The Reign of Christ the
King
Michael Davies
REMNANT
COLUMNIST,
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O |
n 11 December 1925, Pope Pius XI
promulgated his encyclical letter Quas primas, on the Kingship of Christ. The encyclical dealt
with what the Pope described correctly as "the chief cause of the
difficulties under which mankind was laboring."
He explained that the manifold evils in the world are due to the fact that the
majority of men have thrust Jesus Christ and His holy law out of their lives;
that Our Lord and His holy law have no place either in private life or in
politics; and, as long as individuals and states refuse to submit to the rule
of our Saviour, there will be no hope of lasting peace among nations. Men must
look for the peace of Christ in the
The teaching of this encyclical was ignored and
passed over, if not actually contradicted, by the Second Vatican Council. It is
an incontrovertible fact that this Council conspicuously and, one must
conclude, deliberately, failed to reaffirm the teaching of Quas primas in which Pope Pius XI reaffirmed
the unbroken teaching of his predecessors that states as well as individuals
must submit themselves to the rule of Christ the King. In affirming this
fundamental truth of our faith, Pope Pius was not referring simply to Catholic
nations, or even to Christian nations, but to the whole of mankind. He stated
this truth unequivocally by quoting a passage from the encyclical Annum sacrum of Pope Leo XIII:
The empire of Christ the King
includes not only Catholic nations, not only baptized persons who, though of
right belonging to the Church, have been led astray by error, or have been cut
off from her by schism, but also all those who are outside the Christian faith:
so that truly the whole of mankind is subject to the power of Jesus Christ.
All men, both as individuals and as nations, are
subject to the rule of Our Lord Jesus Christ the King,
and this for two reasons. Firstly, because, as God, He is our
Creator. Psalm 32 summarizes the correct Creator-creature relationship
in the following inspired terms:
Let all the earth fear the Lord:
and let all the inhabitants of the world be in awe of
Him. For He spoke and they were made: He commanded and they were created.
"For He spoke and they were made: He commanded
and they were created." God is our Creator. We are His creatures. Without
Him we would not exist. We owe Him everything, and He owes us nothing. Those
who are created have an absolute obligation to love and serve their Creator.
This obligation is unqualified; there is no question of any possible right on
the part of any man at any time to withhold his obedience.
It is only when men live their lives within the
correct perspective of the Creator-creature relationship that social and
political harmony and order prevail. "The peace of
Christ in the
In Quas primas, Pope Pius XI explains the second reason that we
must subject ourselves to Our Lord. He explains the beautiful and profound
truth that Christ is our King by acquired as well as by natural right, for He
is our Redeemer:
Would that those who forget what
they have cost our Saviour might recall the words: “You were not redeemed with
corruptible things, but with the Precious Blood of Christ, as of a lamb
unspotted and undefiled.” We are no
longer our own, for Christ has purchased us “with a great price”; our very
bodies are the “members of Christ.”
The double claim of Our Lord Jesus Christ to our
allegiance, as our Creator and our Redeemer, is well summarized in the Book of
the Apocalypse, where
No one claiming to be a Christian would, one hopes,
dispute the fact that as individuals we must submit ourselves to the rule of
Christ the King, but very few Christians, Catholics included, understand, let alone uphold, the
Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
His social kingship can be implemented fully only when Church and State
are united. The separation of Church and
State was condemned unequivocally by the Roman Pontiffs until the Second
Vatican Council. The Church's teaching is that the State has an obligation to
render public worship to God in accord with liturgy of the true Church, the
Catholic Church, to uphold its teaching, and to aid the Church in the carrying
out of her functions. The State does not have the right to remain neutral
regarding religion, much less to pursue a secular approach in its policies. A
secular approach is by that very fact an anti-God and an anti-Christ approach.
Those who ignore or repudiate the Social Kingship
of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and His right to rule over societies as well as
individuals, accept, perhaps without realizing it, the abominable theory of
democracy enshrined in the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man, the declaration which constituted
a formal and insolent repudiation of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus
Christ, the declaration which enshrined the greatest heresy of modern times,
perhaps of all times: that authority resides in the people. On the contrary, as
the Popes have taught, Omnis potestas a Deo—-"All
authority comes from God."
