Church And State

[Resurrexi]

My question was no vaguer than the original condemnation by the Holy Father.

[Nihil Obstat]

[quote name='Resurrexi' post='1807364' date='Mar 14 2009, 10:51 PM']My question was no vaguer than the original condemnation by the Holy Father.[/quote]
The original condemnation was certainly not isolated; it would have followed background statements and clear context, as well as very good development of the exactly what they mean when they say "separation of Church and state". Your poll question had none of the above.

[Resurrexi]

In the Syllabus, Pius IX merely named the error among a list of many others. These kind of lists have actually been very common in the past, e.g. "Exsurge Domine" which condemned a number of Luther's theses. However, there was a reference to the allocution "Acerbissimum vobiscum" at the end of the error, but I have yet to find a complete copy of it, but merely the following excerpt in Denzinger:

1640 We say nothing about that other decree in which, after completely despising the mystery, dignity, and sanctity of the sacrament of matrimony; after utterly ignoring and distorting its institution and nature; and after completely spurning the power of the Church over the same sacrament, it was proposed, according to the already condemned errors of heretics, and against the teaching of the Catholic Church, that marriage should be considered as a civil contract only, and that divorce, strictly speaking, should be sanctioned in various cases (see n.1767); and that all matrimonial cases should be deferred to lay tribunals and be judged by them (see n.1774); because no Catholic is ignorant or cannot know that matrimony is truly and properly one of the seven sacraments of the evangelical law, instituted by Christ the Lord, and that for that reason, there can be no marriage between the faithful without there being at one and the same time a sacrament, and that, therefore, any other union of man and woman among Christians, except the sacramental union, even if contracted under the power of any civil law, is nothing else than a disgraceful and death-bringing concubinage very frequently condemned by the Church, and, hence, that the sacrament can never be separated from the conjugal agreement (see n. 1773), and that it pertains absolutely to the power of the Church to discern those things which can pertain in any way to the same matrimony.

[Nihil Obstat]

I'm relatively sure that the passage you quoted, while very well written and quite true, isn't relevant to separation of Church and state.

At least I don't see anything of particular relevance.

[Resurrexi]

Exactly. The thing is, that the condemnations from the syllabus are supposed to be taken in context from the documents which are referenced. The reference to the condemned proposition "The Church should the separated from the State..." is the allocution "Acerbissimum". However, I can only find that excerpt from the document and not the entire document itself.

[Nihil Obstat]

[quote name='Resurrexi' post='1808177' date='Mar 15 2009, 10:49 PM']Exactly. The thing is, that the condemnations from the syllabus are supposed to be taken in context from the documents which are referenced. The reference to the condemned proposition "The Church should the separated from the State..." is the allocution "Acerbissimum". However, I can only find that excerpt from the document and not the entire document itself.[/quote]
You lost me after exactly. How does this contradict my 'charge' (respectfully, if you will) that the questions lacked context?

[AdAltareDei]

Resurrexi,

In another thread you argued that we owe the assent of faith to all magisterial documents. I disagreed.

How do you reconcile;

[i]“This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom... 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. This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed; thus it is to become a civil right.”[/i]
-Dignitatis Humane

with the following condemnation

[i]They do not hesitate to put forward the view which is not only opposed to the Catholic Church, but very pernicious for the salvation of souls — an opinion which Gregory XVI, Our Predecessor, called absurd. This is the view that liberty of conscience and worship is the strict right of every man, a right which should be proclaimed and affirmed by law in every properly constituted state... When they rashly make these statements, they do not realize or recall to mind that they are advocating what St. Augustine calls a liberty of perdition” [/i]
-Pius IX Quanta Cura


[b]
Tell me, how can we assent to two official and authoritive statements that are contradictory?
[/b]
Thankyou

[Resurrexi]

They aren't contradictory unless you take them out of context and interpret them in some way other than in light of each other.

[Resurrexi]

Perhaps this blog entry by an English Catholic priest who celebrates both the ordinary and extraordinary forms will be helpful:

[url="http://the-hermeneutic-of-continuity.blogspot.com/2009/02/hermeneutic-of-continuity-and-freedom.html"]http://the-hermeneutic-of-continuity.blogs...nd-freedom.html[/url]

[AdAltareDei]

I don't buy it.
Pius IX condemns a concept that Vatican II enshrines.
It's as simple as that.

