Catholic teaching on religion and the state

John Lamont

	In his interesting paper ‘What is the Catholic doctrine of religious liberty?’, Prof. Thomas Pink has advanced a new interpretation of Catholic teaching on religious freedom, which he presents as reconciling the teachings of the Vatican II declaration Dignitatis Humanae with previous Catholic teaching on the subject – a goal that has consistently eluded theologians since the promulgation of that document some forty-six years ago. I do not think that this new interpretation is not accurate, and will offer what I think is the correct account of the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae. This account necessarily has to be placed in the context of Catholic teaching on religion and the state as a whole, so an overview of this teaching will be provided. The materials for discussion below are taken from more extensive work on the question of Catholic teaching on religious freedom, and will be summary in some places and not always equipped with the full academic paraphernalia of footnotes and references to the literature. I think however that in view of the interest of the topic, such an exposition of the question will be of value.

Freedom of choice and the coercion of belief

Pink is not clear on the nature and origin of the ‘person-centred’ view that he identifies as underlying the teachings of the 19th-century popes, but he is wrong to see these teachings as containing novelties that depart from Catholic tradition. The assertions made in 19th-century encyclicals about the necessary freedom of religious belief are in fact taken from patristic sources. Tertullian and Lactantius made such assertions in objecting to the coercion of Christians into pagan worship by pagan emperors, and Athanasius and Hilary of Poitiers made them in objecting to the coercion of Catholics by Arian emperors. Tertullian asserted in Ad Scapulam 2,2, that ‘It is not in the nature of religion to coerce religion, which must be adopted freely and not by force’ (see also his Apology, chs. 24, 28). In his Epitome of the Divine Institutes, 49,1, Lactantius states that ‘it is religion alone in which freedom has placed its dwelling. For it is a matter which is voluntary above all others, nor can necessity be imposed upon any, so as to worship that which he does not wish to worship’. In his Divine Institutes 5,20, he says ‘There is no occasion for violence and injury, for religion cannot be imposed by force; the matter must be carried on by words rather than by blows, that the will may be affected.’ Athanasius taught that ‘Truth is not proclaimed by swords and missiles, nor by means of soldiers, but by persuasion and counsel. But what persuasion is there where fear of the Emperor prevails? Or what counsel is there, when he who withstands them receives at last banishment and death?’ (History of the Arians, part 4, ch. 33.)
	The 19th-century popes were also correct in identifying this position on the voluntary nature of faith as being the basis for the teaching that unbelievers may not be converted to Christianity by force. This is the reason given for it by Pope Nicholas I in his response to the questions of the Bulgars in 866 (letter 99, ch. 41); ‘Therefore, no communion should be shared with those who do not believe and who adore idols. Yet, violence should by no means be inflicted upon them to make them believe. For everything which is not voluntary, cannot be good; sacrifice to you,[Ps. 53:8] and again: Make all the commands of my mouth your will,[Ps. 118:108] and again, And by my own will I shall confess to Him.[Ps. 27:7] Indeed, God commands that willing service be performed only by the willing.’ It is given by St. Thomas in 2a2ae q. 10 a. 8: ‘Among unbelievers there are some who have never received the faith, such as the heathens and the Jews: and these are by no means to be compelled to the faith, in order that they may believe, because to believe depends on the will.’ Pink is thus mistaken in seeing this teaching as ever having been based on the limitations of the Church’s jurisdiction, rather than on the necessity of freedom in choosing to believe. Contemporary traditionalists such as Michael Davies and Bishop Fellay are quite correct in seeing their rejection of the coercion of the act of belief as being the traditional position.
	Pink makes a valuable contribution by pointing out the difficulty of reconciling this traditional view with Catholic teaching and practice on the coercion of heretics and schismatics, and with the observable fact that it is possible to influence belief through coercion – a fact that has been invoked to justify the coercion of heretics by the Church. As he points out, the teaching that baptized Christians can be compelled to live up to the commitments of their baptism is de fide; Canon 14 of the 7th session of the Council of Trent anathematizes the position that those who have been baptized as infants cannot be compelled to carry out the commitments incurred by baptism by means other than the spiritual penalties of exclusion from the sacraments.
	To address this difficulty, we should begin by considering the basis for the traditional view that faith must be freely chosen. When the traditional view talks about the freedom that is required for the act of faith, it is not referring to freedom in any metaphysical sense, or even to freedom in the strict sense of voluntary as opposed to involuntary, but rather to freedom in the loose and popular sense; the kind of freedom we usually mean when we say we freely chose to do something – i.e. the freedom that consists precisely in not being pressured into choosing to do something by fear or suffering. The reason for maintaining that this freedom is required for an act of the theological virtue of faith is that such an act does not consist in simply holding the teachings of the faith to be true because God has revealed them - something that devils do, although they do not possess the theological virtue. It also requires that this belief be produced in a certain way, a way that excludes coercion as a motivation for belief. The act of faith that is demanded of unbelievers seeking baptism, and that is an obligation of those who have been baptized, is formed faith (cf. 2a2ae q. 4 a. 3), that is, an act of faith whose motivation is the theological virtue of charity. Faith that is motivated by fear of punishment is not motivated by charity, and thus cannot be formed faith. That is why Catholic tradition holds that faith must be freely chosen. 
	It could be pointed out that the theological virtue of faith is also exercised by believers who are in a state of mortal sin, in acts of formless faith, which are not motivated by charity (cf. 2a2ae q. 4 a. 4). It is difficult to see the point of aiming to produce acts of formless faith by coercion, but even if there was something to be gained by doing so, it would not be possible. Formless faith, just as much as formed faith, requires grace (cf. Vatican I, Dei Filius, ch. 3, and 2a2ae q. 4 a. 4 ad 3). Belief that is produced by coercion results from natural means, not grace, and is what theologians call acquired faith. Since such belief is not produced by grace, it is not formless faith. Since acts of the theological virtue of faith are either acts of formed or of formless faith, and neither of these can be produced by coercion, acts of faith cannot be produced by coercion.
	It might be objected that although it is impossible to produce the act of faith by direct coercion, natural resistances to faith arising from prejudice, or from the fear of the negative consequences of conversion, will be broken down by the threat of coercion. Such a threat can thus dispose people to accept the offer of the grace to believe. This is of course true, but it is equally true that the threat of coercion will produce feigned conversions that are motivated by the fear of punishment – probably more frequently than it will assist the operation of grace. Feigned conversions will make the false convert less rather than more likely to accept the offer of grace of true conversion, since they are both sinful and productive of loathing of the faith to which one has been forced to conform. Coercion that is ruthless and extreme enough to constitute brainwashing may remove the guilt of forced conversion and the resentment at having been forced to convert, but it will also make the act of faith impossible, since faith must be freely chosen, and brainwashing removes freedom of choice. These are obvious reasons why coercion should not be used to encourage conversion.
	But this raises the question insisted on by Pink: if the necessity of free choice for faith rules out the coercion of unbelievers, how is it that the Church has taught and practiced the coercion of heretics – a coercion that she continues to practice, as he points out, by allowing in the 1983 Code of Canon Law for the imposition of temporal penalties such as loss of employment for open rejection of the faith?
	Pink appeals to the teaching of St. Thomas here on the legitimacy of coercing heretics to believe, but this teaching is not in fact straightforward. In 2a2ae q. 10 a. 8, the text to which Pink appeals, St. Thomas considers this objection; ‘Further, Augustine says (Tract. xxvi in Joan.) that “it is possible for a man to do other things against his will, but he cannot believe unless he is willing.” Therefore it seems that unbelievers ought not to be compelled to the faith.’ He replies to this objection as follows: ‘Just as taking a vow is a matter of will, and keeping a vow, a matter of obligation, so acceptance of the faith is a matter of the will, whereas keeping the faith, when once one has received it, is a matter of obligation. Wherefore heretics should be compelled to keep the faith (ad 3).’
	However, in his Commentary on the Sentences book 4 d. 13 q. 2 a. 3 St. Thomas gives a different answer to this objection; ‘No-one believes against their will, as Augustine teaches. But heretics err in matters of belief. Therefore, they are not to be coerced.’ He gives this answer to the objection; ‘The Church does not punish heretics in order to induce them to believe through violence, but to prevent them from corrupting others, and so that such a great sin does not remain unavenged.’ (‘Praeterea, nullus credit non volens, ut dicit Augustinus. Sed haeretici in fide errant. Ergo non sunt cogendi. … Ad quintum dicendum, quod Ecclesia non persequitur eos ut per violentiam inducantur ad credendum, sed ne alios corrumpant, et ne tantum peccatum inultum remaneat.’)
	One could explain this difference by saying that St. Thomas changed his mind between writing the Commentary on the Sentences and the Summa Theologiae, but his complete position in the Summa Theologiae does not fit this simple explanation. In 2a2ae q. 11 a. 3, he states that the execution of heretics does not aim at their conversion: ‘the Church … condemns not at once, but “after the first and second admonition,” as the Apostle directs: after that, if he is yet stubborn, the Church no longer hoping for his conversion, looks to the salvation of others, by excommunicating him and separating him from the Church, and furthermore delivers him to the secular tribunal to be exterminated thereby from the world by death.’ The same idea is repeated in 2a2ae q. 11 a. 4, where he states that heretics are executed for the good of others:

