Epilogue
In 1959, Jaroslav Pelikan, a Lutheran minister, University of Chicago Ph.D., and future Yale professor, published The Riddle of Roman Catholicism.[1] Pelikan set out to explain, in a somewhat condescending manner, Catholicism to non-Catholics. The book is thus a good record of the reservations Pelikan and other non-Catholic Americans felt towards the Church just before Second Vatican Council. The reservations are interesting in part because some council fathers saw Dignitatis humanae as a Catholic adoption of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.[2] Assuming this was the document’s import, had the fathers weighed the bad of the American experience along with the good? What was it about religious freedom in the United States which had permitted the kind of biases found in Pelikan’s book?
Judging from the tone of Dignitatis humanae, the council fathers knew of those biases and thought they could be remedied if the Church were more on board with the liberal project, of which the United States was the oldest and most prominent example. In such a view, the biases had persisted because the Church was holding out. Consider, for example, this complaint from Pelikan:
“Political theorists of the Roman communion have quite candidly admitted that the ideal of ‘a catholic church in a catholic state’ [sic] implies recognition by the state of the church’s prior rights and privileges to other religious bodies. When it is in a controlling majority, the church refuses to put error on the same level as truth; it is therefore committed to intolerance. Meanwhile, it demands a tolerance for itself which, in principle, it would refuse to others.”[3]
Judging again from Dignitatis humanae’s tone, it could be argued the council fathers decided upon what Pelikan called “the pluralistic standard of ‘a catholic church and many other churches in a single secular state.’”[4] And in fact, some people have read the documentthat way. One possible example was Paul Blanshard, whom Pelikan had grouped among the “[m]any thinking people” who believed the Church was “a threat to American freedom.”[5] After the fathers had promulgated their document, however, Blanshard gave something of an approval:
“For American Catholics the most explosive subject at Vatican II was religious liberty, which at the beginning was not even listed as a subject. Even in the second session, it was buried inconspicuously in a chapter in the schema on ecumenism, but finally it was given the dignity of a chapter by itself. Passing through six versions and 120 speeches in the aula, it became for the American bishops the big subject, the one best cause around which they could rally with all the power and enthusiasm they possessed . . . . One reason why religious liberty mattered so much to the Americans was that for several generations American Catholicism has laboured under the accusation that the Church tends to stand for religious liberty only when it suits the Church and that when Church authorities gain enough power in any country they then deny to other cults the very freedom they have claimed for themselves when in a minority . . . the passage of a broad and general statement on religious liberty became for most of the American bishops an emotional and logical necessity. And to their credit they fought a good fight, demonstrating tenacity and near unanimity. When the statement was finally adopted, it was a distinctly American achievement.”[6]
But for all that, the bias still remained. “I am often asked,” Blanshard said after the council, “whether you have changed your opinion about the Catholic Church? The answer is ‘’Yes, but only to the extant that the Catholic Church has changed.’”[7] Stated another way, the Church would continue to bear a burden to prove she had changed.
So, apart from its tone, does Dignitatis humanae actually carry that burden? The close reading offered above shows that, at least for an educated Catholic layperson, the document does not show the Church changed. The council fathers, too often to conclude otherwise, kept the Catholic tradition intact. But the fathers simultaneously offered statements which could be construed contrary to Catholic tradition, were undefined, or were simply illogical. Considered as a whole by an educated Catholic layperson, that is, by a literate believer unequipped with either scholarly or magisterial insight, Dignitatis humanae is too incoherent to convey a reliable meaning.
To an objection that incoherence is impossible in a document of an ecumenical council, a lay reader of Dignitatis humanae may reiterate the fact of his or her own confusion, a condition which for the present writer has persisted over decades of study and thought about the document.[8] As for how the tone of the document could suggest something when the underlying language means nothing at all, perhaps the following anecdote supports an inference.
In the 1970s, this writer spoke with a retired Air Force colonel about the Cuban Missile Crisis. The colonel had piloted B-52s during those days of October 1962. Leaving with a load of nuclear weapons, he and his crew had crossed the Atlantic and flown repeated circuits around the Mediterranean Sea. They passed through successive zones on these circuits, each linked to a particular target within the Soviet Union. If the order came, they were to penetrate Soviet airspace and bomb that target.
