intellectual atmosphere fostered by Pope John XXIII,

the Church, as if overnight, changed its position on this politically foundational issue. As one

popular history puts it:

Rarely in Church history has a doctrine undergone such a profound development—many would say reversal—in such a short time. In a period of about fifteen years (1950-1965), the Catholic Thesis was disestablished and freedom of religion was set in place as the governing principle in the Church’s relations with the modern world. Murray was surely the principle agent in effecting change…2

Is this exciting retelling accurate or oversimplified?

In this essay I will argue that the conventional wisdom about Fr. Murray and the

Catholic Church's position on religious liberty is incorrect.The Catholic Church's doctrina

l development on this question was both less drastic and more gradual than is often presu

med. While it is true that some of Murray's ideas were quite influential at the Second

Vatican Council, he was no revolutionary. Rather, his ideas were an organic extension of

previous concepts taught by popes and theologians. First I will examine the Catholic

Church’s policies and statements regarding the subject of religious liberty from the

French Revolution until the Second Vatican Council, try to understand what historical

events influenced the Church's view of liberty, and attempt to discern what doctrinal

developments occurred during that time. Next, I will examine the ideas of John Courtney

Murray and the role he played at Vatican II. After that I will discuss Dignitatis Humanae

and assess how much of it was really new and to what extent the conventional wisdom

about Murray and the document is correct. Finally, I will discuss the ramifications of

Dignitatis Humanae for the Catholic Church’s role in political affairs.

3

The Early Catholic Responses to Liberalism

The statements of nineteenth-century popes condemning freedom of conscience,

liberalism, and state neutrality regarding religion are numerous, but a few examples will suffice.

In his 1832 encyclical Mirari Vos, Pope Gregory XVI famously denounced “this false and

absurd maxim, or better this madness, that everyone should have and practice freedom of

conscience.”3 Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors condemned the proposition “that persons

coming to reside [in some Catholic countries] shall enjoy the public exercise of their own

peculiar worship.”4 Even the more moderate Leo XIII made similar statements about the dangers

of states allowing “the licence of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth, and souls

away from the practice of virtue.”5 Such statements are quite illiberal and sound harsh to

contemporary ears. They seem to be hard to square with the more liberal6

The French Revolution was an earth-shattering event for the Catholic Church. It was the

beginning of the end of what can be called “Catholic political Christendom”

statement of Vatican II

concerning religious liberty. It will be helpful to put them into context.

7 in which states

cared for and privileged Catholicism as the dominant religion in society and were allowed to

participate in the Church’s governance and receive the Church’s blessing. This brutal conflict

was the harbinger of the modern age of rationalism and the secularized, even anti-Christian,

political order. For many years to come Catholics would view liberal and progressive reform

movements in Europe with suspicion, reasonably considering them to be the offspring of the

Revolution. The nineteenth century would see Napoleon’s persecution of the papacy, the anti-

clericalism of the Third Republic,8 the Kulturkampf in Germany, and the Italian annexation of

the Papal States. Throughout this period the European state was paternalistic and not limited in

theory, and so “separation” from the state meant that the Catholic Church would likely be

4

dominated, hindered, and even persecuted by secularist opponents.9 Another Catholic fear was

that a neutral policy towards Catholicism would lead people toward indifference and cultures

toward secularization.10 Finally, it was difficult on a theoretical, or theological, level to square

freedom of conscience and worship with the teaching that all non-Catholic religions were

regarded as false. How could someone have the right to believe and preach what is erroneous?

As it was generally stated in that time: “Error has no rights.”11

The anti-liberal pronouncements of the nineteenth century popes look very different from

the Second Vatican Council’s embrace of constitutional guarantees of the right to religious

freedom, but theologian Fr. Brian Harrison offers a caveat. Those not schooled in the arcana of

papal history sometimes have a tendency to treat all papal utterances as equally authoritative.

However, papal statements vary in their levels of theological weight for Catholics, based on their

context and intent. Some statements, especially in the period from the Reformation to the

twentieth century, are of unclear authority due to their perhaps intentionally ambiguous wording.

In the Middle Ages popes could in some cases blatantly issue political orders to monarchs. After

the Reformation, however, as papal political power waned popes sometimes adopted a more

hortatory tone. When a pope uses a word like “ought,” it is not always clear if the audience

“ought” to do something as a matter of doctrine or for the sake of pleasing the pope by

complying with his policies.

12

Readers might keep in mind that not all papal statements (or

conciliar statements for that matter) carry the same theological weight, and how much weight

they carry can be a matter of much debate.

5

Thomistic Responses to Modernity: The Popes See Liberty in a New Light

Were these condemnations of liberalism the last word on the matter until Vatican II took

an apparently opposite stance, or was the shift more gradual? A strong case can be made that

Catholic social and political doctrine developed gradually but significantly between the mid-

1800s (the era of Pius IX) and the 1960s. The development starts at least as far back as Leo XIII

(1878-1903). Weigel, like his hero Murray before him, sees the American Catholic experience as

a strong challenge to the Catholic assumption in Continental Europe that liberal separation of

church and state automatically led to secularization, indifference, and a weakening of the

Church. By the late nineteenth century it was clear that the Catholic Church in America was

flourishing under a relatively laissez-faire stance from the federal government. In other words, it

looked as if American liberalism was not the same as the European variant, or at least it was

having different effects. This state of affairs led Leo XIII to acknowledge in his 1895 encyclical

to the American bishops, Longinqua Oceani, that the American system was tolerably good, but

that it was wrong to draw the conclusion that this model should be adopted everywhere. As Leo

saw it, the Catholic Church in America “would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to

liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”13 Thus, a

new way of viewing church-state relations was born: the thesis-hypothesis model. This theory

states that a system of state neutrality (the “hypothesis”) is tolerable whenever Catholics are

unable to bring about a political order in which the state privileges the Catholic Church above all

others (the “thesis” or ideal).14 The American system had been upgraded from intolerable to

being a tolerable second best option.15

Leo XIII’s papacy was a step towards an embrace of freedom of religion in other ways.

