FREEDOM IN

THE CHURCH

LEONARD SWIDLER

FREEDOM IN

THE CHURCH

PFLAUM PRESS, DAYTON, OHIO

1969

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-93013

Pflaum Press

38 West Fifth Street

Dayton, Ohio 45402

(c) 1969 by Leonard Swidler. All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

THEMES FOR TODAY

General Editor, James O’Gara

FOREWORD BY GENERAL EDITOR

For years religion and religious institutions were thought of as relatively changeless. Indeed, for many this was precisely the great attraction of religion—it stood solid and rocklike, unchanging in the midst of a world very much in the process of change. Now those days have gone, probably forever. Today, change has become almost the normal condition. This change can be good or bad, obviously, and it is therefore more important than ever that we weigh and balance, that we exercise judgment wisely. It was for this reason that it seemed to the Editors of Pflaum Press and to me that a series of quality paperbacks would be helpful, a series specifically designed to take into account the fact of change. How do we visualize the goal of this series? Its purpose is simple, or at least is simply stated; books in the “Themes for Today” series will have one or two aims: to discuss the lasting and perennial in a contemporary fashion or to discuss the contemporary in a lasting fashion. If these goals are achieved, we will count the series a success.

JAMES O’GARA

Editor, Commonweal

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Chapter I.  Freedom and Responsibility:

The Christian Tasks

3

Chapter II. A Sense of History:

A New Freedom

12

Chapter III. The Catholic Attitude toward

History and Freedom

20

Chapter IV. Catholic Church-State Relations

and Religious Freedom

43

Chapter V.  Religious Freedom and Religious

Dialogue

59

Chapter VI. Doctrinal Authority and Freedom

in the Church

79

Chapter VII. Freedom’s Revolution: Personalization

and Democratization of the Church

105

Index

l37

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was written during the past year, which l spent as a Fellow at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, Collegeville, Minnesota. l found in that beautiful, scholarly, and friendly setting the leisure and stimulation to think through and set down a number of the problems and ideas I have been increasingly occupied with since the Second Vatican Council. For that opportunity, and many other things, I am deeply grateful to the Institute and all those associated with it.

That I was able to take advantage of the Fellowship offered me was due in no small measure to Temple University, which granted me the necessary sabbatical leave. For this, too, I am extremely thankful.

I also wish to acknowledge use of the following copyrighted material:

Excerpts from The Documents of Vatican II, published by Guild Press, America Press, Association Press, and Herder and Herder, and copyrighted 1966 by America Press. Used by permission.

Excerpts from Twentieth Century Catholicism, edited by Lancelot Sheppard, published by Hawthorn Books of New York.

Excerpts from Infallibility and the Evidence by Francis Simons, published by Templegate of Springfield, Illinois.

Excerpts from “German Catholicism in 1933" by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenforde, and “Reform and Infallibility” by George Lindbeck, permission of the editor of Cross Currents.

Excerpts from The Church by Hans Küng, (c) Verlag Herder Freiburg im Breisgau 1967, English translation (c) Burns &  Oates Ltd., 1967, published by Sheed & Ward Inc., New York.

Excerpts from Faith and Doctrine by Gregory Baum and from “Religious Liberty from ‘Mirari vos’ to the `Syllabus’” by Roger Aubert (Concilium, vol. 7 ), published by Paulist/Newman Press.

Excerpts from Faith and the World by Albert Dondeyne, published by Duquesne University Press of Pittsburgh.

I

FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY:

THE CHRISTIAN TASKS

If one were asked to put the most central, burning, current issue into one word, that word would be freedom. In fact, for the last two hundred years it has been the central word in one or other of its variant forms from liberté of the French Revolution, or “Give me liberty or give me death” of the American Revolution to Uhuru in contemporary Africa, or “Freedom Now” of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Moreover, there is no sign that the passionate search for freedom is about to abate, for within the last decade the intensity of the search has both increased and broadened.

The 1950s were the days of McCarthyism, of the Organization Men, of conformity and complacency, when the aim of college and career for men was to sink themselves ever more deeply into the folds of a giant American Linus blanket; and for women the aim was to retreat into the pseudo-sanctuary of the unfulfilling fulfillment of the feminine mystique.