How do you work your way around that? Fr. Finnigans article focuses on freedom of conscience anyway. Not the states role.

“This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom... 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. [b]This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law [/b]whereby society is governed; thus it is to become a civil right.”
-Dignitatis Humane


They do not hesitate to put forward the view which is not only opposed to the Catholic Church, but very pernicious for the salvation of souls — an opinion which Gregory XVI, Our Predecessor, called absurd. This is the view that liberty of conscience and worship is the strict right of every man, [b]a right which should be proclaimed and affirmed by law in every properly constituted state[/b]... When they rashly make these statements, they do not realize or recall to mind that they are advocating what St. Augustine calls a liberty of perdition”
-Pius IX Quanta Cura


I mean, one says that religious freedom must be enshrined in civil laws and the other condemns that very proposition, almost word for word.

I'd like you to respond, I could just as easily refer you to some articles written by traditionalists but that wouldn't be a discussion would it.

I want to know how you reconcile these two statments. Not how Father Finnigan does.

Edited April 30, 2009 by AdAltareDei

[Aloysius]

both are prudential pastoral policy directives. the substance of the doctrine is whether a person has a personal moral right to freedom of religion, and the substance of that doctrine which we owe our assent to does not change. that one must freely choose religion in order to truly attain it is doctrinally true; that erroneous positions have no moral right to exist is also doctrinally true; the prudential positions have changed and while once the doctrine that erroneous positions have no moral rights was emphasized in the political pastoral application which said that Catholic states should illegalize public manifestations of erroneous positions, now the fact that religion must come without coercion is emphasized by the political pastoral application which says that all states should permit free choice in religion. we owe a type of public assent to that pastoral decision in the sense that we are obligated to exhibit loyalty, fidelity, and unity with our pastors; and especially because we fully agree with the doctrines behind those things. we might privately hold, and even might be free to debate about, whether a Catholic state ought to permit public rights for error... because we believe in two seemingly conflicting doctrinal principals: one, that conscience must be free; and two, that error has no moral right.

the application of doctrines in political/pastoral policies changes. the degree of assent we owe to those things is not the same as the degree of assent we owe to the doctrines themselves. one cannot hold that false religions must be permitted by the state because erroneous positions have a moral right to exist ("what St. Augustine calls," quoted in your above quotation, "a liberty of perdition") or that Catholic states ought to spread the religion by coercion because there is no freedom of conscience.

but if one wishes to continue to hold support for the idea of a Catholic state not permitting the full public expression of false religions, one must simply make it clear that they defer to their pastors in their pastoral judgment of how to minister to states and how to tell states to apply those doctrines. two complimentary doctrines which only seem to contradict each other: that conscience must allow for free choice in religion, and that error has no rights.

[Resurrexi]

I know you said you didn't want an article, but his best explains how I feel:

Quid Roma Dixit: examining Dignitatis humanae
by Jacob A. Michael

Of the sixteen documents promulgated by the Second Vatican Council, there is little doubt that Dignitatis Humanae ("The Dignity of the Human Person", also known as the Declaration on Religious Freedom) is the most hotly contested, and has caused the most consternation amongst Traditional Catholics. The more bold will simply reject the document as a blatant contradiction of the Church's Traditional teaching concerning religious liberty and the obligation of the State to profess the Catholic Faith. Even those who genuinely want to adhere to the teaching of the council, and rea

d its documents in a Traditional light, will often come up short when reading this document.

Before examining the document itself, it is our responsibility to first acquaint ourselves with the Traditional teaching of the Church on the subjects involved. What have the popes of past ages said about religious liberty? What did they mean? How did they define the terms?

The Church's Traditional teaching is rooted, ultimately, in Creation itself; this is a key point to notice, because the development of the subject by Vatican II is also rooted in Creation. Man is created by God, and as such, is entirely dependent upon Him for life, health, breath, sustenance, etc. Through Creation, Man

can known with certainty that God exists, and can easily make the next logical deduction - that God is owed thanksgiving, honor, gratitude, and worship.