For example, he set in motion a Thomist revival in Catholic education, which would be vitally

6

important to later Thomist defenders of religious liberty, including Murray himself. Leo XIII

drew upon St. Thomas Aquinas to make arguments for the value of freedom of association for

non-state entities, calling them “real societies,” based on friendship, “that bring about mutual

perfection by free activity.”16 Defenses of freedom important for human moral and social

flourishing would be important to Murray and other reformers. Additionally, Leo drew upon

Pope Gelasius, of Late Antiquity, to form his own theory of Church-state relations. He believed

in “concordia” between the two, rather than a traditional establishment of religion. The state

would facilitate the Church. The state would not teach doctrine, but it could be taught by the

Church in matters of justice and truth.17 Finally, Leo did not consider democracy to be a

defective system in itself, but rather claimed that the form of government and the content of

constitutions was largely a matter of prudential judgment.18

Pius XI (1922-1939), whose papacy spanned almost the entire interwar period of

ascendant totalitarianism and eventual economic collapse, was the next pope to make substantial

contributions to Catholic social theology. Although most famous for his statements regarding the

economic order, Pius XI made contributions in various areas of social thought, which he

considered to be a single integrated body of teachings. Indeed, Pius was “the first pontiff to

speak of social teachings as a single body of ‘social doctrine.’ On his watch emerged the now

familiar concepts of ‘social justice’ and ‘subsidiarity.’”

19

subsidiarity sometimes is invoked on cost-benefit grounds to suggest that private agents and groups can accomplish public ends more efficiently. This, however, is not the principle of subsidiarity. Rather, subsidiarity presupposes that there are plural authorities and agents having their “proper” (not necessarily, lowest) duties and rights with regard to the common good.

The principle of subsidiarity is

especially important for understanding religious freedom, but it is not widely understood. As one

scholar explains it:

20

7

In other words, the state bears some responsibility for promoting the common good, but not all

responsibility. Writing in an age that put great hopes in the power of the state to solve all human

problems, Pius sought to “set clear boundaries to state power.”21 He defended the principle of

subsidiarity forcefully in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno: “all social activity, of its very

power and nature, should supply help to the members of the social body, but may never destroy

or absorb them.”22

Violations of subsidiarity could happen in the realm of religion as well as in economics.

And the gravest abusers of state power in the interwar period were not monarchs or liberal

democrats, but totalitarian dictators. In his scathing denunciation of Nazism, Mit brennender

Sorge (1937), Pius declared: “The man of religious faith has an inalienable right to profess his

faith and to practice it in appropriate ways. Laws which repress or render difficult the profession

and practice of religious faith are in contradiction with a law of nature.”

23

Pius XII (1939-1958) went further in embracing liberal democracy and regimes based on

liberty and inalienable human rights than any of his predecessors. According to Russell

Hittinger, Pius XII’s achievements in political theology were two-fold:

Thus, in an age when

some of the world’s most powerful states were brutally disregarding the human rights of their

citizens, the papacy was developing arguments for human freedom that used the language of

rights, yet were thoroughly Catholic, and more specifically, Thomistic.

First, he did not speak as though the Church were still situated within political Christendom. Second, he took as normative the democratic regimes’ self-understanding of the nature and scope of their authority: namely, as governments legally limited by constitutions and morally limited by a commitment to human rights. Though Pius XII was critical of certain aspects of democratic government, his concerns were expressed in the manner of an internal, rather than external, criticism.24

8

Pius XII further developed his predecessors’ ideas of a limited state. He wrote at length about

religious liberty and man’s relation to the state and the importance of respecting human rights

and dignity. His most famous statement on the subject of politics was his famous 1944 Christmas

message, which arrived at a conclusion that looked more favorably on democracy than the

stances of any of previous popes:

beneath the sinister lightning of the war that encompasses them, in the blazing heat of the furnace that imprisons them, the peoples have, as it were, awakened from a long torpor. They have assumed, in relation to the state and those who govern, a new attitude—one that questions, criticizes, distrusts. Taught by bitter experience, they are more aggressive in opposing the concentration of dictatorial power that cannot be censured or touched, and call for a system of government more in keeping with the dignity and liberty of citizens…to avoid for the future a repetition of such a catastrophe, we must vest efficient guarantees in the people itself… If, then, we consider the extent and nature of the sacrifices demanded of all citizens, especially in our day when the activity of the state is so vast and decisive, the democratic form of government appears to many as a postulate of nature imposed by reason itself.25

John XXIII (1958-1963) would reiterate and build on the teachings of Pius XII. In the midst of

the Second Vatican Council, he released his 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris, which listed

religious freedom as a fundamental human right.26

As this brief survey shows, the Catholic view of the state and liberty had developed

significantly between the mid-1800s and the mid-1900s. The earlier era was marked by a fear

and distrust of liberal democracy and freedom that ran amok. The later era saw some Catholic

arguments for liberal principles such as limited government, democracy, and the inalienable

human right to social and religious liberty. Moreover, these developments did not occur in a

vacuum, but were a response to the changing political climate in which popes found themselves.

As always, papal statements make the most sense when put into historical context. In the

nineteenth-century Continental, anti-clerical liberalism seemed like the Church’s worst enemy,

and papal pronouncements from that era reflect that hostility. However, the horrors of the

9

twentieth-century dictatorships showed the modern popes the even greater dangers of unchecked,

illiberal government. Around the same time, the relatively benign American Catholic experience

showed that the faith could flourish under conditions of liberty. These developments helped

moved the Church closer to an acceptance of political liberalism and a less hostile stance towards

modernity.

John Courtney Murray Enters the Conversation

Fr. John Courtney Murray, an American Jesuit priest and arguably the most eloquent

Catholic defender of religious liberty in his day, was active as a public intellectual from the

World War II years until his death in 1967. Although Murray’s views are often contrasted with

the statements made by the more anti-liberal popes of the nineteenth-century, it should be clear

from the story of development told above that Murray was operating in a Catholic environment

that seemed to be ripe for a reconsideration of religious liberty. As we attempted to do for the

modern popes, it is important to understand the historical context before getting into a discussion

of the ideas.