"Not so!" reply the revolutionaries. Omnis potestas a populo—"All
authority comes from the people."
How well the term "revolutionaries"
applies to these men! A revolution is best defined as the forcible overthrow of
an established government, and this is precisely what they did. They overthrew the Social Kingship of Our
Lord Jesus Christ in favor of the heresy that
authority resides in the will of the majority—the heresy that is the source of
all the evils in society today. The promulgation of The Declaration of the Rights of Man constituted the first formal
repudiation of Our Lord's Social Kingship.
It was the most influential act in the process of securing His virtually
universal dethronement during the next two centuries.
Before examining the extent to which this
Declaration constituted a repudiation of Catholic teaching on the authority of
the State, it is necessary to have a clear grasp of the content of this
teaching. A state is composed of two elements: the government, or those who
govern, and the governed, authority being vested in those who govern. The
Church is not committed to any particular form of government. Despite the
tendency of Popes to refer to "princes" in their encyclicals, they were
in no way opposed to democracy, if all that is meant by this term is that those
who govern are chosen by a vote (based on either limited or universal
suffrage). Leo XIII explains:
The right to rule is not
necessarily, however, bound up with any special mode of government. It may take
this or that form provided only that it be of a nature to insure the general
welfare. But whatever be the nature of the government, rulers must ever bear in
mind that God is the paramount Ruler of the world, and must set Him before
themselves as their exemplar and law in the administration of the State.
What the
Popes maintain, logically and uncompromisingly, is that the source of authority
is precisely the same in an absolute monarchy, such as that of Louis XIV in
18th-century
Every civilized community must
have a ruling authority, and this authority, no less than society itself, has
its source in nature, and has, consequently, God for its author. Hence it
follows that all public power must proceed from God. For God alone is the true
and supreme lord of the world. Everything without exception must be subject to
Him, and must serve Him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern, holds it from one sole and single source, namely,
God, the Sovereign Ruler of all. "There is no power but from God."
(Rom. 13:1)
"There is no power but from God." This quotation from Romans
13:1 states all that needs to be stated concerning the source of authority.
Because those who govern derive their authority from God and govern as His
legates, and not as holding their authority from the people, no government can
have a true right to enact any legislation contrary to the law of God, even if
such legislation is the manifest wish of the majority of the people. The Church
is totally opposed to any concept of democracy in which authority is said to
reside in the people and in which those who govern are said to receive their
authority from the people. Pope Leo XIII insisted in Immortale Dei that:
In a society grounded upon such maxims, all
government is nothing more nor less than the will of the people; and the
people, being under the power of itself alone, is alone its own ruler. . . .
The authority of God is passed over in silence, just as if there were no God;
or as if He cared nothing for human society; or as if men, in their individual
capacity or bound together in social relations, owed nothing to God; or as if
there could be a government of which the whole origin and power and authority
did not reside in God Himself. Thus, as is evident, a state becomes nothing but
a multitude, which is its own master and ruler.
In the July 1950 issue of the American Ecclesiastical Review, Monsignor George Shea explains the situation that should prevail in a
predominantly Catholic state as follows:
In a Catholic society, it is
incumbent upon the State to be a "
This is a faithful summary of consistent papal
teaching. In Immortale Dei, Pope Leo XIII teaches:
Men living together in society
are under the power of God no less than individuals are, and society, not less
than individuals, owes gratitude to God, who gave it being and maintains it,
and whose ever-bounteous goodness enriches it with countless blessings. Since,
then, no one is allowed to be remiss in the service due to God, and since the
chief duty of all men is to cling to religion in both its teaching and
practice—not such religion as they may have a preference for, but the religion
which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the only
one true religion—it is a public crime to act as though there were no God. So,
too, is it a sin in the State not to have care for religion, as a something
beyond its scope, or as of no practical benefit; or out of many forms of
religion to adopt that one which chimes in with the fancy; for States are bound
absolutely to worship God in that way which He has shown to be His will. All
who rule, therefore, should hold in honour the holy Name of God, and one of
their chief duties must be to favour religion, to protect it . . . . "
In the same Encyclical he cites as reprehensible
these views:
The State (civitas) does not consider itself
bound by any kind of duty towards God. Moreover, it believes that it is not
obliged to make public profession of any religion; or to inquire which of the
very many religions is the only one true; or to prefer one religion to all the
rest; or to show to any form of religion special favour; but, on the contrary,
is bound to grant equal rights to every creed, so that public order may not be
disturbed by any particular form of religious belief.
