By FR. BRIAN W. HARRISON, OS
You may not remember me now, but I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting you and chatting with you at dinner at the conference in Monterey, Calif., in February 2018, hosted by The Latin Mass magazine. Your Excellency and I were both speakers at the conference.
Along with innumerable members of the Catholic clergy and faithful, I am deeply grateful for, and appreciative of, the courageous leadership you have been showing at a time when the vast majority of Successors of the Apostles are remaining deplorably silent about the confused and chaotic state of the Church today, which grows daily more critical during the present pontificate.
However, I confess to being troubled, on reading your recent interview with Michael Matt, editor of The Remnant, by certain criticisms you make of the Vatican II Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae (DH). One centrally important feature of that interview was that the recent idolatrous “Pachamama” rites scandalously carried out at the Vatican and in another venerable Roman church were somehow implied, at least indirectly, by the teaching of Vatican Council II.
The interview can be seen here:
With great respect to Your Excellency, I must honestly say that these criticisms are based on a serious misunderstanding of the Council’s teaching. Moreover, given the weight that millions of faithful Catholics rightly attach to your statements about doctrine, and given that the Declaration in question was promulgated by the Successor of Peter and nearly all the world’s bishops in Communion with him, I fear that your unwarranted criticism of DH could further undermine the confidence of many Catholics in the doctrinal reliability of the Church’s recent Magisterium. That confidence has of course already been severely put to the test by a number of disturbingly novel statements of the present Pontiff. (Dignitatis Humanae has been a specialty of my own study and writing for over thirty years: I have written two books and many articles defending its essential doctrinal continuity with the traditional Magisterium.)
Key elements of Your Excellency’s Remnant interview were reported on LifeSiteNews.com in a posting of November 8, 2019. I will refer to the following citations by the reporter, Dr. Maike Hickson, since they include a transcript of the relevant part of your remarks to Michael Matt:
“Bishop Schneider also refers to the Council’s teaching on the ‘freedom of religion,’ the ‘natural right’ implanted in human nature by God to choose one’s own religion. While it is true, he adds, that one should not be ‘forced,’ this new teaching also means that one ‘has the liberty to choose a religion.’
“Here, Schneider points to the contradictions in the conciliar texts. At one place, in its document Dignitatis Humanae, the Council teaches ‘every person has the obligation to seek the truth, and this is the Catholic Church,’ Schneider says, ‘but then further down it says that you have freedom of religion rooted in your nature.’ This teaching is ‘not clear,’ it is ‘ambiguous,’ as the prelate explains, and the consequences after the Council were ‘that almost all Catholic seminaries and theological faculties, and the episcopate and even the Holy See’ promoted ‘a right of every person to choose his own religion.’
“. . . Bishop Schneider comments in this November 2 interview on this conciliar teaching with these words: ‘you have no right to choose idolatry, you have no right to offend God,’ through ‘idolatry or through blasphemy.’
“‘This is already rooted here [in the Vatican Council],’ Bishop Schneider states. ‘If you have a right by God given to you, by nature, also to be able to choose acts of idolatry — like the Pachamama — when it is rooted in your dignity of man even to choose a Pachamama religion: this is the last consequence of this expression of the Council text,’ he explains.”
With due respect, Your Excellency, it is not correct to say that Dignitatis Humanae in any way implies that “one has the liberty to choose a religion,” meaning by that a moral right to choose a false religion, i.e., any religion other than Catholicism. Most certainly, therefore, Vatican II does not imply a “right to choose idolatry,” or a “right to offend God.” And there is no “contradiction” on this point within DH; for the entire Declaration is consistent with its affirmation in article 1 that religious freedom, as understood by the Council, “leaves intact the traditional Catholic doctrine regarding the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ.” Of course, the “traditional Catholic doctrine” regarding the said “moral duty” excludes absolutely any supposed moral “right” to choose idolatry as one’s religion.
The natural right that the Council says is based on the dignity of the human person is not a supposed moral right to choose any religion regardless of its truth or falsity, but a limited (not absolute) moral right to immunity from human coercion, especially government coercion, in manifesting one’s own conscientiously held religious beliefs, even if they’re false. Let me explain this a little more fully:
If “X” means a false religion, there is a clear and important difference between affirming: (a) “There is a natural right of the human person to choose and profess X,” and (b) “There is a natural right of the human person not to be prevented by the State from choosing and professing X.” Vatican II does indeed clearly imply (b). But never does it affirm or imply (a), which is plainly heretical, because there can never be a “right” to do what is wrong. The distinction between (a) and (b) is a contemporary application of a thesis taught for centuries by many traditional theologians and jurists (including St. Thomas Aquinas), namely, that not every form of sinful behavior may justly be penalized or criminalized by the State.
Here is another clear example illustrating that thesis. Our Lord teaches that neglect of the poor and needy can be mortally sinful (cf. Matt. 25:41-46; Luke 16:19-25). But it by no means follows from this that the State (assuming we pay our taxes) can justly fine or imprison us for not visiting those in prison or for not giving enough charitable help to the poor. Such penalties would violate our natural right to freedom from excessive government interference in how we live our lives.
(The limits to the natural right to civil liberty in religion affirmed by DH are set out in general terms in article 7 of the Declaration, which says that government may impose legal restrictions, grounded in the objective moral order, on activity involving religion and ethics in cases where this threatens the rights of other citizens, or public morality, or the public peace.)
Your Excellency, the above is not just my personal interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae. It’s also that of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, where we read, “The right to religious liberty is neither a moral license to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error [footnote reference here to Leo XIII’s Libertas of 1888 and Pius XII’s Ci Riesce of 1953], but rather a natural right of the human person to civil liberty, i.e., immunity, within just limits, from external constraint in religious matters by political authorities. This natural right ought to be acknowledged in the juridical order of society in such a way that it constitutes a civil right [footnote reference to DH, 2]” (n. 2108, bold type added here).
For a fuller explanation of the non-contradiction between Dignitatis Humanae and traditional doctrine, Your Excellency and other Wanderer readers may be interested to read my article, “Dignitatis Humanae: a Non-Contradictory Development of Doctrine” in Living Tradition at this link: http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt151.html.
Once again, I thank Your Excellency with all my heart for your inspiring and invigorating witness to the true Catholic faith in these troubled times, and I hope this letter may help to clarify an important point of interpretation of Vatican Council II’s teaching on religious freedom.
Yours very sincerely and respectfully in Christ,
Fr. Brian W. Harrison, OS
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