Murray lived in an overwhelmingly Protestant nation that had been gradually coming to

accept Catholics as equals but still harbored some concerns about Catholicism’s seemingly

authoritarian claims. Even if most Catholics in America were good, patriotic citizens, could fears

about politically authoritarian Catholicism ever be put completely out of mind? As Reinhold

Neibuhr complained to Murray, “the Catholic Church’s theory of ‘one true church,’ which is the

very dynamic of Catholic religion, necessarily made Protestants uncomfortable when the

Catholic Church appeared to be gaining an increase of power in any particular nation or in any

particular phase of a nation’s activities.”27 Such criticisms of the Church struck Murray as

10

having more than a grain of truth and led him to seek a way to reconcile Catholicism and liberal

governance marked by constitutional guarantees of religious liberty.28 Murray basically agreed

with critics of Catholicism that the Church had been for years supporting a seemingly cynical

double standard: when Catholics were out of power, they demanded freedom and tolerated a

non-Catholic state as a necessary evil; but when they gained power, they attempted to erect a

Catholic state that would enforce orthodoxy on Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Thus, Murray

bitterly opposed the thesis-hypothesis view of church-state relations, first iterated by Leo XIII.29

It is true that you may not find in these [Catholic] countries a Catholic people that intelligently and actively professes its public faith animo et moribus….You certainly will fail to find the fulfillment of the Western Christian ideal of political life and government, which is certainly not dictatorship. No matter. You do find establishment and intolerance, and therefore you find the ideal Catholic state.

Here is Murray’s sarcastic description of Leo’s “thesis” of the Catholic political ideal, as it was

still being interpreted in countries such as Spain:

30

Clearly, Murray considered the Church’s defense of intolerance to be a grave problem,

something he would dedicate much of his life to rectify. However, it is important to see that

Murray was not a typical liberal critic of traditional Catholicism in the Rawlsian or Lockean

mold.

Murray was not simply a cheerleader for liberalism. Rather, he was a strident critic of

Locke’s individualism, preferring a more Catholic, social view of man.31 He criticized the view

he attributed to Locke that sees “every individual as a sort of little god almighty, whose power to

preserve himself is checked only at the point where another little god almighty starts preserving

himself.”32 Rather, like Pius XII and later popes, John Courtney Murray can be seen as an

internal critic of liberal society. He sought to make authentically Catholic natural law arguments

for religious liberty that would nonetheless be intelligible to non-Catholics as well. Murray saw

11

modernity as a two-fold challenge. First, Catholics had to oppose the intellectual and social

currents that promote secularism and marginalize the role of religion in society. Second,

Catholics had to find a way to reconcile their faith with the good parts of modernity, such as

democracy and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.33

Attempts at reform within the Catholic Church can be described with the following three

terms: development, aggiornamento, and ressourcement.

Thus, Murray’s concerns were largely

the same as the concerns of those who would be considered more conservative Catholics: how

could Catholicism remain a vital, flourishing force in modern society; and how could human

dignity and happiness be promoted by governments, churches, and various intermediary

organizations?

34 Development is the idea that new

concepts can be incorporated into Catholic teachings, if they follow from or are an unfolding or

clarification of what the Church has already been teaching. Development often has an emphasis

on recent papal and conciliar statements, as if Catholicism were a living organism, becoming

more mature and wiser over time. The other two concepts complement the idea of development.

Aggiornamento is the notion that the Church must adapt to the changing world, to some extent,

to ensure that it meets the needs of contemporary people. Perhaps the best illustration of

aggiornamento is Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, whose title literally means “of new

things” and which refers to features of modern society such as capitalism, socialism, and labor

unions. Finally, ressourcement is the attempt to renew the Church by going back to the

fundamental sources of Catholic teaching for inspiration, including Scripture, the Church

Fathers, and teachings and actions of popes, bishops, and saints over time. This way of thinking

asks if the Church is best living up to the example of Jesus Christ as understood in the Bible and

in Catholic tradition. When studying Murray, it is important to keep all three of these concepts in

12

mind. As is clear from passages above, Murray hoped for aggiornamento for the Church in

matters of religious liberty. However, development, in the organic sense described above, and

ressourcement were very important to him as well.

As already explained, Fr. Murray attempted to fight the thesis-hypothesis school of

thought by developing a Catholic argument for the inherent human right to religious liberty. He

argued that merely quoting post-Reformation popes, who tended to be hostile to liberalism, was

insufficient. Contemporary men and women, as Pius XII and John XXIII had argued, understood

the importance of human rights and limited government. Murray argued that due to “the growth

of personal and political consciousness, the state of the ancient question concerning public care

of religion has been altered.”35 It was no longer appropriate to have debates primarily about the

“tolerance…of religious dissidence. The terms of the argument today are, quite simply, religious

freedom.”36 Murray used ancient and medieval sources to make his case. Drawing upon St.

Thomas Aquinas, Murray argued that whereas the purpose of moral law is to “make man good as

man,” the much more limited scope of human law is concerned with “not man as man but man as

citizen.”37 He further argued for the use of prudence and a concern for the common good when

making laws. Not all moral laws could or should be enforced through political coercion.

Therefore, a law ought to be “necessary or useful for the common good in the given

circumstances. The morality of a law is not an immediate guarantee of its necessity or utility.”38

It is helpful to separate Murray’s views on church-state matters into two categories. To

borrow the language of America’s Bill of Rights, religious freedom has the following aspects:

the right to the free exercise of religion and a prohibition on establishing a national church.