This is the most basic foundation of any discussion of religious liberty; it must be accepted by anyone who claims to be a Christian, in fact, even non-Catholics. It is written all over Sacred Scripture; Man owes God the worship which belongs to Him, is obligated to confess Him, to believe in Him, to accept His revelation.

In 1864, Blessed Pope Pius IX wrote:

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who ... 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." ... [T]hey 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," 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." (Quanta Cura, 3)

The Pope here condemns the complete separation of Church and State, which is to say, a situation in which the State either professes no religion at all, or makes no distinction between true religion and false religions (which really amounts to the same thing). He also condemns the "absolute liberty" of conscience, "which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil."

Writing in 1899, Pope Leo XII said much about this idea of "liberty" in his encyclical Libertas. He acknowledges that "Liberty, the highest of natural endowments, being the portion only of intellectual or rational natures, confers on man this dignity - that he is 'in the hand of his counsel' and has po

wer over his actions." (Libertas, 1) However, he notes that liberty must be exercised with responsibility: "the true liberty of human society does not consist in every man doing what he pleases, for this would simply end in turmoil and confusion, and bring on the overthrow of the State." (Libertas, 10)

Because the State, no less than the individual, has received its authority and power from God Himself, it too bears the obligation to acknowledge God publicly and to give its approval to the true religion. Thus, Leo XIII also condemned "the fatal theory of the need of separation between Church and State." (Libertas, 18) On the subject of false liberty, he said:

This kind of liberty, if considered in relation to the State, clearly implies that there is no reason why the State should offer any homage to God, or should desire any public recog nition of Him; that no one form of worship is to be preferred to another, but that all stand on an equal footing, no account being taken of the religion of the people, even if they profess the Catholic faith. But, to justify this, it must needs be taken as true that the State has no duties toward God, or that such duties, if they exist, can be abandoned with impunity, both of which assertions are manifestly false. (Libertas, 21)

Thus he concludes, "justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness - namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges." (Libertas, 21)

Similar sentiments are to be found in the writings of Pope St. Pius X, who said:

That th e State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. (Vehementer Nos, 3)

This Traditional teaching reached its apex with Pope Pius XI, who instituted the Feast of Christ the King with his encyclical Quas Primas, on the Social Kingship of Christ:

Men must look for the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ; and that We promised to do as far as lay in Our power. In the Kingdom of Christ, that is, it seemed to Us that peace could not be more effectually restored nor fixed upon a firmer basis than through the restoration of the Empire of Our Lord. (Quas Primas, 1)

Basing many of his arguments on Sacred Scripture, Pope Pius XI wrote that Christ is King over all nations; as it is written in Psalm 2, God has made "the ends of the earth" His possession; St. John's Apocalypse hails Him as the "king of kings, and Lord of lords," which is to say, He is the king over all earthly kings; all men, and all States, are obliged to acknowledge this Universal King, both privately and publicly.

Thus far we have seen what is the Traditional teaching of the Church on religious liberty. The State has an obligation to profess the Catholic Faith in its official capacity; all men have an obligation to submit to Christ the King and to worship God according to the Truth of the Catholic Faith. Unbridled liberty of conscience leads to the collapse of society; the separation of Church and State leads to a godless State, to an atheistic State in which immorality cannot help but reign.

Dignitatis Humanae picks up this thread in its opening paragraphs, stating that the Council "leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ." (DH, 1) However, the document states that it "intends to develop the doctrine of recent popes on the inviolable rights of the human person and the constitutional order of society." (DH, 1)

Here there is a subtle distinction, but one which must be understood if we are to hope to get anything out of the rest of this document. The Council declares that it is not speaking, in this documen

t, of the obligation of men and societies to profess "the true religion" and to belong to "the one Church of Christ." Rather, the document addresses the question of Man's "inviolable rights," as it affects him individually and within a constituted society.

In short, the question asked by Dignitatis Humanae is not, "should all men profess the Catholic Faith and belong to the Catholic Church?" It has already answered this in the affirmative. Rather, the question is asks is, "how are men to

be treated if they do not profess the Catholic Faith and belong to the one true Church?"