If heretics were always received on their return, in order to save their lives and other temporal goods, this might be prejudicial to the salvation of others, both because they would infect others if they relapsed again, and because, if they escaped without punishment, others would feel more assured in lapsing into heresy. … For this reason the Church not only admits to Penance those who return from heresy for the first time, but also safeguards their lives, and sometimes by dispensation, restores them to the ecclesiastical dignities which they may have had before, should their conversion appear to be sincere: we read of this as having frequently been done for the good of peace. But when they fall again, after having been received, this seems to prove them to be inconstant in faith, wherefore when they return again, they are admitted to Penance, but are not delivered from the pain of death.

The truth about St. Thomas’s view in the Summa Theologiae thus seems to be that his position on the reason for coercion of heretics given in the Commentary on the Sentences applies to the execution of heretics, but his position in 2a2ae q. 10 a. 8 applies to lesser forms of coercion of heresy, such as the exclusion from ecclesiastical dignities that he mentions above. The difference between the Commentary on the Sentences and the Summa Theologiae on this matter would thus reflect his realization that the position in the former work could be applied to some forms of coercion of heresy, but could not be applied to all of them; evidently at least some lesser forms of coercion of heresy are in fact aimed at getting the heretic to renounce his heresy and return to the faith.
	His defence of the coercion of heretics in 2a2ae q. 10 a. 8 ad 3 thus applies to some but not all forms of such coercion. Does it stand up? An initial point to be made is that the acts upon which religious coercion bears cannot include the act of faith itself, since this act is not available for public observation; they can only be the externally observable acts of public profession of the faith and public practice of the faith. Is it just to say, as St. Thomas does, that Christians can legitimately be coerced into these actions because they have incurred an obligation to perform them by accepting the faith? 
	The objection to this claim would be that most people become Christian through being baptized as infants, an act that involves no consent of the will on their part. St. Thomas’s reply would be that baptism produces the habitus of faith and the habitus of charity in a baptized infant. These virtues are dispositions of the will to fulfil the obligations of faith, dispositions that exist prior to any act that fulfils these obligations. Baptism thus produces the will to fulfil these obligations, a will that can only be changed by a deliberate act of sin against faith or charity. Because this will exists in every baptized infant, such infants can be said to have accepted the obligations of faith even though they have not do so in a particular act. This effect of baptism can be better understood if we consider that the sacrament confers a new nature on the one who receives it. Just as human nature involves dispositions of the will – dispositions to seek life, nourishment, social interaction, and so forth – that exist prior to any action, and that are presupposed by any action, so the new nature conferred by baptism includes dispositions to act in pursuit of the supernatural good that exist prior to any meritorious action, and that are presupposed by such action. An infant can be said to will the objects of its natural dispositions prior to acts that pursue these objects; even so, a baptized infant can be said to will the supernatural good that is the object of the supernatural dispositions conferred upon it by baptism. It is thus theologically correct to say that keeping the commitments incurred by baptism is a matter of obligation, and hence that the objection that these commitments must be freely accepted – as conversion must be freely accepted – does not apply. It cannot therefore be claimed that the Church’s teaching that faith must be freely chosen is incompatible with any form of religious coercion. 
	Any defence of religious coercion is liable to provoke horror and aversion, because of the savage and extreme forms of coercion that have been used in the past on behalf of the Church (such as dressing Protestants up in bird costumes and then shooting them, something that happened in the French Wars of Religion). It should be remembered that a defence of the legitimacy of religious coercion does not mean that any form at all of such coercion is legitimate, or that all the forms of coercion in fact used in the past were legitimate. Once it is established that religious coercion can be legitimate, it is a further, separate question as to what forms of coercion are legitimate. There are after all forms of religious coercion that are clearly defensible on the face of it, such as parents exerting mild pressure on their children who are over the age of reason to attend mass on Sunday, or theology faculties in Catholic universities threatening to dismiss staff who publicly reject the Catholic faith. Being in favour of the legitimacy of religious coercion need not go farther than upholding such clearly defensible forms – it does not require upholding the practice of dressing people in bird costumes and shooting them.  