Murray was interested in both of these. First, applying his view of temporal laws to church-state

policy, Murray argued against persecution or hindrance of people in their search for God,

13

whether Catholic or not. He started with the human right to freedom of conscience, of which he

says: “the tradition with regard to the necessary freedom of the act of faith…runs unbrokenly

from the text of the New Testament to the Code of Canon Law (can. 1351).”39 He argues for the

“immunity of conscience from coercion in its internal religious decisions,”40 calling the

conscience a “sacred forum.”41 According to Murray, when this freedom is taken into account

along with man’s social nature, it is clear that human beings also possess freedom from coercion

regarding their outward expressions of faith, whether individually or in groups, such as

churches.42

a true metaphysic of the human person affirms that human existence is essentially social-historical existence. It is not permitted to introduce a dichotomy into man, to separate his personal-interior existence and his social-historical existence. Hence it is not permitted to recognize freedom of conscience and to deny freedom of religious expression. Both freedoms are given in the same one instance; they are coequal and coordinate, inseparable, equally constitutive of the dignity and integrity of man.

Murray makes a metaphysical argument for the link between freedom of conscience

and freedom to practice religion publicly:

43

This was the crux of Murray’s argument, and it would be adopted in roughly the same form in

Vatican II’s “Declaration on Religious Freedom.” Moreover, Fr. Murray complemented this

argument with a historical one that contends that “coercion or constraint of religious worship,

witness, or teaching has inevitably resulted in the destruction or diminution of freedom of

conscience, from the days of Diocletian to our own day of more subtle and damaging pressures

on conscience.”44 Although his conclusion is similar to the conclusion of most American

liberals, his justification is clearly a very Catholic one. Man must be free to seek God, because he

has a sacred quest to find God. The right is inseparable from the duty. Thus, Murray does not

depart from the nineteenth century Catholic wisdom that “error has no rights.” But due to his

dignity as a rational and social creature, man must be free from coercion in religious matters,

14

even if he falls away from Catholic orthodoxy. In Murray’s view error still has no moral rights,

but the person making the error has the right to be left alone by the state.

His views concerning the other church-state issue, establishment, were also largely in line

with American conventional wisdom and the First Amendment. He argued that governments

should not establish a church, not even the Catholic Church. He defends this not from political

expediency as the Catholic “thesis-hypothesis” theorists had (i.e. that a religiously neutral state

could be tolerated as the second best option), but by appealing to the nature of government itself.

He argues that “the care of religion, in so far as it implies the care of souls, is not in any sense a

function either of civil society or of the state.”45 Instead, applying the principle of subsidiarity,

Murray says that “the care of religion in so far as religion is an integral element of the common

good of society, devolves upon those institutions whose purposes are religious—the Church and

the churches, and various voluntary associations for religious purposes.”46 Finally, “the care of

religion, in so far as it is a duty incumbent on the state, is limited to a care for the religious

freedom of the body politic.”47 The state “under today’s conditions of growth in the personal and

political consciousness” is not competent do anything further concerning religion.48 He allowed

that it was appropriate for a nation to constitutionally declare itself to be Catholic as long as there

would be no “juridical consequences” from such a declaration.49

Murray drew heavily upon the social teachings of the recent popes, especially Leo XIII

and Pius XII, when making his arguments about religious liberty and religious establishment. He

also drew upon older sources, which Leo XIII had also referenced. One was Pope Gelasius who

viewed society as a “dyarchy” of the spiritual and temporal powers. The other was Pope Gregory

VII, who, Murray claimed, had been concerned primarily with the freedom of the Church, not

the care of religion by the state.

50

15

Fr. Murray was well aware of the difficulty of reconciling his own views on religious

liberty with the more anti-liberal views of the nineteenth-century popes. He got around this

problem by emphasizing the historical nature of the papal statements that were not in line with

his own views. In other words, anti-liberal popes were often responding to the specific social and

political conditions of their times, and some of their statements would be anachronistic if applied

to later periods.51 This is commonly done by Catholic scholars attempting to interpret

pronouncements of past popes and councils. Even Fr. Brian Harrison, one of Murray’s most

thorough critics, attempts to put papal statements into their proper historical context, arguing, for

example, that some of the anti-liberal statements made by nineteenth century popes were against

a certain radical strain of liberalism advocated by people like the French intellectual Lamennais,

not denunciations of all types of liberalism.52 Moreover, Avery Cardinal Dulles warns against

taking the Syllabus of Errors, containing the most famous papal condemnations of liberalism and

modernity, at face value, pointing out that it was “an unsigned appendix to [the encyclical

Quanta Cura]....According to Newman the Syllabus has no more doctrinal authority in itself than

an index or table of contents taken apart from the book to which it refers.”53 Nonetheless,

Murray’s attempt to enlist past popes, such as Leo XIII, as champions of religious freedom,

while explaining away their more anti-liberal statements as “historical” was controversial in his

own day, when belief in the development of doctrine was looked on with more caution than it is

today. Indeed, both Murray’s critics and one of his devotees have criticized his cherry-picking of

Pope Leo XIII’s writings.54

Murray made enemies with some conservative American Catholics due to his role as a

champion of the development of Catholic teaching toward a more liberal stance regarding

religious liberty,

55 a development that he believed had been already well underway during Pius

16

XII’s pontificate.56 These conservative critics of Murray, believing that such pro-liberty views

could not be reconciled with traditional Catholic teaching, complained to Cardinal Ottaviani, the

head of the Holy Office at the Vatican, who was sympathetic to their more conservative reading

of the tradition regarding religious liberty. In 1955, after some investigations by

Ottaviani, Murray’s superiors in the Jesuit order found it best to command him to refrain from

publishing material on the subject of religious liberty, at least for the time being.57 Murray’s

silencing, though probably not ordered directly by the Vatican, reflected the relatively cautious

atmosphere within the Catholic Church in the 1950s under Pius XII. Although Pius XII was in

many ways a reformer (for example, he praised democracy and he allowed Catholic scholars to

use modern techniques of scriptural exegesis58) by 1950 a fear of a resurgence of modern values

led to him to look with a suspicious eye toward many of the more liberal theologians of the era.