In his Encyclical Libertas humana,
"This kind of liberty [liberty of cult], if considered in relation
to the State, clearly implies that there is no reason why the State should
offer any homage to God, or should desire any public recognition of Him; that
no one form of worship is to be preferred to another, but that all stand on an
equal footing, no account being taken of the religion of the people, even if
they profess the Catholic faith.... Civil society [civilis
societas, quia societas est]
must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His
power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the
State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in
godlessness—namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike,
and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges. Since, then,
the profession of one religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be
professed which alone is true, and which can be recognized without difficulty,
especially in Catholic States, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engraven upon it.
Pius X wrote in his Encyclical Vehementer nos, ll
February 1906:
That the State should be
separated from the Church is an absolutely false and most pernicious thesis.
For first, since it is based on the principle that religion should be of no
concern to the State, it does a grave injury to God, He Who is the founder and
conserver of human society no less than He is of individual men, for which
reason He should be worshipped not only privately but also publicly.
The Rights of Man were discussed by the French
National Assembly during the meetings of August 1789, and adopted in October of
the same year. Some of the articles are not simply acceptable, but actually
commendable, e.g., Article 7, concerning the detention of citizens; Article 8,
stating that laws cannot have a retroactive effect; and Article 9, concerning
those who have been arrested but whose guilt has not been proven. Other
articles are ambiguous. But some others are positively incompatible with Catholicism,
particularly Article 6, which begins by stating that the law is the expression
of the general will. This is a complete negation of
the teaching of the Church that all authority comes from God. Pope Pius VI had
no hesitation in condemning the Declaration as "contrary to religion and
to society.[1] Acceptance of the Declaration of the Rights
of Man rules out the possibility of a Catholic state and the social reign of
Christ the King. This is hardly surprising in view of the Masonic origin of the
Declaration. Father Denis Fahey wrote:
That
the preparation and the triumph of the French Revolution were the work of
Freemasonry does not need proof, since the Masons themselves boast of it.
Accordingly, The Declaration of the
Rights of Man is a Masonic production.[2]
Father Fahey quoted in support of this contention a
statement by Monsieur Bonnet, the orator at the Grand Orient Assembly in 1904:
Freemasonry had the supreme honor of giving to humanity the chart which it had lovingly
elaborated. It was our Brother, de la Fayette, who first presented the project
of a declaration of the natural rights of the man and the citizen living in
society, to be the first chapter of the Constitution. On
Father Fahey summarized the Declaration as a formal
renunciation of allegiance to Christ the King, of the supernatural life, and of
membership in Christ's Mystical Body. He continued:
The
Father Francis J. Connell has explained that the
fundamental issue at stake in the necessity for Church and State to be united
in Catholic countries is not the obligation of states to obey the laws of the
Catholic Church, but "the obligation of civil rulers in their official
capacity to obey the divine positive law of Jesus Christ." He adds: "In
other words, the real point at issue is not the relation between the State and
the Catholic Church, but rather the relation between the State and Christ the
King."[5]
This is a point of crucial importance. The
obligations of the State to God, deriving from the rights of Christ the King,
are quite independent of any particular historical circumstances which may have
influenced the writing of a particular encyclical. The citations from
encyclicals which have been cited demonstrate that the Popes were laying down general
principles with a permanent validity.
These principles retain their validity no matter what may have been the
circumstances which prompted particular encyclicals. Writing in the American Ecclesiastical Review
in May 1953, Cardinal Ottaviani condemned those who
attempt to bypass permanently valid teaching in encyclicals on the grounds that
it was transient and applicable only to the historical circumstances which
prompted it:
The first fault of these persons
consists precisely in their failure to accept fully the arma
veritatis and the teachings which the Roman Pontiffs
during the past century, and particularly the reigning Pontiff Pius XII, have
given to Catholics on this subject in encyclical letters, allocutions, and
instructions of various kinds.
