Dignitatis Humanae and Social Kingship, Part Two

In Part One of this essay on Dignitatis Humanae, I made the argument, following Tracey Rowland and Russel Hittinger, that DH should be read minimalistically as a simple affirmation that no person should be forcibly coerced in religious matters by the Church, or by the State acting as an agent of the Church.

In what follows, I wish to elaborate upon this point even further and to defend its cogency as the approach that best situates DH within the tradition.

The matter of scholarly interpretation

But allow me to begin with one of the sillier arguments against this position. Some will claim that the mere fact that one needs a scholarly interpretation of the text in order to make sense of it is a sure sign that the text itself is ambiguous at best. They point to the obvious fact that there are many other scholarly interpretations of the text that read it in a more maximal manner as evidence of the text’s ambiguity. Therefore, they claim, my reading of the text as minimalistic is just an idiosyncratic opinion of one school of thought among many others.

But this argument proves too much. Hundreds of scholarly books and articles have also been written about the Council of Nicaea, many of which differ from one another in significant hermeneutical details, without for all that implying that Nicaea must therefore be judged as inherently ambiguous. If one follows the logic of those who claim that the mere presence of post-conciliar theological debates is a sign of a flawed council, one would be forced to conclude that Nicaea must have been less than perspicacious as to its meaning concerning homoousios and the full divinity of Christ. This would be why, apparently, the Church needed the theological interpretation of Athanasius to rush to Nicaea’s defense. Furthermore, the Arian heresy continued with strength and numbers, especially amongst the Germanic tribes, for a few more centuries, adding more fuel to the “Nicaea was ambiguous” argument.

And then we had the Monophysite and Monothelite schisms after Ephesus and Chalcedon. There was also the stubborn persistence of a subordinationist Christology among theologians influenced by Middle Platonism. Not to mention various Trinitarian heresies that persist to this day.

But of course, those councils were in fact rather clear in their teachings, and the mere presence of dissent from (or confusion about) them is no indictment against their clarity. Human beings get confused, make mistakes, and engage in all manner of theological obfuscations owing to various ideological antecedents operative in their thought all the time. Church history is littered with examples of this.

And as I stated in my previous essay, you also cannot rule out deliberate manipulation of conciliar teachings for the sake of ulterior ecclesial and/or political motives. Humans are a complicated lot.

Continuity and corrections

All that said, am I claiming that Hittinger’s take on DH is the only possible approach that should be given credence? Not at all, just as there is not a single Christology that one can legitimately develop out of the doctrinal claims made by Nicaea through Chalcedon, with many variations on what it means to say that Christ is fully and really divine. So too here. There are mutually enriching approaches to DH, all of which place it in coherence with aspects of the tradition.

Therefore, there can be a variety of approaches. But the approach adopted by Hittinger seems the most cogent and coherent to me since, as every pope has said from 1965 forward, the only proper interpretation of the Council is one that places it squarely within a continuity with Catholic tradition. And Hittinger’s approach does that better than most other theories, if not all of them. Thomas Pink has also put forward an approach that does the same, but I prefer that of Hittinger since it requires fewer assumptions.

I hesitate to use the term “continuity” here because that word has been so abused through cliched overuse that it can obscure the issue at hand. But it is still the best term to use, provided one does not view it in an overly straight-jacketed manner as something closed to further nuance and development from within its own essential form. Whether some like it or not, doctrines do sometimes develop. And they do in ways, as I noted in Part One with regard to Pope Benedict, that sometimes require certain corrections of past teaching and/or praxis.

And note well, those “corrections” are not an attempt at novelty for the sake of accommodation to the culture in inappropriate ways, but rather the deepening of a doctrine by retrieving elements of the tradition itself that seem to demand the development in question. As Cardinal Newman noted, sometimes those developments of doctrine can at first glance appear to be something radically different than before and not in continuity with the faith. But, as he points out, an analogy can be seen for such development when one looks to a butterfly emerging from its cocoon and realizes that though very different looking from the caterpillar, it is in fact in an organic continuity with it.

In other words, looks can be deceiving, and what appears to the casual glance to be a radical change is, upon further inspection, an organic development most wondrous and beautiful. And it is precisely so because of its surprising epiphanic revelation of what was, in latent form, there all along and hiding in plain sight.