During that time, in which the Curia was more conservative than Pius himself,59 various well-

known scholars, including Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and, of course, John

Courtney Murray, were censored or even removed from teaching positions.60

After the death of Pius XII and the election of John XXIII, the mood within the Church

changed enough that in 1960 Murray felt comfortable enough to publish his most famous work,

We Hold These Truths, which touched upon religious liberty as well as various other issues in

political theology and philosophy.

61 Murray described the new environment thus: “John XXIII

had created an atmosphere in which a lot of things came unstuck—old patterns of thought,

behavior, feeling. They were not challenged or refuted, but rather just dropped.”62 Murray, along

with other prominent liberal theologians, was at first deliberately disinvited from attending the

Second Vatican Council by the still relatively conservative Vatican administration that organized

it.63 However, many American cardinals, seeing firsthand the difficulty of defending illiberal

17

Catholic views regarding church-state issues within a liberal society, were great champions of

religious liberty at the council, and the famous Cardinal Spellman, usually considered a

conservative, succeeded in inviting Murray to the council as a peritus (i.e. “expert” theologian)

in 1963. While at the council, Murray would be a great shaper of the “Declaration on Religious

Freedom,” also known by its Latin name, Dignitatis Humanae. Thus, in a span of eight years,

Murray went from being a censured theologian to an expert theologian at the Second Vatican

Council.

The Debate at the Council

By the time of Vatican II, most Catholic bishops supported that idea that human beings

deserved to exercise religious liberty. Bishops who had qualms about a statement by the Church

in support of religious liberty were in many cases uneasy not so much about religious liberty per

se, rather they worried that such a development would be difficult to reconcile with earlier papal

statements on the matter.64 There were also bishops at the council who were hesitant to have the

council make a statement about such a hot-button issue.65 Some of the most vigorous supporters

of a strong statement in support of liberty were bishops from America,66

The proponents of religious liberty were not only concerned with making a good

impression on their Protestant critics. They were also concerned that for the Church to insist on

freedom for its members in totalitarian regimes, it must first show itself to be a champion of

religious liberty. A bishop from communist Yugoslavia, expressed the importance of the issue:

“Yesterday it was Nazism, today it is atheistic materialism or communism. Religious freedom is

the problem par excellence.”

where, of course, they

worked against a tradition of suspicion regarding Catholics and church-state issues.

67 Some conservative bishops, often from countries such as Spain

and Italy, where Catholicism was dominant, were quite hesitant and even hostile to drafts of

18

Dignitatis Humanae that appeared to be too liberal. One Spanish cardinal, criticizing an early

draft of the declaration, “denounced the document as favoring liberalism and said that it seemed

to be meant primarily for Protestant countries. Its adoption would mean a revolution in the

Church, whereas Paul VI had called for a gradual reform.”68

Such debates are interesting to read about because they show how diverse the

circumstances were in which the various “Council Fathers” found themselves in their respective

countries. The Catholic Church was in a position of political power in places. In other places it

was a brutally persecuted minority religion. In pluralistic societies it coexisted with other

religions with varying degrees of difficulty. Although earlier drafts of the declaration very much

mirrored John Courtney Murray’s views on both religious liberty and establishment, the final

version also reflects the concerns of the conservative minority at the council.

69

Dignitatis Humanae

The final, approved version of the document, known in English as the “Declaration on

Religious Freedom” and in Latin as Dignitatis Humanae, begins by recognizing and approving

of the fact that “contemporary man” has become more aware of the dignity of human beings and

the needs of governments to recognize the rights that accompany this dignity.70 It also states its

intention to “develop the doctrine of recent Popes on the inviolable rights of the human person

and on the constitutional order of society.”71 Thus, the bishops show their concern for both

development of doctrine and for aggiornamento. However, at the outset the document states that

“it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward

the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ,”72 showing itself to be fundamentally a

traditional document on the issue of establishment. Next, Dignitatis “declares that the human

19

person has a right to religious freedom.”73 He has an immunity from coercion “on the part of

individuals or of social groups and of any human power” not to be “forced to act in a manner

contrary to his own beliefs” nor to be “restrained from acting in accordance with his own beliefs,

whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.”74

The right is grounded, as the title of the declaration suggests, in the “very dignity of the human

person,” and it is to be constitutionally recognized.75 Men have a duty to “seek the truth,” which

can only be done under conditions of freedom from coercion.76 Following the same logic that

Murray had, Dignitatis argues that, due to man’s “social nature,” outward expressions and

discussions of faith must not be impeded.77 The declaration approves of preaching by religious

bodies, but opposes “any manner of action which might seem to carry a hint of coercion or of a

kind of persuasion that would be dishonorable or unworthy, especially when dealing with the

poor or uneducated people.”78 Governments must “see to it that the equality of citizens before

the law… is never violated for religious reasons… Nor is there to be discrimination among

citizens.”79 Governments, rather than being neutral toward religion, ought to “create conditions

favorable to the fostering of religious life.” It may also give “special legal recognition” to a

particular religion, as long as it does not infringe upon the rights of people of other religions.80 It

should favor the “religious life of the people,” but not “presume to direct or inhibit acts that are

religious.”81

Dignitatis says that exercise of religion is “subject to certain regulatory norms.”

82 Men

and groups are morally bound to respect the rights of others and the “common welfare of all,”

dealing with others “in justice and civility” when exercising their own rights.83 Moreover,

“society has the right to defend itself against possible abuses committed on pretext of freedom of

religion.”84 In upholding this right of society, governments are not “to act in arbitrary fashion or

20

in an unfair spirit of partisanship. Its action is to be controlled by juridical norms which are in

conformity with the objective moral order.”85 When regulating religious activity, governments

must be acting to uphold “public order” which consists of the care for “public peace” and “public

morality.”86

The rest of the declaration gives Biblical defenses of religious freedom and the

freedom of the Church to carry out the mission given to it by Christ.

