Dignitatis Humanae changing history

On December 7, 1965, Pope Paul solemnly promulgated the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, known by its Latin incipit (opening words) as Dignitatis Humanae. The Council thereby turbocharged the Catholic Church’s transformation into the world’s premier institutional defender of basic human rights—which the late Sir Michael Howard, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, once told me was one of the two great revolutions of the twentieth century, the other being the Bolshevik theft of the Russian people’s revolution in 1917.

And so we have another irony in history’s fire. For it was the Catholic Human Rights Revolution that played a pivotal role in putting paid to Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution and the monster state it created, the Soviet Union.

How, you ask?

Think of the linkages this way:

No Vatican II, no universalization of global Catholic leadership.

No universalization of global Catholic leadership, no Pope John Paul II.

No Pope John Paul II, no broad-based, religiously sustained revolution of conscience, of the sort that transformed public life in east central Europe from 1979 to 1989.

No revolution of conscience, no nonviolent auto-liberation of the “captive nations” of central and eastern Europe in 1989-1991.

No auto-liberation of the vassal states of the Warsaw Pact and the pseudo “republics” of the USSR, no collapse of the Soviet Union in August 1991.

And the linchpin in that chain of causality was Dignitatis Humanae.

Why? Because absent the Council’s solemn affirmation of religious freedom as a fundamental human right—a truth grounded in the dignity of the person that can be known by both revelation and reason—the Church would have been unable to plausibly defend the rights of religious people (and indeed all people of conscience) against the atheistic hegemon of European communism.

Nor would a Church clinging to the remnants of ecclesiastical establishment have been able to credibly assert that state power is inherently limited and has no legitimate role in “those voluntary and free acts by which a man directs himself to God … [acts that] cannot be commanded or forbidden by any human authority” (as the declaration put it).

In short, Dignitatis Humanae not only defended a basic right of persons to be free from coercion in that sanctuary of conscience where God may be sought and found. Dignitatis Humanae was also the theological analogue to a precision-guided hypersonic missile, aimed directly at a central claim of the communist project: that there was no sanctuary of personal identity and integrity into which the party-state could not assert itself.

Little wonder, then, that Yuri Andropov, the highly intelligent and thoroughly wicked chairman of the KGB, the USSR’s secret intelligence service, saw the 1978 election of John Paul II—a promoter of Dignitatis Humanae at Vatican II and an ardent defender of religious freedom as archbishop of Kraków — as a mortal threat to the Soviet Union itself, not just to the Soviet position in Poland.

Contrary to ill-informed opinion in 1965 and today, Dignitatis Humanae was not the opening wedge to religious indifferentism. In fact, its key paragraph, having defined the right of religious freedom as grounded in the nature and dignity of the person, immediately linked that right to a duty:

It is in accordance with their dignity that all men, because they are persons, that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore bearing personal responsibility, are both impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth once they come to know it and direct their whole lives in accordance with the demands of truth. But men cannot satisfy this obligation in a way that is in keeping with their own nature unless they enjoy both psychological freedom and immunity from external coercion. (DH 2)

The Declaration on Religious Freedom was not a surrender to secular liberalism; it was not a concession to modern skepticism about the human ability to know anything with certainty; and it was not an ecclesiastical white flag waved before Enlightenment political theory. It was a classic case of the development of doctrine—in this instance, the recovery and application to contemporary circumstances of two biblically rooted truths.

The first of those truths is that God wishes to be adored by people who are free, as manifest in Israel’s experience of the Exodus. The second is that there are things of God’s that are not Caesar’s, as the Lord taught in Matthew 22:21.

The Catholic Church was being true to her divinely ordered self in Dignitatis Humanae. That fidelity would have impressive—one might even say, providential—consequences in history.