Catholic teaching on the jurisdiction of Church and state in religious matters

There are two foundational periods in the formation of Catholic teaching in the role of the state in religious matters; the period of the Christian Roman Empire, when the faith was officially accepted by society and state, and the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was rejected. 
Under the Christian Empire, the theory of the role of the state in religion was not elaborated at length, but the correct practice for rulers was unambiguously taught by the Church. In religious matters connected with Christianity, the Fathers unanimously rejected attempts by the emperors to judge in religious matters, and as unanimously welcomed the emperors’ suppression of pagan religion and of groups that the Church had judged to be heretical or schismatic. In questions concerning the faith or unity of the Church, the patristic position was that the Church decides, and the Emperor enforces. The idea that the state has a responsibility for the regulation of religious practice did not originate with Christianity: it was a basic assumption of the Roman state, as of all states in antiquity. Catholic teaching on the duties of the ruler to the Catholic faith simply takes over the traditional Roman view that the state is responsible for the proper worship of the gods, and that such proper worship is essential for the security of the state, and substitutes the Christian religion as taught by the Church for pagan worship. The fact that Catholic teaching on this subject was an adaptation of a pagan idea does not cast doubt on the teaching in question. Such adaptation is standard in Catholic teaching, and indeed is a frequent occurrence in divine revelation itself ( as e.g. the adoption of an euhemerist account of the origin of pagan gods in Wisdom 14:17-21): the classic defence of it is found in Newman’s review of Dean Milman, available at www.newmanreader.org/works/essays/volume2/milman1.html.
Pink’s claim that the emperors, in enforcing the decisions of the Church, were acting in their capacity as baptised Christians and not in their capacity as rulers, cannot be maintained. This enforcement was presented to the emperors as being their duty as rulers; Pope Leo the Great, writing to the emperor Leo in order to convince him to enforce the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon, stated that  ‘you ought unhesitatingly to consider that the kingly power has been conferred on you not for the governance of the world alone but more especially for the guardianship of the Church’ (letter 156). In this he repeats the teaching already pronounced to Theodosius II by Pope Celestine (see on Celestine’s letter and the teaching it contains F. Cavallera, ‘La doctrine du prince chrétien’, Bulletin de literature ecclésiatique, 1937, pp. 67-78, 119-135, 167-179). This teaching is not asserting that Christian emperors as individuals have acceded to the purple in order to use the imperial power for the guardianship of the Church. It is asserting that such guardianship is their responsibility precisely as emperors. 
In line with the traditional Roman view, enforcement of the true religion was presented as being a guarantee for the safety of rulers and the wellbeing of the state – a factor that obviously falls under the responsibility of rulers as such. This is clearly stated in the letter of Pope St. Agatho to the emperor Constantine IV, which was used as a confession of faith at the Second Council Constantinople in 681. In this letter, issued ex cathedra as teaching the faith of the Apostle Peter, Pope Agatho teaches that the suppression of heresy by the state is necessary ‘for the stability of the Christian state, and for the safety of those who rule the Roman Empire’, and describes the upholding of the Catholic faith by the Emperor as that which ‘keeps the Christian empire of your Clemency, which gives far-reaching victories to your most pious Fortitude from the Lord of heaven, which accompanies you in battle, and defeats your foes; which protects on every side as an impregnable wall your God-sprung empire, which throws terror into opposing nations, and smites them with the divine wrath, which also in wars celestially gives triumphal palms over the downfall and subjection of the enemy, and ever guards your most faithful sovereignty secure and joyful in peace.’ This teaching is pronounced in letters to emperors from Popes Leo the Great, Simplicius, Felix II, Celestine I (‘happy the empire that is put at God’s service’, letter 22), Gelasius, and Symmachus.  
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the second foundational period for Catholic teaching on religion and the state, the patristic teaching was reiterated by the popes, but there was a change of focus in the main message. Coercion in religion can have two objects; forcing people to do what is good, and forcing them to not do what is bad. Coercion of heretics and schismatics falls under the former category, and was the main concern of the Church in the Christian Empire and the Middle Ages. With the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, however, a new situation developed, where the main threat to the faith was an aggressive attempt to undermine belief and persecute the Church through the state. In this new situation, the latter category came into prominence; the focus of Catholic teaching on religious coercion became the duty of states to suppress anti-religious propaganda, and to respect the rights of the Church. The problem of heresy was not ignored in this period; it was consistently taught that the Protestant Reformation was at the root of the Enlightenment rebellion against Christianity, a teaching authoritatively stated by Vatican I in its dogmatic constitution on the Catholic faith and in a number of papal encyclicals of the era (e.g. Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, 5: Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 23: Diuturnum, 4, 23: Quod Apostolici Muneris, 3: Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus 29), but one not much discussed by contemporary ecumenists. However, the attack on Christianity and the Church was presented as the main danger, and papal teaching on religion and the state addressed this danger rather than heresy or schism.
There is a logical progression in the teaching of this epoch. The first stage, that of the teachings of Gregory XVI and Pius IX, is principally concerned with the condemnation of errors that asserted alleged rights of freedom of conscience, speech, and religion. The next stage is the teachings of Leo XIII, which provide a positive account of the nature of freedom, the state, and the relations of Church to state. Leo XIII is by far the most significant figure in the development of this teaching. This positive account gives the rationale for the negative condemnation of errors, a condemnation that Leo XIII extends. The final stage is the teachings of St. Pius X and Pius XI, which ground the teachings of Leo XIII concerning Church and state on the social kingship of Christ, insist on the necessity of this kingship for the well-being of society, and predict that its rejection will bring catastrophe. Pius XII and John XXIII repeat and extend this structure of teachings, without adding anything fundamentally new.
The fundamental positive teachings that justify the negative teachings on the nonexistence of rights to religious error, and the duty of the state to suppress such error, are the following:

A). The state has the proximate end of promoting the temporal good of man, but since the temporal good of man is subordinate to the eternal good of man, the state must subordinate its pursuit of temporal good to that of eternal good, and promote the pursuit of eternal good insofar as it can. (Pius IX, Qui Pluribus, 34: Quanta Cura, 8: Leo XIII, Au Milieu des Sollicitudes, 6: Immortale Dei, 6,7: Libertas, 18, 20: Rerum Novarum, 40: Sapientiae Christianae, 1, 2, 6-7, 30: St. Pius X, Vehementer Nos, 3: John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, 57-59).

B). The eternal good which the state must respect and promote is not determined by the moral and religious truths knowable by natural reason alone, but is given by the true religion, which is the Catholic faith. (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 7: Libertas, 17, 20, 38-40: Sapientiae Christianae, 20; Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, 11: St. Pius X, E Supremi, 8-9: Vehementer Nos, 3).

C). The sole judge of the Catholic faith, which is the pathway to the eternal good for man, is the Catholic Church. Therefore, the state, in respecting and promoting eternal goods, must follow the guidance of the Catholic Church. (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 8-13, 25-27, 35: Libertas, 26, 27: Sapientiae Christianae, 27).

D). This submission to the Catholic faith does not exceed the power of the state, because it does not require the state to adjudicate questions of religious truth as such; it only requires that the state be able to identify the true authority in religious matters, which is the Catholic Church. This identification is possible using natural reason alone, so it does not surpass the nature of the state. (This point is not meant to claim that as a matter of fact the true religious authority will be identified using natural reason alone, rather than through the exercise of the virtue of faith on the part of Christian rulers of the state; it is instead meant to address the philosophical point that the state, as a natural entity with a natural end, must be capable of using natural means to identify the true religious authority.) (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 7: Libertas, 20).

E). Although the Catholic Church is the proximate source of the religious truth that the state promotes and respects, the ultimate religious authority that the State obeys is Jesus Christ, whose kingship is not only over individuals, but over all families, societies, and states. (Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus 7-8: St. Pius X, E Supremi, 8-9: Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio 48: Quas Primas 18: Mit Brennender Sorge 10). 

F). Acknowledgement and promotion of the true religion and the social kingship of Christ by the state serves the well-being of society and is necessary for it; states that reject the social kingship of Christ will suffer disaster and collapse. (Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, 14, 20: Pius IX, Quanta Cura, 4, 8: Leo XIII, Au Milieu des Sollicitudes, 5-7: Inscrutabili Dei Consilio, 2-8, Libertas, 15-16, 22: Diuturnum, 25 Nobilissima Gallorum Gens, 2: Rerum Novarum, 27: Sapientiae Christianae, 3, 39: Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, 7-9, 11-13: Praeclara Gratulationis Publicae: St. Pius X, E Supremi, 2: Vehementer Nos, 3: Benedict XV, Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum, 5: Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, 27-31, 45-48: Quas Primas 1, 18-19, 24: Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus 21-22, 30: John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, 217).