The pastoral nature of Vatican II

Therefore, when DH says that it leaves all previous Church teaching on church-state relations intact, and when it gives us no overarching political theory or even a preferred political philosophy drawn from the faith to ground its teaching on freedom, then it is clear that every effort is being made—as Paul VI at the time insisted and as the acts of the Council make crystal clear–to situate DH within the tradition and to limit its scope to the matter of coercion.

Thus, if Hittinger, Rowland, and I are guilty of anything, it is that we interpret the text as the magisterium says we should, as a limited development of doctrine in continuity with profound theological truths in the tradition concerning the nature of true faith as something that can only exist within an atmosphere of non-coerced freedom. You can call us all “Boomer hippies” and send us to bed without our supper, but I at least would go to my room in full peace knowing that all I have done is to defend the Church’s magisterial teaching against the fiddleback fussbudgets who seem to think that the magisterium went into a psychotic, dissociative state beginning in 1962 if not earlier.

But some critics are not satisfied and claim that there was no need for DH to say what it said because the Church was already embracing the notion of tolerance in religious matters, even in the pre-conciliar Church. It was indeed doing that! But this only goes to show that DH was not doing something utterly novel and that it was developing theological concepts that were already percolating in the Church, even amongst very traditional Catholics.

But why press it further beyond what the Church had already embraced? Here, we need to focus on the oft-mentioned “merely pastoral” nature of DH and what that means and what it entails. I will focus on both the doctrinal element that is embedded within this pastoral project, as well as the chief pastoral aims, as such. And by the way, all doctrines and dogmas are ultimately “pastoral” insofar as their primary goal is to aid our path to God by clarifying the intellect.

Some traditionalist Catholics—but by no means all—claim that DH does make a doctrinal claim that contradicts previous magisterial teachings. And that is the doctrine that the dignity of the human religious conscience grants to all persons a God-given right to immunity from coercion. But this is a development that is truly akin to that butterfly-from-the-caterpillar analogy. Because even if this “new” doctrine seems like a novelty, in fact, it is actually more of a much-needed reaffirmation of some essential truths from the tradition that had been crudded over with centuries of a deeply problematic ecclesial praxis.

Having it both ways?

Furthermore, such ecclesial praxis was problematic, as were some of the theological and doctrinal elements that justified it. The critics of DH love to point out its non-infallible status and therefore that we are free to reject it. But that argument cuts both ways because such criticisms only establish the fact that there are indeed a few non-infallible teachings of the Church that might embody distorted and/or exaggerated truths that have emerged as a result of cultural osmosis and stand in need of correction. Even the peripatetic Bishop Athanasius Schneider keeps saying that a future pope “must!” correct DH and other “ambiguities” (i.e., “errors”) in Vatican II.

But if DH stands in need of nuanced correction or even reversal, then so can previous non-infallible Church teachings that condoned torturing and executing obstinate public heretics, as well as encouraging the civil authorities to criminalize all other religions and to suppress their adherents by means even of deadly force if necessary. The slogan “error has no rights” became the mantra of many. But it ignores the rather important fact that persons who are in error do have rights.

The DH critics go on to point to the fact that this praxis and teaching of the Church regarding strong coercion was long-standing and consistently taught by the ordinary magisterium of the Church. Therefore, it is probably expressive of infallible teaching and has, at the very least, a stronger claim to an authoritative magisterial pedigree than does the teaching of DH.

But once again, this is a critique that proves too much. When confronted with the horrific praxis of the Church regarding the torture and execution of heretics, the DH critic usually goes into a bit of doctrinal shrinkage and rushes to point out that they are not talking about torture and execution but only about the goodness of having Catholic confessional states policing the religious precincts of the public square. But you cannot have it both ways, since part and parcel of the previous doctrinal justification for the suppression of religious freedom was the concomitant justification for imprisonment without trial or due process, as well as for torture, execution, and exile. Leo X made that quite clear in Exsurge Domine. And such teachings were also long-standing and consistent, and check just as many boxes for meeting the criteria put forward by the DH critics themselves for the alleged infallibility of such doctrines.