Murray’s View of the Declaration and Opposing Views

A widely circulated translation of Dignitatis Humanae includes commentary by John

Courtney Murray in the footnotes. He interprets the declaration to be essentially identical with

his own views. The declaration’s arguments in favor of religious liberty, grounded in the human

person’s dignity, social nature, and duty to seek the divine truth, are very similar to the view

advocated by Murray. Moreover, by forbidding heavy state intrusion into the religious lives of

citizens, Dignitatis Humanae clearly overturns the thesis-hypothesis view of religious

establishment, or at least versions of that theory that called for the hindering of or even

persecution of those practicing non-Catholic religions. To this extent Fr. Murray clearly won a

great victory for religious freedom. No one denies the obvious Murrayan imprint on much of the

document.

However, there is at least one major area in which the declaration deviated from

Murray’s views: establishment or the public care of religion. As we have seen, Murray believed

that government was only competent to care for the religious freedom of its citizens. It could not

intervene in any other way. He argued that a weak or nominal establishment could be allowed as

long as it had “no juridical consequences.87 Another way of saying this is that the Church could

not ask anything of the state besides respect for its freedom. Murray argued that the Declaration

21

established as doctrine that the Catholic Church could only claim from the state “freedom,

nothing more.”88 This is so, because “government is forbidden to assume the care of religious

truth as such…or the task of judging the truth or value of religious propaganda. Otherwise it

would exceed its competence, which is confined to the affairs of the temporal and terrestrial

order.”89

It is difficult to square this claim with the text of the declaration. First, as Russell

Hittinger points out, the Declaration clearly sidesteps the issue of establishment, not intending

any development in that area, when, in article 1, it says it “leaves intact the traditional Catholic

teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and the one

Church of Christ.”

90 Moreover, in article 13, the declaration claims freedom for the Church,

based not only on the natural law reasons given earlier that apply to all religious bodies, but in

addition it justifies its freedom as being a special mission from Christ.91 This seems to

presuppose that states are indeed competent to judge the truth of the claims of Christ. Another

commentator agrees that Murray “did not succeed in having the declaration articulate the role of

the state in wholly negative terms or to adopt the position that the state is incompetent in all

matters religious.”92 Moreover, it made a “concession to existing Catholic privilege” in article

6.93 Indeed, it seems like a stretch to interpret the declaration’s allowance of giving one religion

“special legal recognition” over others94 with Murray’s requirement that legal recognitions of a

religion should have “no juridical consequences.”95

Furthermore, Fr. Brian Harrison points out that earlier versions of the declaration

included the idea that the state was competent to uphold religious liberty but not competent in

any other aspect of religious affairs. However, after objections from conservative Council

Fathers, this language was dropped for the final, adopted draft, which calls care for the “common

22

temporal good” the state’s “distinctive purpose,”96 no longer its single purpose,97 and only

disallows the state “to hinder or take charge of religious activity.”98

Although the Vatican did later revise its concordats with countries such as Italy, Spain,

and Argentina in order to allow for more religious liberty, it left its concordats intact with the

Dominican Republic, which invoked “the name of the Most Holy Trinity,” clearly meaning that

the state had judged at least one Catholic teaching to be true.

Fr. Harrison gives further

evidence that the council did not adopt Murray’s view that legal recognition could have no

“juridical consequences.”

99 Ten years after the council, the

Vatican signed a concordat with Columbia that made similar religious judgments.100 Moreover,

both of these concordats had “juridical consequences,” giving Catholicism privileges in policies

regarding “marriage legislation, public education, the designation of public holidays, the civil

status of clergy, and other areas of national life.”101

Given all this evidence from the text itself, from what was left out of the text, and from

how the Vatican acted after the declaration, I must side with those who find a significant

discrepancy between what Murray wanted the document to say and what it actually said. A

perhaps overly simple—and maybe overly American—way of explaining what the declaration

said is to say that it mostly affirmed the American constitutional guarantee of free exercise of

religion, though allowing for restrictions for various reasons, but it did not adopt the First

Amendment prohibition of religious establishment.

What Was New in the Declaration?

Although Dignitatis Humanae did not develop doctrine as far as Murray wanted it to, it

seems clear that some sort of development did occur. According to Murray, the Church had

23

already taught that man has a right to immunity from coercion to act contrary to his beliefs. What

is new (but still “in harmony” with the older teaching) is that the declaration states that man also

has an immunity from being restrained from acting in accordance with his religious beliefs.102

Fr. Harrison sees the declaration as an adaptation to twentieth-century democratic culture.

The Church had long taught that there were three kinds of rights: the right to do something

(agendi), to have something (habendi), or to have something done or not done by someone else

(exigendi).

As

stated earlier, this follows from man’s social nature.

103 However, in the past exigendi rights had generally been attributed to rulers: they

could demand things from their subjects. In a more democratic spirit, Vatican II declared that

citizens could make demands on those that governed them.104 As noted earlier, Pius XI and Pius

XII had already moved in this direction in the 1930s and 40s. Moreover, the declaration seems to

have adopted a line of thought that was begun by St. Thomas Aquinas: a person has a subjective

duty to follow an “objectively erroneous conscience, when the error is inculpable.”105 This is due

to the modern insight that people are less rational than once thought and are therefore very often

not culpable for their doctrinal errors. Therefore, they ought to be immune from coercion when

following this erroneous conscience. Harrison says that it is more common today to separate the

objective moral duty to accept the truth from the subjective moral duty to follow one’s

conscience. Modern Catholics see that it may be quite common that following an erroneous

conscience could be motivated by a love of God and could in some cases be an occasion for

sanctification. Such ideas are not new, but the instances of such sanctification are now seen to be

likely more common than was once thought.106

Russell Hittinger also sees some new developments in Dignitatis Humanae. For one

thing, it insists that the Church’s freedom be complemented by guarantees for the freedom of

24

others. The Church’s liberty “does not require political hegemony.”107 For another, he sees the

declaration as a signal that the Church has a greater “spirit of detachment from the problem of

the state” than it did for much of its history.108 Hittinger sees not so much doctrinal development,

but a shift in attitude and emphasis. According to Hittinger, the problem that the Catholic Church

faced after the loss of the Papal States and after Vatican I was that it lacked a “middle-level

policy that could bring together the speculative and diplomatic poles.”109

Dignitatis Humanae provided this “middle-level” missing position.

