Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, told a Rome conference Oct. 28 that St. John Paul II never aimed merely at the fall of communism. His goal, Parolin said, was "the re-Christianization of the peoples of Europe." That hope, he said, "nevertheless remained unfulfilled" (Vatican News).
Parolin named the cause. Secularism, he said, "had excluded religion from the public sphere, no longer recognized God as the center and supreme authority of history, and put human beings in his place" (Vatican News). Parolin recalled Pius XII's verdict that the war grew from "society's departure from the teaching of Christ, which had once given Europe spiritual cohesion" (Vatican News).
That diagnosis cuts against a habit now common among churchmen: speaking of religious freedom as if it were the summit of Catholic social teaching, an absolute to be defended above the truth itself. It is not. Algiers Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco shows where that habit leads.
Asked what Christians in Europe should do, he set a fortress against fraternity. "Do we see ourselves as a besieged fortress?" he asked. He granted there are reasons to see it that way. "Or do we choose fraternity? For me, it is the only worthwhile option." Later, speaking of relations with Muslims, Vesco told CathoBel: "In monotheistic religions, proselytism is poison, because it implies considering the other person's religion false," as Advaticanum reported.
That is the error in its plainest form. If calling a false religion false is poison, then religious freedom has stopped being a protection for consciences and become a rule that no creed may be judged. The Church has never taught that. It has condemned the notion. Pope Leo XIII warned against "the liberty of worship, as it is called," which rests on "the principle that every man is free to profess as he may choose any religion or none" (Libertas 19). Applied to the state, he wrote, it means "that no one form of worship is to be preferred to another, but that all stand on an equal footing." To justify that, "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). His conclusion was flat: "it is quite unlawful to demand, to defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, of speech, or writing, or of worship, as if these were so many rights given by nature to man" (Libertas 42).
Leo taught what the state owes instead. It "is clearly bound to act up to the manifold and weighty duties linking it to God, by the public profession of religion" (Immortale Dei 6). "The Church, indeed, deems it unlawful to place the various forms of divine worship on the same footing as the true religion," though rulers may, "for the sake of securing some great good or of hindering some great evil," let other religions keep a place in the state (Immortale Dei 36). For Leo, allowing false religions to worship in public is a toleration granted from necessity, not equality. Toleration is not forced conversion. It means false religions are kept apart from the institutions of society, with no public parity and no establishment, while every man remains free to believe as he chooses.
He was exact about its limits. The Church, "while not conceding any right to anything save what is true and honest," does not forbid public authority "to tolerate what is at variance with truth and justice, for the sake of avoiding some greater evil, or of obtaining or preserving some greater good" (Libertas 33). And "the more a State is driven to tolerate evil, the further is it from perfection." The Church "usually acquiesces in certain modern liberties, not because she prefers them in themselves, but because she judges it expedient to permit them," in "the extraordinary condition of these times," and "she would in happier times exercise her own liberty" (Libertas 34).
The Second Vatican Council did not reverse this. Dignitatis Humanae teaches that "the human person has a right to religious freedom," meaning "all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power," a right that "has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person" (Dignitatis Humanae 2). That is a real right, but a civil one: immunity from coercion. It protects personal belief, which is exactly what Leo's toleration already assumed. Nor is it absolute. The council grants it "within due limits" (Dignitatis Humanae 2). "The right to religious freedom is exercised in human society: hence its exercise is subject to certain regulatory norms," the council teaches, and "society has the right to defend itself against possible abuses committed on the pretext of freedom of religion." Those norms arise from the needs of public peace and "a proper guardianship of public morality," which together "constitute the basic component of the common welfare: they are what is meant by public order" (Dignitatis Humanae 7).
The prelates who make religious freedom an absolute are not following Vatican II. The council itself limits it. It also says what it leaves alone. Its subject is "immunity from coercion in civil society," and it "leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ" (Dignitatis Humanae 1). The Catechism agrees: "The duty of offering God genuine worship concerns man both individually and socially," and Christians must "make known the worship of the one true religion which subsists in the Catholic and apostolic Church" (CCC 2105).
Read together, Leo, the council and the Catechism teach one thing. No one may be coerced into belief; the Church "is wont to take earnest heed that no one shall be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against his will" (Immortale Dei 36). That freedom of conscience is not temporary. What is temporary is the share false religions now hold in public, institutional life, standing on equal footing with the truth. That parity is a toleration for "the extraordinary condition of these times," not the ideal, and no society is excused from its duty to Christ.
That duty has a name. Pius XI taught that "all men, whether collectively or individually, are under the dominion of Christ," with no difference "between the individual and the family or the State" (Quas Primas 18). "When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony" (Quas Primas 19).
Real liberty comes from Christ the King, not from a pluralism that treats every creed alike. Religious freedom rightly guards every conscience from coercion. It does not make error the equal of truth in the life of a nation. Parolin called the re-Christianization of Europe unfulfilled. It remains the goal. So does Christendom.