To justify themselves, these people assert that in the body of teaching
imparted within the Church there are to be distinguished two elements, the one
permanent, and the other transient. This latter is supposed to be due to the
reflection of particular contemporary conditions.
Unfortunately, they carry this tactic so
far as to apply it to the principles taught in pontifical documents, principles
on which the teachings of the Popes have remained constant so as to make these
principles a part of the patrimony of Catholic doctrine. [my emphasis]
After summarizing papal teaching on the question of
Church and State, including "the duty of rulers of a Catholic State to
protect from everything that would undermine it the religious unity of a people
who unanimously know themselves to be in secure possession of religious
truth," Cardinal Ottaviani traces this teaching
through successive pontificates up to that of Pope Pius XII and concludes:
These principles are firm and immovable. They were valid in the times of
Innocent III and Boniface VIII. They are valid in the days of Leo XIII and of
Pius XII, who has reaffirmed them in more than one of his documents . . .
. I am certain that no one can prove
that there has been any kind of change, in the matter of these principles,
between Summi pontificatus
of Pius XII and the encyclicals of Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris against Communism, Mit
brennender Sorge against
Nazism, and Non abbiamo bisogno
against the state monopoly of fascism, on the one hand; and the earlier
encyclicals of Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, Libertas, and Sapientiae Christianae, on the other.
"The ultimate, profound, lapidary fundamental norms of
society," says the august Pontiff in his Christmas radio-message of 1942, "cannot be damaged by the intervention of man's
genius. Men can deny them, ignore them, despise them, disobey them, but they
can never abrogate them with juridical efficacy."
It is incontestable that Dignitatis
humanae, the Declaration of the Second Vatican
Council on Religious Liberty, did not reaffirm authentic papal teaching on the
social reign of Christ the King. It is
certainly arguable that it also contradicts papal teaching on Church and state,
teaching which Cardinal Ottaviani described as
"part of the patrimony of Catholic doctrine."
The most scholarly defense
of Dignitatis humanae was
written by an Australian priest, Father Brian Harrison. Father Harrison is a scholar of complete
integrity, who makes no attempt to defend what is indefensible. He writes:
Even more striking than Dignitatis humanae's omission of
any obvious reiteration of the obligation of public authorities to recognize
Catholicism as uniquely true (not to mention the subsequent removal of prayers
and hymns expressing this teaching from the new Mass and Office of Christ the
King) is the conciliar Declaration's affirmation of
certain ideas which bear at least a prima facie appearance of contradicting
previous papal statements. [6]
Father Harrison was not only honest, but prudent,
to concede that the social kingship of Christ was not affirmed by Dignitatis humanae, as not one
word affirming it can be found anywhere in the Declaration, and his reference
to the new Mass and Office of Christ the King is very significant. An accepted principle with regard to
liturgical worship is that the doctrinal standpoint of any religious body must
necessarily be reflected in its liturgy. This can be summed up by the phrase lex orandi, lex
credendi, which can be translated freely as meaning
that the manner in which the Church worships, lex orandi, must reflect what the Church believes, lex credendi
The true import of the new Office can be deduced
primarily from what has been removed from the preconciliar
Breviary, and a comparison of the two texts reveals the systematic removal or
modification of complete prayers or individual phrases which could not be
reconciled with the teaching of Dignitatis humanae, that is, prayers which give liturgical expression
to the Social Reign of Christ the King, and demand that states as well as
individuals must submit themselves to His rule. The same procedure has been
applied to the Proper of the Mass for the Feast. An introductory note in the
1952 edition of the St. Andrew Daily Missal explains that:
Pope Pius XI (whose motto was Pax Christi in regno Christi) instituted the Feast of Christ the King as a
solemn affirmation of Our Lord's Kingship of every human society. He is King
not only of the soul and conscience, intelligence and will of all men, but also
of families and cities, peoples and states and the whole universe. In his
encyclical letter Quas primas,
the Pope showed how laicism or secularism, organizing society without any
reference to God, leads to the apostasy of the masses and the ruin of society,
because it is a complete denial of Christ's Kingship. This is one of the great
heresies of our time, and the Pope considered that this annual public, social,
and official assertion of Christ's divine right of Kingship over men in the
liturgy would be an effective means of combatting it.