Some common misrepresentations of these teachings need to be corrected. Fr. Martin Rhonheimer denies that these teachings are of a dogmatic nature, on the grounds that ‘there is no timeless dogmatic Catholic doctrine on the State – nor can there be –, with the exception of those principles that are rooted in the apostolic Tradition and in Sacred Scripture. The idea of a “Catholic State” as the secular arm of the Church falls outside these principles.’ (http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1347670?eng=y.) This assertion flatly contradicts papal teaching. These teachings are explicitly stated as giving the universal truth about the relations of civil society as such, and the state as such, to religion; this is clear, for example, in Leo XIII’s encyclicals, which present their subject as being these universal truths. These universal claims about the state and its duty to religion are presented as teachings of the Catholic Church to which all Catholics must assent, not as philosophical speculations on the part of the popes. That means that they are taught as being ‘rooted in the apostolic Tradition and in Sacred Scripture’, and that Catholics are to accept them as being so rooted. Catholics are not entitled to decide for themselves whether or not the teachings of the Church are rooted in apostolic tradition and/or Sacred Scripture; they are to accept that, because a doctrine is taught by the Church, it is so rooted. The idea that Christians are entitled to question Church teaching in this way is Protestantism. 
In response to this criticism, Fr. Rhonheimer argues that the Church’s ‘conception of the function of the state and of its duties toward the true religion’ is ‘in reality is not at all of a purely theological nature, nor has to do with the nature of the Church and its faith, but concerns the nature of the state and its relationship with the Church.’ But the claim that the nature of the state does not form part of Catholic theology is obviously false and indeed absurd. There are clear Scriptural teachings on the nature of the state and the responsibility of Christians towards it, as e.g. Romans ch. 13. Fr. Rhonheimer attempts to answer this criticism by claiming that these passages do not contain assertions about the duties of the state towards the true religion. But this abandons the claim that the nature of the state is not part of Catholic theology, and hence removes the basis for Fr. Rhonheimer’s claim that the teachings of the popes on the responsibility of the state towards the true religion – a teaching that is explicitly founded in the nature of the state itself – is not a component of Catholic theology. The reason for this teaching is given by Pius IX in Quanta Cura as concern for the Catholic religion, for sound doctrine, and for the salvation of souls; this clearly shows that the teaching is theological.
There is in fact a clear Scriptural basis for the teachings of the popes on this subject. It is the position that the commandments of the first table of the Decalogue apply not only to individuals, but also to societies and states. This position is clearly held in the Scriptural evaluation of the kings of Israel and Judah; they are praised for upholding this commandment in their kingdoms, and blamed for allowing it to be transgressed. (The same view seems to underly the decision of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 3:28-29.) The popes, in teaching this position, are simply making this assumption explicit.
Another common misrepresentation of these teachings is presented by Fr. Rhonheimer when he talks of these teachings as being ‘the result of specific contingent historical circumstances’, and hence being revisable. This approach is unacceptable, since it could be used to justify rejection of absolutely any Catholic teachings. All magisterial teachings are the result of specific contingent historical circumstances (as indeed are the Scriptures themselves). Belief in the teachings of the Catholic Church is based on the idea that all specific contingent historical circumstances are under the control of divine providence, and that God uses this control to bring it about that specific contingent historical circumstances enable the Church to arrive at and proclaim the truth. (Further discussion of the wrongness of this approach is found in John Lamont, ‘The historical conditioning of church doctrine’, The Thomist 1996, and ‘Determining the content and degree of authority of Church teachings’, The Thomist, July 2008.) 
Nor is it the case that the teachings only condemn an antireligious ideology that serves to justify freedom of religion, and do not reject freedom of religion in itself. This claim is made by Archbishop Eric D’Arcy:

The popes condemned the ideology that based freedom of conscience on three false doctrines, viz., that the human conscience is exlex, subject to no law, not even God’s; that all religions are equally true or valuable, or that religious truth cannot be known with certainty; and that the state is omnicompetent, so that the Church herself is to be incorporated in and subordinate to the state. These are false doctrines, and were condemned as such by the popes, but the condemnation does not extend to the institution of religious freedom that did, in fact, in some places, come from them, but can be based on other, true, doctrinal and religious foundations. (Eric D’Arcy, ‘Freedom of Religion’, New Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 6.) 

This passage contains two false claims. The first one is the claim that the popes only condemned the three elements of the ideology that D’Arcy mentions, and did not condemn religious freedom in itself independently of these elements. This is obvious from the texts of the encyclicals, and also from the historical context of these condemnations. The condemnations of Gregory XVI were explicitly aimed at Lamennais, who did not hold any tenets of the ideology that D’Arcy referred to at the time of his condemnation. Pius IX issued Quanta Cura and the Syllabus to condemn views that had been advanced by Montalembert and other Liberal Catholics (as Fr. Rhonheimer recognizes). He did not mention Montalembert and his allies because he accepted Montalembert’s personal loyalty to the Holy See and hence did not wish to condemn Montalembert by name, but Quanta Cura was prompted by speeches given by Montalembert at Malines where he called for ‘a free Church in a free State’. Montalembert of course did not accept anything like a secularist conception of society.
The second false claim is that the popes simply assumed that postulating a right to freedom of religion followed from a secularist conception of the state and society, but did not teach that the converse was true. In fact, they explicitly taught that there is a double relation between these two positions. They acknowledged the obvious fact that the secularist conception logically implies the idea of a right to freedom of religion. But they also taught that the idea of a right to religious freedom logically implies the secularist position, and that when this right is acknowledged by the state, a secularist understanding of society will be accepted. In Immortale Dei, Leo XIII asserted the logical relation: 

26. And it is a part of this theory that all questions that concern religion are to be referred to private judgment; that every one is to be free to follow whatever religion he prefers, or none at all if he disapprove of all. From this the following consequences logically flow [underlining not present in the original]: that the judgment of each one's conscience is independent of all law; that the most unrestrained opinions may be openly expressed as to the practice or omission of divine worship; and that every one has unbounded license to think whatever he chooses and to publish abroad whatever he thinks.

Pius IX taught that there is a causal relation between acknowledging religious freedom and establishing a secular society in Quanta Cura: 

3. … at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity,"2 viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." …
4. And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth …?

This text of Quanta Cura is significant as being the most authoritative Catholic teaching on religious freedom. The condemnation of religious freedom it contains is a moderate one, as it simply implies that there can be some duty incumbent upon the civil power of restraining offenders against the Catholic religion by enacted penalties, without specifying that such a duty must always exist or describing what it requires. It is however an infallible teaching, as it is one of the propositions whose denial is condemned by Pius IX in the following terms; ‘Amidst, therefore, such great perversity of depraved opinions, we, well remembering our Apostolic Office, and very greatly solicitous for our most holy Religion, for sound doctrine and the salvation of souls which is intrusted to us by God, and (solicitous also) for the welfare of human society itself, have thought it right again to raise up our Apostolic voice. Therefore, by our Apostolic authority, we reprobate, proscribe, and condemn all the singular and evil opinions and doctrines severally mentioned in this letter, and will and command that they be thoroughly held by all children of the Catholic Church as reprobated, proscribed and condemned.’ This condemnation, contained in an official teaching document addressed to the Catholic bishops of the whole world, explicitly invokes the apostolic authority of the pope in unmistakable terms, and states that this authority is being exercised in defence of the doctrine of the faith and for the salvation of souls. It is thus an infallible ex cathedra statement.
The authority of the teachings in A) to F) as a whole should be considered. Few of the references given are to teachings that are infallible in themselves. But the number of authoritative teachings that assert A) to F) is so great that these positions must be taken to be infallible, in the sense of its being impossible for them to be false. Although it is possible to hold that a single authoritative but noninfallible magisterial statement is false, it is not possible to hold that a series of authoritative magisterial teachings repeated many times by many different popes could turn out to be false (see John Lamont, ‘Determining the content and degree of authority of Church teachings’, The Thomist, July 2008, on this question). A) to F) together are thus not subject to revision by later magisterial teachings. 
This is important for Fr. Rhonheimer’s claim that ‘the freedom of religion that he [Pius IX] was condemning was nothing other than the civil right to freedom of worship asserted by, among others, the Catholic-liberal wing. It is therefore correct to say that the assertion by Vatican II of religious freedom as a demand proper to natural law, meaning the civil right to freedom of worship, is nothing other than what had been condemned in the encyclical “Quanta Cura” of Pius IX and in its supplement, the “Syllabus” of errors.’ If he is correct about the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on religious freedom being a contradiction of Quanta Cura and of A) to F) generally, then that teaching would simply have to be rejected as false. The teaching of the Second Vatican Council is not as authoritative as that of Quanta Cura or of the rest of A) to F), so if it conflicts with them it must be rejected. This rejection would not irreparably undermine Catholic theology or the Catholic faith, because the conciliar teaching is not either infallible or irreformable. Whether such a contradiction exists depends on what the Second Vatican Council taught on this subject, a question that will be considered in the next section.
Another misrepresentation of these teachings is Pink’s view of the jurisdictions of Church and state in religious matters. Pink asserts that a) coercive jurisdiction in matters of religion belongs exclusively to the Church, b) such coercion was exercised by Christian rulers only in their capacity as baptized Catholics, not in their capacity as rulers, and c) the right to exert coercion in religious matters was withdrawn from the state in the teachings of Vatican II, on prudential rather than doctrinal grounds. 
The teachings reviewed above indicate that a) and b) are false, but a further indication of their falsity can be pointed out; they were rejected by Catholic theologians in the course of justifying the execution of heretics. Catholic teaching on the temporal punishments that could be inflicted by the Church always excluded the death penalty, according to the maxim ‘Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine’. The execution of heretics, which was forbidden to the Church by this tradition, was justified by canonists and theologians as being an exercise of the temporal power and not an action of the Church, who limited herself to pronouncing on the guilt or innocence of those accused of heresy. One can plausibly object to this justification on the grounds that there are good reasons for thinking that the state, as well as the Church, is not entitled to execute heretics. But this objection does not undermine the premise appealed to in this justification, which is that the state as such, independently of the Church, has the authority to punish religious error. The fact that this premise was appealed to for centuries indicates that Pink’s view on the exclusive power of the Church to inflict religious coercion was never accepted in Catholic theology. Since this power is not leant to the state by the Church, the Church has no power to withdraw it.
Although the authority of the teachings in A) to F) cannot be disputed, their practical utility in contemporary circumstances can be and has been questioned. This questioning observes that state recognition of the Church is not essential to the Church’s accomplishing her mission, and argues that since such recognition is a pipedream in contemporary circumstances it is pointless to insist on the teachings that require such recognition; they need not be denied, and indeed should not be denied, but should be left to fall into desuetude rather than be inopportunely announced in circumstances where they will only provoke anger and derision. 
It is of course true that state recognition of the true religion is not necessary for the Church to perform her mission; this mission was after all successfully advanced for the first three centuries of the Church, during which the state officially declared Christianity to be illegal. But to advance this fact as a reason for treating Catholic teaching on religion and the state as a dead letter ignores the object of this teaching. Its object is not to describe what is essential for the functioning of the Church, but to describe what is essential for the functioning of civil society and the state. If society and the state will fall into ruin as a result of rejecting the true religion, as F) teaches, the Church will no doubt carry on – since she will carry on under absolutely all circumstances until the end of the world. But this does not mean that the ruin of society and state is not a disaster to be avoided at all costs. If the rejection of the true religion by state and society is now so deep that this disaster cannot be avoided, the doctrine still needs to be urgently announced in order to enable people to prepare for disaster.