If what follows is difficult to comprehend, this should be no surprise at all; what the Council is touching upon here is the very mystery of Free Will, and its somewhat tense relationship to God's Sovereignty. As already noted by Leo XIII, Man alone among the creatures of the earth has the ability to choose voluntarily; Man alone among the beasts has will, and that will is free, by God's own design.

If God demands that all men must acknowledge Him, worship Him, etc., He also has created Man with the ability to disobey. Man is obligated, but free. Note a very important distinction: Man is "free" to disobey, but he does not have the "right" to disobey. The only things that can be called absolute "rights" are those things which have been granted to Man by God. Thus, Man has an abso

lute right to worship God and to profess the Catholic Faith; this right is not contingent upon anything. No one can remove this right, and it would remain a right even if the State were to forbid it. Man does not have the right to reject God; that is not a right that God has given him; yet, because God has created Man with Free Will, Man does have the freedom to reject God. The distinction between what Man is free to do, and what Man has a right to do, is a fine distinction - but it must be sharply defined as such.

To illustrate the point, it is obvious that Man is free to walk into a store and steal a loaf of bread; that is his choice, an exercise of his will, which is always free. But Man does not have a right to steal bread, as becomes perfectly clear when the police capture him and cart him off to jail.

Much of the confusion generated by Dignitatis Humanae stems from the fact that most people who read the document fail to let the document itself define the terminology; we tend to import our own me

anings into the text, based on our societal and cultural situation. Thus, when DH speaks of "religious liberty," we often read "separation of Church and State" into this term, because that is what it has come to mean in our society. This is not how the document defines the term, however:

This Vatican Council likewise professes its belief that it is upon the human conscience that these obligations fall and exert their binding force. The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.

Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. (DH, 1)

The first paragraph states that truth cannot be imposed; it must be received on its own merits, and cannot

be forced upon the human mind. Leading from this, the second paragraph declares that "religious freedom" is synonymous with "immunity from coercion in civil society."

When the Council later states that "the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person" (DH, 2), it alludes to what we have mentioned about the very order of Creation; the "dignity of the human person" is that Man has been created with Free Will, and that Free Will cannot - must not - be violated. Put another way, the State has no right to coerce or force its subjects to believe this or that thing, because God Himself does not so coerce Man, and thus He has not given this right to the State.

The docume

nt describes the same thing in a more explicit statement:

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. (DH, 2)

This gets to the answer of the question we asked earlier: what if Man does not fulfill his obligation to God? What then? He must continue to remain free from coercion, and not be forced to act contrary to his beliefs. Here there is the unfolding of two different elements: passive and active. Ma

n cannot be forced to believe anything - this is passive. Man acts according to his beliefs, and so he cannot be forced to act in a way that contradicts his beliefs - for example, the State, were it to be a Catholic State, could not lawfully impose an obligation upon all men to attend Mass on Sundays. It would be a violation of Man's Free Will if a government agent were to invade his home on Sunday morning, put a gun to his head, and force him to walk to the nearest parish for evening Vespers. This, too, is passive.

But what about when we move into the active realm? Let us say that I have two beliefs: first, that Mass is an abomination, and I must never attend it; second, that I must worship a false god on Thursdays. The first is passive, the second is active; the first is something I will not do, according to my beliefs, and the second is something I must do, according to my beliefs. It would be pure coercion if the State were to force me to go to Mass; but what if the State were to prohibit me from worshiping my false god on Thursdays? Would that also be a form of coercion?

This is where Man's right to "religious freedom" (understood as immunity from coercion) becomes less and less absolute, and more and more contingent, because it becomes less a problem of coercion than a problem of prohibition. Hence, the Council includes the all-important qualifier: "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 declares that all men are bound by the obligation to seek the Truth, and to adhere to it once they discover it; however, even if they fail to live up to this obligation, Free Will remains, and coercion continues to be a violation of human dignity as a result. Thus:

In consequence, 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 be observed. (DH, 2)

Here again, the Council is walking a very thin tightrope and attempting to maintain balance; part of immunity from coercion means immunity from prohibition, yet this is very much contingent - "the exercise of this right," that is, active expression of Man's beliefs, "is not to be impeded," with the important condition that "just public order be observed." This will, of course, vary from place to place. In a Catholic State, where the majority of citizens are practicing Catholics, it would no doubt be a disturbance of the public order to allow a Muslim community to set up its own mosque and begin distributing religious literature. On the other hand, in just about any society, it would be a disturbance of the public order to allow a Satanist to freely exercise his religion, when that religion includes such things as human sacrifice.