In 500 years from now, one could imagine a seminary professor listing such Cold War events as among the causes of the mid-20th century Church crisis. Just as this writer sat in a seminary classroom and listened to a professor discuss the causes of the Protestant Reformation, a safe object of study because it was 500 years in the past, the imaginary future professor will describe how a generation of churchmen, traumatized by two world wars and an economic depression, met under the American nuclear umbrella for an ecumenical council.
The professor will point out that the United States was a world hegemon which had liberated Western Europe from totalitarian political systems, then rebuilt the continent, and was at the time of the Second Vatican Council protecting Western Europe from a remaining totalitarian system. He will note that, before the 21st century, the Church had been centered in Western Europe, and that the United State’s prominence at the time of the council gave it an outsized influence over its European satellites. He will reflect upon the fact that American war planes loaded with nuclear weapons went on heightened alert and greatly increased their flights just as the council opened in October 1962.[9] By the time the military crisis was over, the Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity, the source of the schema on religious freedom, had been raised to Commission status, allowing it to submit its schema to the council.[10]
“Now,” our professor will say, “there is no evidence of a quid pro quo. We cannot say anything beyond the fact that the United States tried to direct world affairs, something common to all powers of sufficient size. This is not to say the American bishops were uniformly respected, however. They were known as ‘the stupid church’ by some factions at Vatican II. (Laughter.) The Americans were undoubtedly influential, however and scholars agree that the council, especially the declaration on religious freedom, was to some extent directed by them.”
“The problem,” he will continue, “was that the United States government’s commitment to religious indifferentism could not be reconciled with the Gospel. The resulting document therefore included both parts. The declaration often sounded like the American compromise on religion, but an ecumenical council guided by the Holy Spirit could not actually impose such a compromise on the Church. To gain the requisite number of votes, for example, language was added saying the council had left untouched the traditional Catholic teaching on Church and State.”[11]
“This produced confusion, with some reading the document to mean religious freedom as understood in the United States, and others reading it differently. As you know, Pope Paul VII eventually issued his syllabus anathemizing interpretations of Vatican II contrary to the Catholic tradition. The easiest way to explain this to people is to say the council was ‘pastoral,’ but the syllabus was ‘dogmatic.’ Tell them the council was intended to communicate with people of that time, in language they understood, while the syllabus provided definitions of faith binding for all time. And the Catholic tradition, of course, is that error has no rights.”
“The theological opinion, as I see it, is that the document on religious freedom was meaningless at the rhetorical level. In other words, it did not say anything in particular because it tried to say so many things at once. But you needn’t get into that. Most people have forgotten Vatican II, and frankly, I think that is a good thing. Not much good came from it.”
[1]Abingdon Press, New York
[2] Davies Michael. The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty. Neumann Press, Long Prarie, Minnesota, 1992, 114-126.
[3] 107
[4] 108
[5] 94, 248
[6] Paul Blanshard on Vatican II, Boston, 1967, 88-89, quoted in Davies, The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty, 115-116.
[7] Ibid., Preface, 209.
[8] “In the function of the magisterium, it is not only the final indefectibility of the Church that constitutes the limit of what the personal infidelity of ministers could inflict on her. The positive inspiration which was granted to the apostles (as it was the prophets) at the beginning of the Church, to preserve and illustrate the revelation of the Savior himself and then fix its expression in the Scripture of the New Testament, is preserved from being obscured throughout successive ages by negative infallibility, that is, certitude that never, no matter how deficient she may be, can any later definition of this truth, communicated once and for all, deform her or obscure her. Yet here again—and even in the original revelation and inspiration—communication of the divine gift, the truth that saves us, is entirely through the human intelligence and capacities of expression that are never dissociated from their human condition and its inevitable limitations.” Boyer, Louis, The Church of God, Body of Christ and Temple of the Spirit, Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago, 1982, 535-536.
[9] Hopkins, Robert S., III, “How the Strategic Air Command Would Go to Nuclear War,” National Security Archive, March 13, 2019, retrieved on May 13, 2024, from: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2019-02-25/how-strategic-air-command-would-go-nuclear-war; Grant, Rebecca, “The Perils of Chrome Dome,” Air and Space Forces Magazine, Aug. 1, 2011, retrieved on May 13, 2024, from: https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0811dome/.
[10] See Davies, The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty, 111-112, for the council dates.
[11] See ibid, 169-171.