Pope Pius XI wrote in Quas
primas:
Nations will be reminded by the annual
celebration of this feast that not only private individuals but also rulers and
princes are bound to give public honour and obedience to Christ.
Forty years later, almost to the day, by the
promulgation of Dignitatis humanae
on
One must realize that this
Council, which exposed itself to human judgement, insisted very much more upon
this pleasant side of man, rather than his unpleasant one. Its attitude was
very much and deliberately optimistic. A wave of affection and admiration
flowed from the Council over the modern world of humanity. Errors were
condemned, indeed, because charity demanded this no less than did truth, but
for the persons themselves there was only warning, respect, and love. Instead
of depressing diagnoses, encouraging remedies; instead of direful prognostics,
messages of trust issued from the Council to the present-day world. The modem
world's values were not only respected but honoured, its efforts approved, its
aspirations purified and blessed.
The values of the modern world are now clearly
apparent even in nominally Catholic countries today in the legalization of
divorce, contraception, pornography, sodomy, and abortion. Pope Paul's illusion
that his Council would purify the aspirations of the modern world was finally
dispelled for him when he wept at the establishment of an abortion clinic in
The Breviary Office of Christ the King
The hymn Te saeculorum Principem of First Vespers has had the following verses
omitted:
The wicked mob screams out.
"We
don't want Christ as king,"
While we, with shouts of joy, hail
Thee as the world's supreme King.
May the rulers of the world publicly
honour
and extol Thee;
May teachers and judges reverence Thee;
May the laws express Thine
order
And the arts reflect Thy beauty.
May kings find renown in their submission
and
dedication to Thee.
Bring under Thy gentle rule our
country
and our homes.
Glory be to Thee, Jesus, supreme over
All secular authorities;
And glory be to the Father and
The loving Spirit through endless ages.
The hymn Aeterna Imago Altissimi has been transferred from Matins to Lauds, and
the following changes made. The last two lines of the second verse stated that
the Father had entrusted to Christ, as His right, "absolute dominion over
the peoples" (Cui iure sceptrum
gentium Pater supremum credidit). This has been
replaced by an admonition that we, as individuals, should willingly submit
ourselves to Christ (tibi volentes
subdimur qui iure cunctis imperas).
The following verses have, not surprisingly, been
omitted completely:
To Thee, Who by right claim rule over all men,
We willingly
submit ourselves;
To be
subject to Thy laws
Means happiness for a state and its peoples.
Glory be to Thee, Jesus,
Supreme over all secular authorities;
And glory be to the Father and
The loving Spirit through endless ages.
A version of the Vexilla
Regis has been abolished completely. Originally found in Lauds, some of its
verses read:
Christ triumphantly unfurls His
Glorious banners everywhere;
Come
nations of the world, and
On bended knee acclaim the King of kings.
How great is the happiness of a country
That rightly owns the rule of Christ and
Zealously carries out the commands God gave to men.
The plighted word keeps marriage unbroken,
The children grow up with virtue intact and
Homes where purity is found
Abound also in the other virtues of home life.
Beloved King, may the
light from Thee
That we desire, shine on us in all its glory;
May the world receive the gift of peace,
Be subject to Thee and adore Thee.
A number of readings from Quas
primas itself were included in the Office, and they
explained the traditional teaching on Church and State with great clarity. They
have all been removed, showing how blatantly the compilers of the new Breviary
went about their task of eliminating liturgical references to the Social
Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The removal of these readings from Quas primas must certainly be
seen as an affront to the memory and the teaching of Pope Pius XI, at whose
behest the Office had been composed only forty years earlier, with the specific
aim of reminding rulers that they are bound to give public honour and obedience
to Our Lord. Could this great Pope possibly have imagined that within four
decades he would have a successor who would totally mutilate the Office that he
had approved so recently, and that this mutilation would have the objective of
removing any suggestion that rulers are bound to give honour and obedience to
Our Lord? Pope Paul VI stated explicitly to the rulers of the world that the
Church asked no more of them than freedom to pursue its mission.