There are, in fact, limits to this right to religious freedom.

In bringing this discussion to a close, it would be a helpful thing to explore, if only briefly, the statement of the Council that it "intends to develop the doctrine of recent popes on the inviolable rights of the human person and the constitutional order of society." Which recent popes? We do, in fact, find something similar to the statements of Dignitatis Humanae in the writings of Pius XI, the very same Pope who insisted upon the rights of Jesus Christ as King of Nations. In his encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, he writes:

The believer has an absolute right (diritto inalienabile) to profess his Faith and live according to its dictates. Laws which impede this profession and practice of Faith are against natural law. Parents who are earnest and conscious of their educative duties, have a primary right to the education of the children God has given them in the spirit of their Faith, and according to its prescriptions. Laws and measures which in school questions fail to respect this freedom of the parents go against natural law, and are immoral. (Mit Brennender Sorge, 31)

While some would want to argue that Pius XI is only talking about Catholics in this paragraph, that is, that only Catholics have the right to profess their Faith, "live according to its dictates," and educate their children, this interpretation cannot be sustained by the document itself. Pius XI does not use the word "Catholic" here, he uses the more generic word "believer"; and while discussing the rights of parents to educate their children in the Faith, he does not say "the Catholic faith," but rather, "their faith."

Father Brian Harrison writes:

Confronting the situation in Nazi Germany, where Catholics, Protestants and Jews alike were being severely harassed in their religious practice, Pius XI in Mit brennender sorge (1937) used an ambiguous expression - "the believer" rather than "the Catholic" or "the Catholic believer" - to designate the subject of "an inalienable right" to freedom from state interference, by virtue of "natural law" (cited in Davies, p. 292). This choice of words was surely deliberate: if the Pope had specified only Catholics in that context, he would naturally have been taken to mean that Jews and Protestants suffered no injustice when Hitler suppressed or interfered with their public worship. Clearly, Pius XI did not want to say that; so Bishop De Smedt's inference that his declaration also refers to non-Catholic "believers" seems quite reasonable to me. (Fr. Brian Harrison, "The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty", Living Tradition, January, 1993, source)

In a similar vein, Pope Pius XII used the language of the "dignity" of the "human person" to defend the rights of religious freedom; in his 1942 Christmas Message, he said:

He who would have the Star of Peace shine out and stand over society should cooperate, for his part, in giving back to the human person the dignity given to it by God from the very beginning ... He should uphold respect for and the practical realization of the following fundamental personal rights; the right to maintain and develop one's corporal, intellectual and moral life and especially the right to religious formation and education; the right to worship God in private and public and to carry on religious works of charity; the right to marry and to achieve the aim of married life; the right to conjugal and domestic society; the right to work, as the indispensable means towards the maintenance of family life; the right to free choice of state of life, and hence, too, of the priesthood or religious life; the right to the use of material goods; in keeping with his duties and social limitations. (Pius XII, Christmas Eve Radio Message, 1942, source)

In a somewhat more explicit manner, this same Pope reiterated these things in the document Ci Riesce; the passage in question is worth quoting at length:

Another question, essentially different, is this: could the norm be established in a community of states - at least in certain circumstances - that the free exercise of a belief and of a religious or moral practice which possess validity in one of the member states, be not hindered throughout the entire territory of the community of nations by state laws or coercive measures? In other words, the question is raised whether in these circumstances "non impedire" or toleration is permissible, and whether, consequently, positive repression is not always a duty.

We have just adduced the authority of God. Could God, although it would be possible and easy for Him to repress error and moral deviation, in some cases choose the "non impedire" without contradicting His infinite perfection? Could it be that in certain circumstances He would not give men any mandate, would not impose any duty, and would not even communicate the right to impede or to repress what is erroneous and false? A look at things as they are gives an affirmative answer. Reality shows that error and sin are in the world in great measure. God reprobates them, but He permits them to exist. Hence the affirmation, "religious and moral error must always be impeded, when it is possible, because toleration of them is in itself immoral", is not valid absolutely and unconditionally.