But that era ended with the demise of the 1950s, and a new era was inaugurated in a preeminent way by two men named John—John F. Kennedy and John XXIII. One treated the secular as sacred, the things of man as pertaining to God; and the other treated the sacred as secular, the things of God as pertaining to man. They thereby freed the objects of their own primary concern to be what they were supposed to be. John F. Kennedy treated his human tasks as a sacred trust and thereby helped lift politics, human life, out of self-centeredness to a service of others: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” John XXIII embraced the world (as he symbolically did in his response to a life convict who asked him if God could ever forgive a murderer—Pope John threw his arms around him). He em­braced the world, with all its joys and miseries, as God’s gift to and task for man. Each with his own approach, these two men saw that only by freeing the secular from a cramped sort of selfish secularism and the sacred from a twisted sort of Manicheistic sacralism could the secular and the sacred really be fully secular and sacred, that is, when they were seen to be the same reality viewed from two different aspects. Not ac­cidentally, both men, one for the secular world and one for the Church, were also deeply committed to openness to and con­cern for others, to freedom and responsibility, for they saw that contemporary man can no longer continue to exist in a closed ghetto, unconcerned about his neighbor, that he will not live without freedom, and that he cannot live long without responsibility. These two men symbolized and partly inspired the new concerns of the sixties: freedom and responsibility, which also are two aspects of a single reality—human life.

In the decade of the sixties, the cry of freedom for the Negroes has been raised; there have been sit-ins, marches, dem­onstrations, and even violence, under the banner of freedom for the black man. Also in the decade of the sixties the cry of freedom for the poor from their grinding degradation has been raised, but this war on poverty was no more than engaged when its outcome was threatened by the escalating war in Vietnam. This war in Vietnam in turn called forth another cry of freedom, from the myth of anti-communism and from America’s infallible righteousness. In the years since the beginning of Vatican II the cry of freedom in the Catholic Church has been raised-freedom for Catholics from unholy ecclesiastical traditions to fulfill their true Gospel-centered tradition of service to God’s world.

American Catholics live in the “land of the free” and have been nurtured in a religious tradition which maintains that “the truth will make you free.” They maintain that they are free or that they have a right to be free. For some philosophers freedom is man’s greatest gift. For others, freedom is that to which man is condemned. It is well to reflect briefly on what this freedom is that everyone is talking about, that everyone is yearning and striving for.

To be free is to be unbound, to be unrestricted. But when one speaks of human freedom, one must ask what man is freed from, what man is freed for, and what the consequences of freedom and unfreedom are. It is logical to consider the last-named first, since that is where man starts, in a state of unfreedom. The theological word for unfreedom is sin. What is meant by that is not so much sins in the plural, but sin in the singular, not so much sinful acts as the sinful state out of which those acts naturally and regularly flow. The focus, then, is not so much on acts which are “wrong,” a common definition of sins, but on the state in which a person is, whereby his actions tend to be “wrong.” This wrongness, this state of sin, basically is a lack of freedom from self-centeredness. Put positively, sin is being bound to, being restricted by, one’s self. It may be asked why being self-centered is wrong, is sinful. One answer is this: experience teaches that it is the peculiar nature of man to be potentially open to all other beings. Indeed, this capacity is in some ways infinite, that is, unlimited. In many ways a man can be united to other beings even to the point of being identified with them. This is what happens in love, when man identifies with the beloved, his alter ego. It is the nature of man to be able to move beyond himself, to embrace an ever-expanding universe of persons, of beings, of all reality, even the ultimate source of all reality. Hence, to remain within the closed case of one’s self is to act contrary to one’s very structure; in more traditional terms, it is to violate the natural law. It is like a seed refusing to break out of itself and put forth the plant. Such a seed is “bad seed.” In scriptural terms, in the Jewish and Christian “law,” every man is to love his neighbor as himself. The fact is that if a man does not love, is not open to, his neighbor, he does not even really love himself, for he is shut up within himself in the pain of utter loneliness.