The teaching of the Second Vatican Council on religion and the state

To determine the content of the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council’s document on religious freedom, it is necessary to take into account both the general principles that govern the interpretation of magisterial documents and the particular circumstances that produced that document. The circumstances that produced Dignitatis Humanae are rather different from those that usually surround conciliar documents, which complicates the problem of its interpretation.
	The general principles governing the interpretation of magisterial documents stem from the fact that they are official documents that have a legislative character, since they establish norms that Catholics are obliged to follow. They resemble civil legislation in that they are intended to agree with other legislation and to be interpreted in harmony with it, unless they explicitly state that previous legislation is to be suppressed and replaced by them. They also use an official vocabulary that is to be interpreted according to the received meaning that the vocabulary has acquired in legislative acts. The principal norms for interpretation of magisterial teachings are thus other teachings and the established meaning of official terminology. They are not to be interpreted primarily in terms of the personal views and purposes of the theologians and bishops responsible for drafting and passing them, any more than civil legislation is to be interpreted by looking at the personal views of the civil servants and legislators responsible for it. If these personal views contradict the content of other legislation that has not been explicitly repealed, or the official meaning of legal terminology, they are not to be taken into account in interpretation; this is the case for both civil legislation and magisterial teaching.
	Magisterial teaching differs from civil legislation in several respects, however. It imposes duties not only to act or refrain from acting – as civil legislation does – but also to believe; and the obligations to belief that it can impose vary in their seriousness.  A teaching can be taught as de fide, which obliges Christians to believe the truth in question as divinely revealed, or as simply demanding religious submission of the mind and will. Magisterial documents also differ from civil legislation in that they give reasons for the beliefs and actions they impose. Whether or not these reasons themselves demand assent depends on the character of the document and the way in which the reasons are expressed. 
	These features of magisterial teachings usually do not raise great problems, but they are difficult to apply to Dignitatis Humanae, because the circumstances under which that document were produced were peculiar in two respects. The first was that the theologians drafting the document and the leading conciliar fathers who promoted it rejected the previous teachings of the Church expressed in A) to F) above. They accepted instead the position of the Liberal Catholicism of the 19th century about the relations of Church and state. This position, originated by Lamennais and expressed most forcefully by him, claimed 1) that the liberalism that produced the French Revolution had two forms, a malign form that was hostile to all religion and a benign form that could accept it; 2) that the principles of freedom and rights espoused by the benign liberalism were true ones; 3) that a nonconfessional state, if based on the benign form of liberalism, was acceptable to the Church, and indeed that, because of the correctness of the principles upon which such a state would be based, the Church should support such a state and reject the idea of the confessional state; and 4) that acceptance by the Church of such a benign nonconfessional liberal state would greatly assist the Church’s mission, and lead to a vast Catholic revival. Liberal Catholicism was condemned by Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, and by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors and Quanta Cura, but these condemnations were accepted more externally than internally by a large segment of the clergy and laity, and a strong sentiment in favour of Liberal Catholicism had continued in existence up to the time of the Second Vatican Council. This sentiment was grounded in an ideological sympathy for the Enlightenment, a sympathy whose nature is explored in the Thomist paper ‘Conscience, freedom, rights’ mentioned above.
	The second peculiar circumstance was that the Second Vatican Council was run on a ‘bishop’s conference’ model. Previous ecumenical councils had considered it essential to thoroughly debate the questions they were addressing. At the Council of Trent, for example, there were two sets of debates; first, questions were debated by theologians who argued against each other while the bishops listened, and then the bishops themselves debated the theological questions prior to voting on them. At the Second Vatican Council, however, thorough and objective theological debate was not the main way in which decisions were arrived at. The predominant factors were bureaucratic manoeuvring, public relations, and parliamentary manipulation – the standard methods by which bishops’ conferences are run – on the part of the most influential figures at the Council and their supporters. 
This element was notably present in the production of Dignitatis Humanae. The decisive stage at the council was the drafting of the texts presented to the council to be voted upon, rather than the theological debate over the issues discussed by these documents; and the drafting of these texts was determined by the control of the committees that produced them. The text of Dignitatis Humanae began as a document composed by two bishops and two theologians in Fribourg in 1960. The preparatory commissions for the Council had produced a text on religious freedom in ch. 9 of its document De Ecclesia, a text that agreed with A) to F) above. All the preparatory documents for the Council were however rejected without any proper debate on their contents. Through the initiative of the Secretariat for Christian Unity under Cardinal Bea, the Fribourg text, which agreed with the Liberal Catholic position, was adopted as the basis for a document on religious freedom.
	One of the authors of the Fribourg text, Émile de Smedt, bishop of Bruges, was given the role of relator of the document to the Council, charged with presenting and explaining it to the council fathers. Both de Smedt and the theologians responsible for drafting the document were firm supporters of the Liberal Catholic position. They saw it as their task to reject the positions that the state must acknowledge the truth of the Catholic faith and may repress religious error as such. de Smedt’s presentation of the document to the Council was designed to achieve this task. An attempt to have the document examined by a commission that included opponents of the Liberal Catholic view was thwarted by Cardinal Bea (see Vatican II: La liberté religieuse, Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 1967, p. 81). The election of Paul VI as pope gave a decisive impetus to the Liberal Catholic view, since Paul VI, whose intellectual mentor was Jacques Maritain, was a convinced supporter of that view. Despite this support from authority, Bishop de Smedt did not consider it beneath him to promote the victory of his cause by expedients such as introducing an important amendment to the text without drawing the attention of the Council Fathers to the change (the amendment stated that the right to religious freedom was enjoyed even by those who “do not fulfill their obligation of seeking and adhering to the truth”; see Fr. Brian Harrison, ‘Skeletons in the Conciliar Closet’, at http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/archive-skeletons.htm).
	Not surprisingly, the majority of the Council Fathers trusted de Smedt and his theological commission to give a reliable presentation of the issue of religious freedom and Catholic teaching, and they followed his lead. The final acceptance of the document was however delayed by two things; the resistance of the conciliar minority, led by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who argued that its contents contradicted previous Church teachings, and disagreements over the reasons that should be given to support the document’s conclusions. The conciliar minority was appeased by inclusion of a clause stating that the document ‘leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ [para. 1].’ Disagreements among the majority who supported the documents included the questions of whether the judgment of an erroneous conscience conferred rights, and the existence or lack of existence of a scriptural basis for a right to religious freedom. 
These disagreements were never really resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. John Courtney Murray S.J., who was involved in drafting earlier versions of the document, found the arguments given in the final version unsatisfactory, and dismissed them with the claim that ‘the Council's teaching authority falls upon what it affirmed, not upon the reasons it adduced for its affirmation’ (John Courtney Murray, ‘Arguments for the Human Right to Religious Freedom.’) Yves Congar tentatively proposed a similar view, questioning whether the authority of the Council is engaged to the same degree in the document’s explanation of its declarations (paras. 3 to 15) as it is in the declarations themselves (paras. 1 and 2) (see Vatican II: La liberté religieuse, p. 51).
Murray’s claim is of course of the first importance for the interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae. There is a particular feature of the explanatory parts of Dignitatis Humanae that supports Murray’s claim; it is that they do not actually explain anything. The content of these explanations is not clear or coherent. This was the result of the need to avoid obvious disagreement with previous teachings, and of disagreements over the basis for the right to religious freedom among the promoters and supporters of the document. There is no definition of religion itself in the document, which is sometimes described in terms that apply only to Christianity or even to Catholicism. The key concepts of conscience and right are not defined, although they have been given radically different meanings in Catholic theology (on this see John Lamont, ‘Conscience, freedom, rights: idols of the Enlightenment religion’, The Thomist 73 (2009)). The recognition of the Church by the state is supposed to be the product of peculiar circumstances (para. 6), but it is also stated that ‘in the face of government the Church claims freedom for herself in her character as a spiritual authority, established by Christ the Lord’ (para. 13), a claim that presupposes recognition by the state of the divine origin of the Church. The drafters and supporters of the document did not agree on the role of the state with respect to the common good, the scriptural basis or lack thereof for a right to religious freedom, or the role of conscience in religious freedom, and as a result there is no clear position on any of these issues in the document. (On these disagreements see e.g. Jan Grootaers, Actes et acteurs à Vatican II, ch. 3). 
This unclarity and inconsistency, together with the fact that the document is a simple declaration, mean that Murray was right to claim that its explanations lack authority. It should be understood however that the reasons for this lack of authority include but are not limited to the lack of coherence of the explanations. In addition to this lack of coherence, it must be remembered that in identifying the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae we are interpreting an official document, not understanding a thinker. If the document was, say, a Platonic dialogue or a paper by Bertrand Russell, we would be quite right to interpret its central assertion by looking closely at the reasoning offered in its support, even if this reasoning was not very coherent. This is because the reasoning offered for an assertion by an author is the most important guide to the author’s thought and purposes in making the assertion, and it serves as such a guide whether or not it is any good. With an official magisterial document, however, the reasoning offered for its assertions is not the most important guide to their meaning; the most important guides, as noted above, are other official teachings and the standard meaning of official terminology. That is because such documents are not intended to convey what their authors think about a given subject, but to lay down what the readers of the document must believe and do. The reasoning offered in justification of these requirements plays a very subsidiary role in explaining what the readers must believe, and hence plays a subsidiary role in determining what the  documents teach – a fact recognized in standard works on the interpretation of magisterial documents, such as Sixtus Cartechini’s De valore notarum theologicarum et de criteriis ad eas dignoscendas (Rome, 1951), where it is asserted that the explanatory components even of dogmatic constitutions do not compel belief. Even if the reasons given for the declarations in Dignitatis Humanae had a coherent meaning and led to a definite conclusion, they could not make it the case that the declaration taught something that contradicted other official teachings or that could not be reconciled with official terminology.
	This exposition of the general principles that govern the interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae, and of the particular circumstances that produced it, reveal the difficulty of producing an account of its teaching. The general principles, and the claim that the document is intended to leave traditional Catholic teaching untouched, indicate that it should be interpreted as agreeing with patristic teaching and with A) to F) above. However, the intention of its drafters and promoters was to reject this previous teaching. A simple and defensible solution to this difficulty would be to say that the document is flatly self-contradictory and thus expresses no teaching at all. However, I think that a careful analysis of the document permits us to discern a coherent and useful teaching in it.
	The first step in such an analysis is to identify the component of the document that constitutes magisterial teaching. If Dignitatis Humanae were a dogmatic constitution, the most authoritative type of document, the presumption would be that all of its assertions were magisterial teachings. It is however simply a declaration, a type of document of lesser authority. the binding teachings of the document are the declarations in paras. 1 and 2. The essential declaration in these paragraphs, the declaration in which the authority of the council is invoked, is the following:

‘2. This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits. The council further declares that the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself. (2) … The right to this immunity continues to exist even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth and adhering to it and the exercise of this right is not to be impeded, provided that just public order [iustus ordo publicus] be observed.’ 

The footnote to this passage refers to Leo XIII, Libertas, 30: Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, 30-31; Pius XIII, radio message of Dec. 24th 1942; and John XXIII, Pacem in Terris 14. These references are concerned with the right to practice the true religion, with the exception of the passage from John XXIII, which does not clarify whether or not it is the true religion that is in question (see Vatican II: La liberté religieuse, pp. 69-71, on this passage). The right to practice the true religion was the understanding of the right to religious freedom taught by the Church prior to Dignitatis Humanae. These references thus do not help with the new element of the document’s teaching on the right to religious freedom, which is the declaration that there is a right to practice religions other than the true one. 
	The declaration asserts that there is a right to practice false religions unless such practice violates due limits, and it describes these due limits as being set by the requirements of just public order, ‘iustus ordo publicus’. To understand the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae, we therefore need to know what is meant by just public order. The document itself does not enable us to do this, because it describes public order in vague generalities such as ‘an adequate care of genuine public peace, which comes about when men live together in good order and in true justice (para. 7).’
	Fortunately, this vagueness does not pose a problem for interpretation of the document, because the term ‘public order’, ‘ordo publicus’, has an established meaning in canon law. It was introduced into canon law in the 1917 Latin Code of Canon Law, Canon 14, §1, ˚2. This canon was introduced to settle the question of the obligation of a traveler to obey the local ecclesiastical laws in an area he is passing through on his travels – laws such as those concerning the forms of marriage, which varied according to whether the canons of the Council of Trent had been promulgated in a given area. Prior to the 1917 Code, there were two schools of thought on this question; the school of Suarez, which held that the traveler was bound to obey all the local laws, and the school of Thomas Sanchez (1551-1610), which held that the traveler is not bound to obey all the local laws, but only those laws that concerned contractual formalities, or whose violation would cause harm to the local community. The 1917 Code took the side of the school of Sanchez, and ruled that travelers were not bound by local laws ‘iis exceptis quae ordinis publico consulunt’, ‘excepting those laws that secure public order’. This was the first occurrence of the term ‘ordo publicus’ in canon law, although it had an established meaning in civil law when it was introduced into the 1917 Code. The authoritative works on its meaning are John Leo Hamill, The Obligations of the Traveler According to Canon 14 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1942), and John Henry Hackett, The Concept of Public Order (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1959). The fact that Hackett could write a book on the meaning of the expression indicates its established status as a canonical term. 
	There are two views on the meaning of ‘ordo publicus’ among canonists. One view takes it to refer simply to the common good as such. The other view interprets it more narrowly as referring to the essential elements of the common good. Hackett describes the latter view thus; ‘Laws that protect the public order are only those that have for their direct object the protection of a good that is indispensable to society as such. … Only a law that clearly is characterized by social necessity is one that safeguards the public order.’ (Hackett 1959, p. 52.) The narrower view is the one more favoured by canonists, and it is the one we will take to be correct. It is worth noting that although the 1917 Code was the one in force when Dignitatis Humanae was promulgated, and is thus the appropriate reference for the interpretation of ‘ordo publicus’, the term was retained in the 1983 Code (canon 13 §2 °2), and canonists agree that its meaning in the later code is that of the earlier code.
	The teaching of Dignitatis Humanae on the right to religious freedom should therefore be understood as asserting that there is always a right to practice the true religion, and that there is a right to practice false religions unless such practice infringes on laws that uphold the essentials of the common good. This of course raises the further question of the nature of the common good for human society, but this question is answered by John XXIII in Pacem in Terris:

57. In this connection, We would draw the attention of Our own sons to the fact that the common good is something which affects the needs of the whole man, body and soul [‘bonum commune ad integrum hominem attinere, hoc est ad eius tam corporis quam animi necessitates.’] That, then, is the sort of good which rulers of States must take suitable measure to ensure. They must respect the hierarchy of values, and aim at achieving the spiritual as well as the material prosperity of their subjects. (42 Cf. Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, 58-59.) …
59. Consisting, as he does, of body and immortal soul, man cannot in this mortal life satisfy his needs or attain perfect happiness. Thus, the measures that are taken to implement the common good must not jeopardize his eternal salvation; indeed, they must even help him to obtain it. (44 Cf. Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno, 118-119.)

This teaching builds on the teachings cited in A) above. The common good for which the state is responsible thus includes man’s spiritual well-being as well as his temporal well-being. This follows, as the encyclical says, from the assertion that the common good includes the needs of the whole man (cf. Gaudium et Spes 74). Since eternal salvation is not only a need of the whole man, but is the principal and ultimate need of the whole man, what pertains to eternal salvation also pertains to the essentials of the common good.
	This means that the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae on religious freedom is clearly compatible with earlier magisterial teaching. Since i) the right to practice false religion is limited by the obligation to respect public order, ii) the obligation to respect public order is the obligation to respect the essentials of the common good, and iii) religious truth is essential to the common good, it follows that the right to practice false religions is limited by the requirement to respect religious truth. Any religious practice that harms belief in the true religion this can and ought to be repressed by the state, unless such repression would damage the common good more than it would promote it. This is precisely the traditional position. 
The teaching also adds something new to the traditional position, by clearly distinguishing between the object of the coercive powers of the Church in religious matters and the object of the coercive power of the state in such matters. The object of the Church’s coercive powers extends to making baptized Christians carry out the obligations incurred by baptism. The coercive powers of the state, however, do not extend thus far; they only extend to preventing behaviour that harms the spiritual well-being of society.   

Questions concerning this account of the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae

	The above interpretation of the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae, although based on solid reasons, may provoke incredulity. How could it be that the document’s teaching is exactly the view that its drafters and promoters wanted to suppress?
	The first step in treating this incredulity is to acknowledge that the reasons for this interpretation are unanswerable. Their conclusive nature results from two factors; the explicit statement that the document preserves the traditional teaching of the Church, and the norms for interpretation of official documents given above. These norms mean that the document is to be understood as agreeing with other documents on the subject unless it clearly states that it is replacing their teaching – which Dignitatis Humanae denies -  and that its terminology is to be understood using the established meaning given to it in official use. The norms are necessities for all interpretation of official documents, whether ecclesiastical or civil; if they are abandoned, the task of establishing the meaning of legal texts and of all official documents becomes impossible. Since the term ‘ordo publicus’ has an established meaning in canon law, and this meaning implies the truth of the interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae provided here, the interpretation must be accepted. 
	In addition to these two conclusive factors, there are further reasons in favour of this interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae that should be mentioned. One reason is the failure of previous efforts by theologians to provide an interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae that agrees with the rest of magisterial teaching on religious freedom. Pink’s own interpretation, clever and learned as it is, is an instance of such failure. These efforts have all assumed that the document must be understood as denying to the state the right to punish religious error as such.  This assumption was natural, since it corresponds to the intentions of its drafters and promoters, but it makes it impossible to reconcile the document with the previous teaching and practice of the Church, since the main idea of this teaching and practice was that the state can and should punish religious error as such. The failure over forty years of all efforts at reconciliation indicates that the assumption underlying these efforts is false, and that a coherent interpretation of the document can only be produced by starting from the opposite assumption, which is that of understanding the document as agreeing with the prior teaching and practice of the Church. 
	Another reason is the character of the process that produced Dignitatis Humanae. This process included the suppression of views contrary to those of the drafters of the document, the misrepresentation of previous magisterial teaching, and the avoidance of debate on crucial issues. It was a squalid episode that reflects the greatest discredit on Bishop de Smedt and his allies. This attempt at hoodwinking the Council Fathers nonetheless had considerable success. The majority of the Fathers ended up agreeing with the views of the drafters and promoters of the document. However, due to the means used to persuade them, they also thought that the position they were endorsing was in harmony with previous magisterial teaching. They did not choose to reject this previous teaching, but believed themselves to be accepting it. The question thus arises; which intention on the part of the majority of the Council fathers should we take to be their primary purpose? Their intention to agree with de Smedt and his allies, or their intention to produce a document that agreed with previous teaching? Justice and filial piety demand that Catholics take the latter intention to be the main purpose of the Council Fathers, and to assume that if the choice between accepting previous teaching and accepting de Smedt’s position had been clear to them, they would have made the former choice. After all, if this had not been the case, it would not have been necessary to hoodwink them in the first place. When faced with a choice between an interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae that agrees with previous teaching and an interpretation that disagrees with it, we should therefore assume that it is acceptance of the former interpretation that is in accord with the will of the Council Fathers.
	There is a further motive for incredulity concerning the interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae advanced here. How could its drafters have produced a text that taught the opposite of what they intended? No doubt the fact that they were not experienced canonists contributed to their use of the term ‘ordo publicus’, despite its implying the truth of the position they opposed. The more important reason however was the grounds for their opposing this position. It was noted above that the supporters of the text agreed on that the previous magisterial teaching should be rejected, but did not agree on why. There were in fact two positions concerning the nature of the state that motivated rejection of this teaching. The position of John Courtney Murray S.J. was that the state had no place in religious matters because the state was not responsible for the entire common good. Its role was limited to the protection and promotion of the socio-economic rights of man. Murray simply rejected as mistaken Leo XIII’s teaching that the state is responsible for the entire common good. (See John Courtney Murray in Vatican II: La liberté religieuse, pp. 128, 131-132, 138.) The American bishops, who had long chafed at Catholic teaching on religion on the state on the grounds of its incompatibility with the American constitution, welcomed Murray’s position – whose Lockean origins are manifest - and upheld it at the Council. 
However, the fact that Murray wrote in English, and that most of the Council Fathers could not understand that language, limited his influence to a minority at the Council. The influence of Jacques Maritain was much more significant. His ideas had a much broader currency in the Church than those of Murray’s, and they were especially important because he was the intellectual mentor of Paul VI; Maritain was in fact consulted by Paul VI on the question of religious freedom during the Council. Maritain did not deny that the state had the promotion of the common good as its purpose; instead, he claimed that the common good which the state exists to subserve is purely temporal in nature, and has no supernatural element. 
The promoters of Dignitatis Humanae all accepted either Murray or Maritain’s view of the state. As a result, they assumed that the public order to which the document referred meant either the upholding of socio-economic rights, or the protection of a purely temporal common good. In neither case would religious error as such be incompatible with public order. These assumptions of course are not taught in the document, and are explicitly rejected by other magisterial teachings, so they have no relevance to the meaning of Dignitatis Humanae; but they explain how the drafters of the document produced a text that contradicted their own beliefs.
Given the clear rejection of this understanding of the state in Pacem in Terris, one might ask how Maritain and his followers could have made this mistake. The answer is connected to decisive developments in the history of the Church in the 20th century. Maritain had been a supporter of Action Française, the right-wing movement led by Charles Maurras. Maurras was an atheist and a follower of Auguste Comte, the 19th-century founder of positivism. He hated Jews, whom he loathed for having spread monotheism, and made anti-Semitism a central part of the message of Action Française. Catholicism, in his view, effectively abolished monotheism by substituting the Church for God, and as a result was acceptable and indeed valuable. He rejected democracy and advocated a return to an absolute monarchy in France, and wooed French Catholics with the object of gaining their support for his political programme. Many French Catholics, at odds with the Third Republic, were receptive to Maurras’s proposal of an alliance. To justify accepting the leadership of a man who considered monotheism to be a disastrous evil, they appealed to the analysis of Pedro Descoqs S.J., a convinced Suarezian (see Descoqs, À travers l’oeuvre de M. Ch. Maurras, 1913, available online at http://www.archive.org/details/traversloeuvrede00desc). 
Descoqs argued from Suarez’s view that grace involved the gift not only of the power to merit eternal salvation, but also the gift of a supernatural end to human nature, an end that found its fulfillment in the Beatific Vision. Suarez held that without this gift of a supernatural end, human happiness would consist in achieving natural, this-worldly goods. Descoqs argued that since the natural end of man was independent of his supernatural end, it is possible for Catholics to cooperate in temporal affairs with unbelievers, since agreement on the nature of temporal goods was independent of agreement on the supernatural. It was thus legitimate for Catholics to cooperate with Maurras, an unbeliever, in pursuing temporal goods. French Catholics who rejected Liberal Catholicism welcomed this conclusion, and many of them, including Maritain, enthusiastically supported Action Française. (Michael Sutton, in his Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890-1914, gives a good account of these events for Anglophone readers. Crucial books in French include Victor Nguyen, Aux origines de l'Action française, and Jacques Prévotat, Les Catholiques Et L'Action Francaise.)
Maritain originally defended the movement against its liberal critics with arguments along the lines of Descoqs’. However, when in 1926 Pius XI decided to suppress Action Française he appealed personally to Maritain for support. With more loyalty than logic, Maritain immediately rejected his former views and supported the papal move. To replace his allegiance to Action Française and Maurras, he developed a new political approach, which was chiefly elaborated in his book Humanisme intégral (1936). In this approach, he preserved the distinction between temporal and supernatural ends that he had used to justify collaboration with Maurras, but used it instead to argue for the legitimacy of cooperating in the temporal sphere with modern secular states. Not only did he argue for its legitimacy, he claimed that such cooperation was morally required, and that the goal of securing recognition of the Church by the state had to be abandoned. The rationale for this claim was the argument that a secular, non-confessional state was required to respect the dignity and autonomy of the human person. This concept of the dignity of the human person was largely taken from the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier, a charismatic figure whom Maritain was closely associated with from the early 1930’s. The influence of Maritain and Mounier lies behind the statements about the dignity of the human person that abound in magisterial documents after 1960. 
Maritain’s integral humanism amounted to an endorsement and extension of Liberal Catholicism. His great prestige within Catholic circles gave his views respectability, and they achieved enormous success. It was remarked above that Paul VI took Maritain as his intellectual mentor; he was not unusual in this respect among ecclesiastics, and Maritain’s integral humanism was probably the greatest single influence on the progressive majority at the Second Vatican Council. Support for the social kingship of Christ among Catholics was largely eradicated by the vogue for integral humanism. This explains why advocates of this kingship received little support at the Council and after it. 
But while Maritain was developing these ideas on the political front, and bringing much of the Church with him, other events were occurring on the theological front. Descoqs’ defence of Action Française was greeted with revulsion by one of his students, Henri de Lubac. de Lubac felt that cooperation with the anti-religious and bigoted Maurras was immoral, and this led him to reject the theology of grace that was used to justify it. In a series of books – Surnaturel, Le mystère du surnaturel, Augustinisme et théologie moderne, Petit catéchèse sur nature et grâce – he argued against the view that grace involved the gift of a new, supernatural end, and claimed that the supernatural happiness of the Beatific Vision was the end of human nature as such. de Lubac’s view gained prestige in France as a result of the Vichy régime. Action Française was deeply committed to this régime, and some of its prominent Catholic members, such as Raphaël Alibert, were involved in its worst crimes. Alibert introduced the first Vichy Statut des Juifs, which stripped Jews of the rights of citizenship; subsequently Vichy France was to round up French Jews and hand them over to the Germans to be murdered, without any pressure from the occupiers. de Lubac meanwhile took part in campaigns against anti-Semitism, and had to go into hiding to escape the Gestapo. (John Hellman’s The Knight-Monks of Vichy France and Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left 1930-1950 are useful on the tangle of Vichy, Mounier, Maritain, and progressivism. On Vichy anti-Semitism, see Michael Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews.)
The majority of the French clergy and hierarchy had eagerly supported Pétain. The victory of de Gaulle and the Allies, and the shame of Vichy crimes, gave them a strong incentive to distract attention from their Vichy past by enthusiastically endorsing those who had opposed it. Its opponents included Liberal Catholics, which led to the complete victory of Liberal Catholicism in the French hierarchy; but they also included de Lubac, whose theological views thus acquired unassailable progressive credentials, which were enhanced when Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis seemed to criticize his position. Thus it was that the nonexistence of a natural end of man became accepted into the catechism of progressive theologians. This led to its consequence, the nonexistence of an autonomous temporal end for the state, being asserted in Pacem in Terris, which was intended to incorporate progressive elements as a counterbalance to the policy of the previous papacy. Its perceived progressive character also led to the reiteration of a similar claim about the state in Gaudium et Spes 74.
The large element of politics and party sympathy involved in these theological debates meant that the logical implications of the positions taken in them were often not thought through. This explains why progressives could support both Maritain’s integral humanism and de Lubac’s views on grace. Indeed, de Lubac himself supported the progressive position on religious freedom, without giving any consideration to the inconsistency of this position with his views on grace. This lack of reflection led to Pacem in Terris raising knotty problems about the relation of Church and state. The existence of an autonomous temporal end for the state was the rationale given by Bellarmine and Suarez for holding that the pope lacks direct temporal power over rulers, and the subordination of the temporal end of society to the supernatural end of man was an argument given for the direct temporal papal power by its supporters. Thus, St. Thomas in his De Regno, ch. 15, argues that ‘To him [i.e. the pope] all the kings of the Christian People are to be subject as to our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.  For those to whom pertains the care of intermediate ends should be subject to him to whom pertains the care of the ultimate end, and be directed by his rule.’ It seems unlikely that John XXIII considered this when he rejected the existence of a merely temporal end of the state. However, the fact that he did with a strange insouciance reject it means that the real intellectual task for current Catholic discussion of religion and the state is not to demonstrate how the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae is consistent with previous teaching; it is instead to explain the relation of Catholic teaching since Pacem in Terris and Gaudium et Spes to the question of the direct temporal power of the pope.

Conclusion

The unfolding of events in the Church and the world since the promulgation of Dignitatis Humanae has served to clarify the issues it dealt with. The teachings of the popes in A) to F) above were hotly contested within the Church during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by supporters of Liberal Catholicism. It is now obvious to a realistic observer that the assertions of Liberal Catholicism, given in 1) to 4) above, have been shown to be false by events, and that the predictions of disaster in F) have begun to be fulfilled. These developments mean that theological efforts to interpret Catholic teachings on Church and state in a way that is acceptable to modern secular societies have lost any point. They also indicate why the real teaching of Dignitatis Humanae is important, despite the fact that there are now no states in the world that are willing to put it into practice. The teaching shows how to put societies on a firm and just basis, and how to arrest a slide into calamity that will worsen indefinitely if the social kingship of Christ is not acknowledged and obeyed. This truth is a vital one that needs to be firmly announced by the Church, whether or not anyone is willing to listen to it.

(I am grateful to Prof. Pink for extensive and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.)