What he means by this

is that the Church had theoretical doctrines and it also had various concordats with states.

However, there was no “middle-level” explanation of how these theological doctrines should be

translated into concrete policy.

110 The declaration

can be seen as more on the level of philosophy than theological doctrine. Hittinger also places

emphasis on the near silence of the declaration concerning the issue of establishment. He

considers this silence to be deliberate. First, “it would have taken a Herculean effort to sort

through fifteen hundred years of history for the purpose of identifying which government

expressions of Catholicism (or for that matter, of religion) were good, merely acceptable, or

unacceptable.”111 Second, by the time of the council “the most pressing problems facing the

Church were how to induce secularist regimes to respect freedom of religion and how to use the

Church’s moral and spiritual resources to support constitutionally limited government in the

wake of the world wars.”112 Finally, he argues that “the Catholic Church did not, and does not,

believe that disestablishment is a principle superior to free exercise.”113

Angela Carmella sees the declaration as a “rejection of the ideal confessional state,” the

thesis-hypothesis concept that Murray had so vehemently argued against, and “an acceptance of

The declaration is

interesting both for what it says and what it does not say.

25

political liberalism.”114 Dignitatis Humanae does not condemn establishment (in the sense of a

state that takes the “care of religion” into its own hands) as Murray had wanted, but neither does

it require establishment or hold it up as an ideal. And it only allows establishment of religion that

do not entail oppression of dissenters. Avery Cardinal Dulles describes the change as a shift in

the “means” advocated for the support of religion. The nineteenth-century popes had a

paternalistic view of the state and thus advocated establishment, whereas mid-twentieth-century

Catholics “placed greater reliance on indirect support.”115

When studying Dignitatis Humanae one can see evidence of all three of the types of

change mentioned earlier. There was aggiornamento in the sense that the Church attempted to

adapt its stance towards religious liberty in the context of a modern world largely made up of

oppressive, atheistic dictatorships on the one hand, and pluralistic liberal democracies on the

other. As for ressourcement, one can see in the declaration the heavy influence of the Bible and

popes and theologians from ancient and medieval times. Lastly, Dignitatis Humanae was an

organic, logical development of the teachings of the popes from Leo XIII to John XXIII.

Although these various scholars

emphasize different things when describing the developments found in Dignitatis Humanae,

their views seem to be relatively harmonious and easy to reconcile with one another. There

seems to be a general agreement that Dignitatis Humanae marked a major step toward the

Church’s embrace of political liberalism, limited government, and constitutionally guaranteed

human rights. However, the scholars all recognize that the arguments found in the declaration, as

well as almost of all Murray’s arguments, in favor of religious liberty that are authentically

Catholic. They are almost entirely derived from the Bible and Aquinas, as well as various

statements from popes, whether ancient, medieval, or modern.

26

Implications of Dignitatis Humanae and Conclusion

What are the implications of Dignitatis Humanae? There seems to be a consensus among

those who have studied Dignitatis Humanae that it overturns, or at least severely weakens, the

“thesis,” or ideal, of a Catholic, Christendom-style state, which enforces orthodoxy. As Fr.

Harrison has pointed out, the Vatican revised several of its concordats with Catholic nations

towards more liberal, pluralistic policies after Vatican II. However, decades after the declaration,

the Vatican signed or kept on the books concordats that explicitly embraced Catholicism as more

than just a nominal state religion. Moreover, he points out that there are states, such as Ireland

and the Philippines, which officially have no established church, yet which have tended to have

very Catholic political cultures and laws. Harrison sees this as another type of non-liberal

arrangement that continues to be allowed under Church teaching.116 Harrison also suggests that

the requirement in Dignitatis Humanae that restrictions on religious liberty be justified according

to the requirements of public order, public peace, or public morality leaves a lot of leeway for

what can be banned or discouraged by societies. For example, in 1985 Pope John Paul II

supported the censorship of blasphemous artwork.117

The above examples suggest that, at least from a libertarian’s point of view, many of the

Catholic Church’s political emphases have not changed so much. But what has changed is of

great importance. The Council Fathers at Vatican II, aided by John Courtney Murray, developed

and promulgated a sophisticated, intellectually powerful statement in support of what is

generally regarded as one of the most fundamental human freedoms. They did this by appealing

to Biblical and Thomistic arguments about human dignity and the duty of human beings to

search for God, rather than making arguments based on religious skepticism about religious

truth,

118 as liberals such as John Stuart Mill had done, or on consideration of political expediency

27

as other liberal thinkers have. Many religious believers in the world, including non-Catholics,

who wish to embrace religious liberty but not indifference or skepticism, can find a lot to admire

in Dignitatis Humanae.

Moreover, as we saw above, George Weigel has argued that the declaration has played a

major role in the Catholic Church’s transformation in the last half-century or so from what many

perceived as a hindrance to human liberty to one of the most effective champions of liberty.

When faced with human rights violations by secular democracies, anti-religious dictatorships,

and even paternalistic Catholic states, the Catholic Church now has a more consistent and more

convincing response than ever before. The Church has not adopted all of John Courtney Murray's

ideas. However, like Fr. Murray, and in no small part due to his influence, the Catholic Church

now preaches and demands religious liberty for people of all faiths.