Moreover, God has not given even to human authority such an absolute and universal command in matters of faith and morality. Such a command is unknown to the common convictions of mankind, to Christian conscience, to the sources of Revelation and to the practice of the Church ... The duty of repressing moral and religious error cannot therefore be an ultimate norm of action. It must be subordinate to higher and more general norms, which in some circumstances permit, and even perhaps seem to indicate as the better policy, toleration of error in order to promote a greater good. (Pope Pius XII, Ci Riesce, Sec. 5, source)

These are the teachings of the "recent popes" which the Council sought to develop, and did so in a very refined way. The State has the right to repress error, but this right is not always absolute; as the Pope affirmed, in certain circumstances God "would not even communicate the right to impede or to repress what is erroneous and false." The dignity of the human person, which is to say, the gift of Free Will which is his by natural law as part of Creation, must not be violated; this means that he has an absolute right to remain free from coercion, and a more limited right to remain free from repression.

No one can force me to believe; forced belief results in an invalid conversion, because faith must be a free assent. No one should force me to positively do something contrary to my beliefs; it would be to go beyond the limits that God Himself has set if the State were to impose obligatory Catholic worship upon all citizens. No one ought to create an environment in which men are more-or-less coerced to convert, and this leads to the limited right of Man to publicly exercise his faith. It is not difficult to see how a law which would have me thrown in jail for attending a Muslim mosque would create such an environment, and would ultimately result in forced conversions. Yet, this is a limited right, and one which entirely depends on the situation of the State. What would be more conducive to preserving the public order? St. Thomas Aquinas comments:

On the other hand, the rites of other unbelievers, which are neither truthful nor profitable are by no means to be tolerated, except perchance in order to avoid an evil, e.g. the scandal or disturbance that might ensue, or some hindrance to the salvation of those who if they were unmolested might gradually be converted to the faith. For this reason the Church, at times, has tolerated the rites even of heretics and pagans, when unbelievers were very numerous. (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-IIae, q. 10, a. 11)

In States which are not Catholic, St. Thomas' wisdom most certainly applies. Unbelievers are indeed "very numerous," and thus, it is more profitable in these cases to tolerate the public exercise of their faith, because this would avoid a "hindrance to the salvation of those who if they were unmolested might gradually be converted to the faith."

If we avoid reading into Dignitatis Humanae certain concepts that are not there, such as a notion of "religious freedom" that is specifically excluded by the document itself, or the notion that Man has a positive right to believe whatever he wishes, we can see how the document is indeed a legitimate development of the Traditional teaching. It does exactly what it intended to do: take up the thoughts of recent popes, such as Pius IX and Pius XII, and clarify their meaning.

Religious freedom, in the end, is not a license for Man to believe error and worship falsely; Man is still bound by his obligation to the Truth, and to God Himself - and DH confirms this explicitly. It is, however, a statement about the treatment of human beings by the State when those human beings do not profess the Truth and worship God according to His dictates. Such persons are not to be coerced, forced, persecuted, or - in certain circumstances, and within due limits - prohibited from publicly exercising their faith. Such is the teaching of even the Angelic Doctor, as well as recent Popes of unimpeachable orthodoxy.

If Dignitatis Humanae has been badly interpreted as a justification for the separation of Church and State, such cannot be supported ultimately by the words of the document itself. Only a Traditional reading of the document does full justice to its intent, and can be used as a defense against abuses of the same document.

Edited April 30, 2009 by Resurrexi

[mortify]

Cf the late Fr William Most on whether Vat II contradicted past teaching.

(It does not)

[Resurrexi]

[quote name='mortify' post='1855970' date='May 2 2009, 09:51 PM']Cf the late Fr William Most on whether Vat II contradicted past teaching.

(It does not)[/quote]

[Slappo]

Regardless of context or lack thereof ressurexi, in time the common use of words and/or phrases change. There are multiple ways to understand what a separation of Church and State means.