The thoroughness with which Archbishop Bugnini's Consilium expunged
every specific expression of Our Lord's Social Kingship from the liturgy can
hardly be denied. Its members did not even miss a reference to Our Lord's
Social Kingship in the Good Friday liturgy. The first of the Solemn Collects,
the one for the Church, read:
Let us pray, dearly beloved, for
the holy Church of God: that our God and Lord may be pleased to give it peace,
keep its unity and preserve it throughout the world: subjecting to it
principalities and powers, and may He grant us, while we live in peace and
tranquillity, grace to glorify God the Father almighty. {my emphasis]
This prayer has been replaced by the following:
Let us pray, dear
friends, for the holy
that God, the almighty Father guide
it, and gather it together
so that we may
worship him in peace and tranquillity.
Lest anyone should imagine that an undue
significance has been placed upon changes in the Breviary and Missal relating
to the doctrine of Christ the King, a comment by Archbishop A. Bugnini, Great Architect of the Liturgical Revolution,
should prove very illuminating.
In the ecumenical climate of
Vatican II, some expressions in the Orationes sollemnes of the Good Friday service had a bad ring to
them. There were urgent requests to tone down some of the wording. It is always unpleasant to have to alter
venerable texts that for centuries have effectively nourished Christian devotion
and have about them the spiritual fragrance of the heroic age of the Church's
beginnings. Above all, it is difficult to revise literary masterpieces that are
unsurpassed for their pithy form. It was nevertheless thought necessary to face
up to the task, lest anyone find reason for spiritual discomfort in the prayer
of the Church. The revisions, limited to what was absolutely necessary, were
prepared by study group l8 bis. In Intercession 1:
"For the Church," the phrase subiciens ei principatus et potestates ("subjecting principalities and powers to
it [the Church]") was omitted: even though this was inspired by what St.
Paul says about the "angelic powers" (Col. 2:15), it could be
misinterpreted as referring to a temporal role which the Church did indeed have
in other periods of history but which is anachronistic today.[7]
So there we have it. The social kingship of Christ is an
anachronism.
In my book The Second Vatican Council and Religious
Liberty, I have documented in great detail the manner in which Dignitatis humanae abandoned the
traditional concept of a Catholic state as taught by the Popes. The term "
One of the privileges denied to the adherents of
false religions in a Catholic state was that of propagating their errors in
public and persuading the Catholic citizens to repudiate the truth for
heresy. This was the case prior to
Vatican II in such Catholic states as
The Church is wont to take
earnest heed that no one shall be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against
his will, for, as
It is
necessary to make a distinction of crucial importance, the distinction between
religious liberty considered from a legal or juridical standpoint, that is as a
civil right, and from a theological standpoint. Considered from a juridical
standpoint, it examines the grounds for and the extent of the legal coercion to
be applied to the expression of religious belief in the external public forum.
Considered from a theological standpoint, that is, a
standpoint based upon the nature and will of God as revealed to man, there can
be no question of any natural right to believe or to propagate error. As Pope
Leo XIII teaches, man
has a natural right only to follow the will of God and obey His
commandments. In the Liberal sense,
liberty of conscience is the right of an individual to think and believe
whatsoever he wants, even in religion and morality; to express his views
publicly, and to persuade others to adopt them, using word of mouth, the public
press, or any other means. He has the right to choose any religion or to have
no religion, and this, Liberals claim, is a natural right. Dignitatis humanae did not affirm that anyone has a natural right, a
moral right, to believe in or to propagate error, but upheld the traditional
teaching in this respect. The
Declaration affirmed not a moral but a civil liberty, and so the question must
be considered from a purely juridical standpoint. In considering the question of religious
liberty from the juridical standpoint, the following distinctions must be kept
in mind. The first distinction must be that between the internal forum and the
external forum. The internal forum refers to what a man does in private, the
external forum to what he does in public. The second distinction must be made
between not being forced to act against one's conscience, i.e., freedom from
coercion, and freedom not to be restrained from acting in accordance with one's
conscience. The traditional Catholic teaching is that in religious matters: 1.
No one must be forced to act against his conscience in private. 2. No one must
be forced to act against his conscience in public. 3. No one must be prevented from acting in
accordance with his conscience in private.
4. The right of acting in accordance with one's conscience in public can
be restricted.