28

1 George Weigel, Freedom and Its Discontents (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1991), 25. 2 Robert M. McClory, Faithful Dissenters: Stories of Men and Women Who Loved and Changed the Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000), 9. 3 Quoted in: Weigel, 28. 4 Quoted in: Brian Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception (Melbourne: John XXIII Fellowship Co-op. Ltd., 1988), 15. 5 Ibid. 6 In this case “liberal” is used in the nineteenth-century political sense, which means an emphasis on individual rights and freedom from the state. 7 Russell Hittinger, “Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903)” in The Teachings of Modern Roman Catholicism on Law, Politics, & Human Nature, ed. John Witte Jr. and Frank S. Alexander (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 43. 8 Weigel, 29. 9 Quoted in: Brian Harrison, “John Courtney Murray: A Reliable Interpreter of Dignitatis Humanae?,” Living Tradition, 33, (January 1991), <http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt33.html>, accessed 1 May 2009. 10 Weigel, 29. 11 Ibid., 38. 12 Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 23-30. 13 Weigel, 32. 14 Angela C. Carmella, “John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967)” in The Teachings of Modern Roman Catholicism on Law, Politics, & Human Nature, 197. 15 Weigel, 32. 16 Hittinger, “Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903),” 60. 17 Ibid., 61-63. 18 Ibid., 64. 19 Ibid., 66. 20 Russell Hittinger, “Introduction to Modern Catholicism” in The Teachings of Modern Roman Catholicism on Law, Politics, & Human Nature, 22. 21 Weigel, 37. 22 Quoted in Ibid., 35. 23 Quoted in John Courtney Murray, The Problem of Religious Freedom (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1965), 69. 24 Russell Hittinger, “The Declaration on Religious Liberty” in Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition, ed. Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 361-362. 25 Ibid., 377. 26 Carmella, 201. 27 John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), 206. 28 Ibid. 29 Carmella, 197. 30 Quoted in Ibid. 31 Ibid., 191. 32 John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005, originally published in 1960), 274. 33 McGreevy, 191. 34 John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 36. 35 Murray, The Problem of Religious Freedom, 19. 36 Ibid. 37 Quoted in Carmella, 187. Italics in the original. 38 Quoted in Ibid., 188. 39 Murray, The Problem of Religious Freedom, pg. 33. 40 Ibid., 34. 41 Ibid.

29

42 Ibid., 36-38. 43 Ibid., 38. 44 Ibid., 39. 45 Ibid., 40. 46 Ibid., 40. 47 Ibid., 41. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 96. 50 Carmella, 189. 51 Murray, The Problem of Religious Freedom, 88-89. 52 Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 109. 53 Avery Dulles, “Religious Freedom: Innovation and Development,” First Things 118 (2001). 54 Carmella, “John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967),” 200, and Harrison, “John Courtney Murray: A Reliable Interpreter of Dignitatis Humanae?” 55 A detailed account of the Murray's silencing can be found in Joseph A. Komonchak, “The Silencing of John Courtney Murray” in Cristianesimo nella storia: saggi in onore di Giuseppe Alberigo, ed. Alberto Melloni (Bologna: Il mulino, 1996), 657-702. 56 Robert Nugent, “The Censuring of John Courtney Murray: Part Two,” The Catholic World 1445 (March/April 2008), <http://www.thecatholicworld.com/archived_files/issue_3-4_08/PDFs/article_2_pdf.pdf>, accessed 1 May, 2009. 57 Ibid. 58 O’Malley, 83-86. 59 Xavier Rynne, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 34. 60 O’Malley, 87. 61 McClory, 18-19. 62 Donald E. Pelotte, John Courtney Murray: Theologian in Conflict (New York: Paulist Press, 1975), 75. 63 Nugent. 64 McGreevy, 237. 65 Ralph M. Wiltgen, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber (Chawleigh, England: Augustine Publishing Company, 1978, originally published in 1967), 160. 66 Ibid., 163. 67 Rynne, 300. 68 Ibid., 299. 69 Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 66-67. 70 Dignitatis Humanae, 1, in The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter M. Abbott, (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), 675-696. Hereafter DH. 71 DH, 1 in Ibid. 72 DH, 1 in Ibid. 73 DH, 2 in Ibid. 74 DH, 2 in Ibid. 75 DH, 2 in Ibid. 76 DH, 2 in Ibid. 77 DH, 3 in Ibid. 78 DH, 4 in Ibid. 79 DH, 6 in Ibid. 80 DH, 6 in Ibid. 81 DH, 3 in Ibid. 82 DH, 7 in Ibid. 83 DH, 7 in Ibid. 84 DH, 7 in Ibid. 85 DH, 7 in Ibid. This requirement was included at the suggestion of Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, who was worried that otherwise Communist governments could argue that their persecutions of religion were being done in the name of public order. See: Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 98-99. 86 DH, 7 in Ibid.

30

87 Murray, The Problem of Religious Freedom, 96. 88 Murray, “Religious Freedom”, in The Documents of Vatican II, 693. 89 Quoted in Harrison, “John Courtney Murray – A Reliable Interpeter of Dignitatis Humanae?” 90 Quoted in Hittinger, “The Declaration on Religious Liberty”, 365. 91 Ibid., 373. 92 Carmella, 205. 93 Ibid., pg. 205. 94 DH, 6 in The Documents of Vatican II. 95 See footnote 87. 96 This is how Harrison translates the phrase “proprius finis.” His translation seems reasonable in the context, and other translations, such as the one in Abbott, give no alternative translation for the word “proprius”, rather they give no translation of the word at all. See: Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 67-8. 97 Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 67-8. 98 Ibid., 67. This is Harrison’s translation of “dirigere vel impedire”, but is not far from the translation in Abbott, which says “direct or inhibit.” See: The Documents of Vatican II, 681. 99 Harrison, “John Courtney Murray: A Reliable Interpreter of Dignitatis Humanae? (Part II),” Living Tradition, 34, (March 1991), <http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt34.html>, accessed 1 May 2009. As of 1991, twenty six years had elapsed since the council, but the concordat had not been revised. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. Studying post-Dignitatis Humanae Vatican history regarding concordats and responses to allegations of human rights violations in majority Catholic countries would provide a fascinating topic for future study. 102 The Documents of Vatican II, 678. 103 Harrison, Contraception and Religious Liberty, 117-18. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid., 130. 106 Ibid. 107 Hittinger, “The Declaration on Religious Liberty,” 375. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid., 361. 110 Ibid., 362. 111 Ibid., 365. 112 Ibid., 366. 113 Ibid. 114 Carmella, 206. 115 Dulles, 38. 116 Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception, 79-80. 117 Ibid., 111. 118 Ibid., 127.