Religious Freedom, the Church, and State Coercion
by Matthew A Shadle, Public Discourse:
The Church must exercise its authority over temporal matters in a way consistent with its spiritual mission, of which the exercise of temporal jurisdiction is a betrayal. The human person is drawn by nature to seek out and hold the truth whose fullness is revealed in God’s revelation in Christ, but this vision of human fulfillment implies a human subjectivity whose freedom must be respected as it seeks out the truth which fulfills it.
The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae (DH), famously taught that individuals and religious communities have the right to act according to their conscience in religious matters, free from coercion by the civil authorities. At the same time, religious freedom should not be understood as a negation of the duty to seek out and worship God. Rather, as DH states, the Church’s teaching on religious freedom “leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.”
Some recent commentators have read that latter passage as an attempt to minimize the apparent discontinuity between DH’s teaching on religious freedom and prior magisterial teaching that the Church can “direct” the state to use its coercive power for the spiritual good of its citizens. In this view, as a previous Public Discourse essay put it, a Catholic “confessional state” is the ideal proposed by Catholic doctrine. Indeed, DH itself affirms that “Government is . . . to help create conditions favorable to the fostering of religious life. . . .”
The philosopher Thomas Pink has argued that DH’s affirmation of the right to religious freedom should be understood as a re-articulation of the traditional teaching that religious matters are outside the competence of civil authorities. In Pink’s telling, DH does not reject the notion that the Church, by virtue of its responsibility for the spiritual good of society, has the authority to direct the state to use its coercive power for spiritual ends. The Declaration’s teaching that “religious freedom . . . is to be recognized as the right of all men and communities and sanctioned by constitutional law” reflects a “policy change” on the part of the Church rather than a development in doctrine.
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