Let us take a specific example. Before Vatican II, Jehovah’s Witnesses in
It is fully within their [civil
rulers’] right to restrict and to prevent public functions and activities of
false religions which are likely to be detrimental to the spiritual welfare of
the Catholic citizens or insulting to the true religion of Christ.[8]
The word "toleration" is of crucial
importance for understanding the discontinuity between Dignitatis
humanae and the classic papal teaching. Pope Leo XIII
taught in Libertas humana:
While not conceding any right to anything save what is true and honest,
she does not forbid public authority to tolerate what is at variance with truth
and justice, for the sake of avoiding some greater evil, or of obtaining or
preserving some greater good.
This was the consistent teaching of the Popes up to
and including Pope Pius XII. Those in
error had no natural right to propagate their views—the propagation of error is
an evil—but it could be tolerated in the interests of the common good ("public welfare")
to prevent a greater evil, such as civil unrest. Pope Leo XIII insisted in Libertas
humana that the overriding criterion in the question
of toleration is the common good, and that
To judge aright, we must
acknowledge that the more a state is driven to tolerate evil the further it is
from perfection; and that the tolerance of evil which is dictated by political
prudence should be strictly confined to the limits which its justifying cause,
the public welfare, requires.
This was official teaching of the Church up to and
during the Council. Writing in the
American Ecclesiastical Review in 1950, Msgr. George
W. Shea insisted that what is at issue here is a
question of principle, i.e., "the relations which should per se obtain by
reason of the nature of Church and State in a Catholic society, so that any
deviation from these relations, while tolerable perhaps as a concession
prompted by expediency, could not merit approval on principle." [my emphasis][9] There is not the least suggestion in the
teaching of any pre-Vatican II Pope that there could be a natural right on the
part of non-Catholics not to be prevented from propagating their errors in
public.
The traditional teaching, described by Cardinal Ottaviani, as "part of the patrimony of Catholic
doctrine" was upheld time and again during the conciliar
debates. Cardinal Siri of
We cannot legitimize what God merely tolerates; we can only tolerate
it, and that within the limits of the common good. We cannot therefore accept
the proposed schema insofar as it recommends liberty for all without discrimination.
. . . We should therefore consider more carefully the contribution of
theological sources to this problem of religious liberty and determine whether
or not the contents of this schema can be reconciled with the teaching of Leo
XIII, Pius XI, and Pius XII. Otherwise, we weaken our own authority and
compromise our apostolic effort.[10]
Bishop Emilio Tagle Covarrabuias of
I am very much against this
schema. It merely rearranges the previous version, and it contains a number of
contradictions. . . . Many passages are too complacent towards false religions
and run the risk of indifferentism and Liberalism. It does not seem possible to
grant the same rights to all religions indiscriminately. Only the one true
Church has the right to religious liberty, strictly speaking. Other religions
can only be tolerated, depending upon the circumstances and persons.[11]
Cardinal de
Arriba y Castro of
This is probably the most delicate problem of the whole Council with
respect to the faith. We must clearly affirm this basic principle: only the
Catholic Church has the duty and the right to preach the Gospel. That is why proselytism on the part of non-Catholics among Catholics is
illicit and should be prevented by the civil authorities as well as by the
Church, as the common good requires. . . .
The Council must be careful not to decree the ruin of Catholicism in
those countries where it is in fact the only religion.[12]
It is no exaggeration to state the changing of the
Spanish Constitution to correspond with Dignitatis humanae has indeed brought about the ruin of Catholicism in
that country. During the Synod of
European Bishops in October 1999, Msgr. Fernando Sebastián Aguilar, Archbishop of Pamplona, lamented the
fact that in
During the
Council, the schema on religious liberty was often called “the American
schema.” The finalized text of Dignitatis humanae can be
considered almost entirely the work of Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., and
he attributed its success to "the solid and consistent support of the
American bishops and their numerous interventions"—interventions which he
had written and which they had accepted and read with the most abject
docility. Father Murray continued:
Undoubtedly, the support derived
its basic inspiration from the American experience, from which the Church has
learned the practical value of the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment.
. . The object or content of the right to religious freedom, as specified both
in the Declaration and in the American constitutional system, is identical."
[my emphasis][13]