In point of fact, long-standing ecclesial praxis and a certain consistency of teaching over time are not the only criteria for determining the legitimacy of some doctrines. Ultimately, it is to be remembered that tradition is not an idol standing above the Church; rather, it exists to carry forward the truths of Revelation within the living stream of the Church. And yes, that process is guided by the Holy Spirit, but not all forms of praxis and teaching are therefore by definition infallible simply because they are Spirit-guided. If that were so, then every doctrine the Church ever taught would be infallible. And indeed, as traditionalists themselves affirm with regard to DH, the Church can teach some questionable things sometimes in her non-infallible teachings, even if they are in the highly authoritative texts of an ecumenical council.

The Spirit guides, but Church praxis can ignore such guidance, and Church doctrines can sometimes become distorted when they are created in order to justify flawed praxis. If this were not so, then why do the critics of DH insist we can dissent from it? The magisterium is a living magisterium capable of some self-corrections precisely in order to avoid these kinds of debates about who it is in the Church that possesses the “true and pure doctrine” of the Spirit.

Let’s cut to the chase. The Church that was instituted by the crucified and risen Christ loses its evangelical punch and loses all pastoral credibility and is in clear violation of its own deepest truths when it condones the torture and execution of heretics, and the strong-armed suppression of all non-Catholic religions. When one sees the spectacle of Pius IX condoning the kidnapping of a Jewish baby who was secretly baptized by a Catholic caregiver, and whose parents lived in the papal states and therefore under its laws, in order to properly raise the child as a Catholic, then it does not take a genius theological IQ to recognize that the Church had gone off the rails in her praxis and, therefore, stood in need of a corrective.

None of this even remotely implies that if the Church was capable of a distorted teaching with regard to religious freedom that maybe it is “wrong” on a bunch of other things as well. That conclusion does not necessarily follow and is utterly reductive and simplistic. It presumes that every non-infallible teaching of the Church is now up for grabs. Therefore, channeling my inner Dwight Schrute, I say: “False! Given the Spirit-guided nature of the magisterium, such needed corrections are minimal and relatively easy to recognize. The baseline for the tradition is stasis, not change, and any needed corrections will be infrequent and grounded in other elements of the tradition that are also part of the stasis over time.”

But this will also need further elaboration in a future essay.

Subhead

Finally, what then of the pastoral aims of DH? I think they are twofold and once again grounded in a minimalistic concern for the question of non-coercion of consciences without any elaborate political theoretical apparatus given.

First, in 1965, the sad fact of the terrible plight of Catholics in Soviet bloc countries was much on the minds of the Council Fathers, chief among them a certain young Polish bishop named Karol Wojtyla. For reasons of pastoral concern for those Catholics, the Council refrained from any explicit condemnation of communism, lest it make matters worse. And besides, everyone already knew that the Church stood against Communism.

But the one thing it could do was to make a robust call for civil authorities everywhere to respect the rights of religious conscience. But it could hardly do so credibly while still affirming its own right to suppress religious freedom in countries dominated by Catholics.

This was one of those pastoral considerations that we are now told by DH critics that we can reject since they are merely the silly remnants of a bygone boomer era of loosey-goosey religious relativism. But in so making this claim, the critics betray their own indifference to the plight of persecuted Catholics in our own time in countries like Nigeria and Sudan, among many other places. We are either in favor of religious freedom for all, or we will be accused of hypocrisy and ignored. Soviet communism is no longer a menace, so I guess we silly boomers just need to get over our time-bound antiquarian nostalgia for the Age of Aquarius and move on to affirm the need to reject religious freedom as a basic human right since the threat has apparently now passed.

The second pastoral concern need not detain us for long since I have already addressed it. To wit, the Church has been unfairly chastised by the secular forces of modernity for being the enemy of freedom. But the Council fathers understood that would be a hard perception to change absent a different pastoral direction. That is why we saw the Church after the Council pull back from several concordats it had with confessional Catholic States and embrace a more hands-off approach to its role in overt politics in favor of more cultural efforts. We can, of course, debate the wisdom of some, or many, of those decisions.

But none of those efforts were mandated by DH, even if there were those in the Church who were saying just that. Which is another reason why, even if such post-conciliar pastoral moves were wise, a more maximalist reading of DH should be avoided, since such a reading has been used in some questionable ways by both the progressives and the traditionalists.

I stated in part one that there would only be one more part to this essay. But there will now be a Part Three dealing with the concept of the social kingship of Christ, which is, in many ways, the most important issue of all.