Religious Freedom: A View From Across the Pond

Religious Freedom:
A View From Across the Pond | Joanna Bogle | Catholic World Report

Vatican II’s
Declaration on Religious Freedom is just as timely today as it was fifty years
ago.

Religious freedom
is the issue of the hour: in America, in Europe, in what we (used to?) think of
as “the West”. But what is particularly interesting is that this comes just as
we are marking the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second
Vatican Council – the Council in which the Church explored the whole question
of religious freedom and gave the world a valuable document which established
the Church’s approach to this subject for the new millennium.

The Declaration on
Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, emphasised that “all men are bound to seek the truth,
especially in what concerns God and His Church, and to embrace the truth they
come to know, and to hold fast to it.” This duty is fundamental. Religious
belief cannot be imposed by government edict, or by coercion using the
authority of the State. “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.”

When this was all
being debated at the Vatican Council, and in the years immediately following,
attention focused essentially on the internal tensions within the Church on the
subject. But now the fullness of the importance and value of Dignitatis
Humanae is coming into its
own, and in circumstances that would have been unimaginable to many of the
Bishops gathered in Rome in the 1960s.

Critics of Dignitatis
Humanae, and in particular
those who support the line taken by the late Archbishop Lefevbre and his
followers, claim that it dishonours God because it is necessary to insist the
Church must be enshrined in the fabric of the State.

The reality of
things, however, has proved the prophetic and powerful value of the Declaration
on Religious Freedom: its true importance is perhaps only now emerging, as we
see what it achieved in the 1970s and 80s, and what it means for us today, and
tomorrow.

From Communism
to Contemporary Crisis

For this writer,
based in London, issues of freedom and human rights have taken a new turn in
recent years. At one time, religious freedom was an issue that chiefly
concerned people living in Eastern Europe or the old USSR – what we used to call
the “Communist bloc”. We all knew the history: from 1917 onwards, Christians
suffered under atheist regimes centred on a Marxist creed, and here were
numbers of martyrs – bishops, priests, poets, academics, campaigners for
workers’ rights, and ordinary faithful Christians who simply wanted to live out
their faith and pass it on to their children. A Christian in the West could
help only by prayer, expressions of solidarity, efforts with various
underground support networks, and so on.

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