Religious Liberty (Continuity or Contradiction?): Reading Dignitatis Humanæ within Tradition by Bernard Lucien

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


This book attempts to reconcile Dignitatis Humanae (DH) with the constant teaching of the Church and starts out, in the foreword by Dr. Alan Fimister, by claiming that one who believes that DH contradicts Church teaching is an apostate!
There are two strategies that one can use in attempting this very difficult task (because DH says the very opposite of the infallible Quanta Cura of Pope Pius IX):
1. Try to find a way to say that DH is saying the same thing as Quanta Cura. A true mission impossible!
2. Admit that DH contains a different teaching but claim that the different teaching is compatible with past teaching.

This book attempts the first strategy. It contains two essays by Fr. Bernard Lucien and one by one of his disciples, Fr. Antoine-Marie de Araujo. I did my level best to understand what Fr. Lucien is saying. But he speaks briefly and without clarity. So, to the best of my ability, here are the claims that he makes, along with my responses to them.

1. DH is saying that men have a natural right to act according to their conscience, while the previous magisterium says that men do not have a natural right to act as they wish. Thus, the two are not in contradiction.
Answer: Even if Fr. Lucien is correct about what the previous magisterium is saying and I don’t think he is, it is still an error to say that men have a natural right to act according to their conscience. The previous Popes condemned liberty of conscience very clearly. Plus, it is a totally Protestant idea, championed by Luther.
If you are taught by your parents from birth that lying in order to get out of difficult situations is good, and so that is what your conscience tells you, it still does not give you a right to lie, or even not to be hindered from lying.

2. In the time of Christendom, it was legitimate to assume that a person who was going against the Catholic faith was not following his conscience and so they were right to oppose heretics then.
Answer: We cannot presume to know the conscience of others, even if they are living in a Christian state. Were Jewish children living in 15th century Spain aware of the teachings of the Catholic Church? Certainly not! In their conscience, they thought that the Jewish faith was the true one.

3. Now, the Catholic faith is not well-manifested, even in Catholic countries, and so we cannot presume that a person is acting against his conscience if he is opposing the Catholic faith. Thus, DH is saying that a state needs to tolerate members of false religions publicly practicing their false religion, for the common good.
Answer: This is a total distortion of the teaching of DH. It states on a number of occasions that all human beings, by the fact that they are human, must not be hindered from practicing their religion. “An injury is done to the human person, and to the order established by God for men, if man is denied the free exercise of religion in society assuming that, in that exercise, a just public order is maintained” (par. 3).
This is a clear repudiation of past Catholic teaching and practice, because it is for all people of all times; it refers to the order established by God for men.

4. Since DH reasserts Catholic dogma, it is part of the ordinary magisterium and is infallible.
Answer: If it did reassert Catholic dogma, we would agree. But we disagree with Fr. Lucien’s interpretation of DH and we believe that DH is wrong, even with his interpretation.

Besides this, there is a major problem with Fr. Lucien’s presentation: no one agrees with him that this is what DH says. Certainly, no one interpreted DH that way after the Council, especially the Conciliar Popes did not. On the contrary, when Pope John Paul II had the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger reply to the dubia of Abp. Lefebvre on religious liberty Religious Liberty Questioned, Cardinal Ratzinger chose the second strategy, not the first. He chose the hermeneutic of continuity strategy.

In the end, while it is understandable that one would want to reconcile DH with constant Church teaching, because it is such a scandal that an ecumenical council of the Church would teach error, you can never avoid the plain fact that DH says the complete opposite of that teaching.




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