Once this human unfreedom or state of sin is recognized as being locked inside the case of one’s self, then the way is clear to seeing what it is man has to be freed from. To be really humanly free, man must be liberated from any and everything that restricts his openness to, his knowledge of, his love of, the other. The things that restrict a man’s openness and freedom are far too numerous to begin to list all of them, but it is well to look briefly at a few of those that have special significance today.

By way of prolegomena, it should be noted that almost everything that expands man’s universe by knowledge and love can also in turn serve as a restriction, as a somewhat larger or more heavily gilded cage. Only the attainment of an open and dynamic view of life can transform each new experience from being something like the bars of a prison into the cables of a bridge to an expanding reality.

One of the dominant forces which both opens up and restricts human lives is the cultural class in which men are born and brought up. As a child and growing young adult, man is led outward from himself by the family, friends, and neighbors around him. If his environment has been that of the great, wide middle class of America, then he has had a fair chance of being opened out by learning a certain concern for the rights and feelings of others, by absorbing a certain appreciation for learning and the arts, by assimilating a certain tendency to attach himself to some causes beyond his individual self, such as that of a political party, church, or country. If he came from the deprived class and, in too many instances, even if he came from the so-called middle class, there was more than a fair chance that he learned to think only of himself, that he absorbed an appreciation of nothing that did not have a dollar sign in front of it, that he assimilated a tendency to avoid all causes other than “me-first-ism.”

It is easy enough to see how those persons brought up in this latter group, the deprived class, have been restricted and made unfree by their cultural class. But what about the first group? How can absorbing its values be a constriction of one’s freedom? It can be a constriction of freedom, first of all, if the middle-class person, and this includes the vast majority of Americans, does not realize that there are other classes and values than his own present ones. It can be a constriction of freedom if he does not realize that there are perhaps thirty million persons in America alone, to say nothing about the overwhelming and exploding majority of the world’s popula­tion, who are living in degrading, dehumanizing poverty and who, therefore. in manifold ways, are the “other” for him. It can be a constriction of freedom if he does not realize that these “other” persons existing in poverty must be sought out known as persons, and aided in a respectful rather than in a patronizing manner. Cultural class can free men, or chain them, point them on their way to open development or drag them down; it can be a lodestone or a millstone.

Another dominant force in the lives of many is the religious tradition in which they were reared. If a religion is what it should be, it will help free men from the tyranny of the mountain of meaningless moments and experiences that life can appear to be. It can, in a preeminent fashion, help to open men to their neighbor, to all reality, and to its source. It can give them an explanation of the meaning of life, help them to bring some sort of order into, to make sense out of the day-to-day and year-to-year events.

A religion can however and often has been, a very restrictive, unfree influence in men’s lives. But when religion become restrictive, it is in reality inhuman, and, therefore, irreligious.

Far too often the religions or churches men have been brought up in have weighed them down with a myriad of ecclesiastical traditions that may, or may not, have had some meaning at one time, but which have long since lost any significance. For example: the notion that the union of Church and State is demanded by true religion has plagued Catholics, Protestants, and even some pro-Zionist Jews and Muslims for centuries. This is a tradition that in most places has at long last been shuffled off—to the great advantage of both Church and State. Some churches for centuries have vastly over-stressed the importance of official authority, of clerics, of males; other churches have insisted to the point of absurdity on literal fidelity to the Scriptures. Both these traditions are undergoing major erosion today. Some religious groups have been addicted to a legalistic following of organizational laws and moral codes; one can see this in Catholicism and in many forms of Protestantism and Judaism. These traditions are being challenged today.

Of course, the challenging of these and other constrictive traditions does not mean that all traditions are to be eliminated: for, even if that were possible, man would then be thrown into a state of anarchy, of lawlessness—and there is nothing more destructive of freedom than lawlessness. Religious traditions should not be peremptorily abrogated, but, where possible, be updated, be made effective and meaningful: for instance, a return to the ancient use of the language of the people in religious worship, as is happening in Catholicism today.

Far too often religion has held man back from his neighbor in his deepest dimension, his religious dimension, because his religion was different. There are still many Catholics and Protestants who hate each other, many Christians who hate Jews, many Christians and Jews who hate Communists— religiously. When this happens, religion, Christianity, becomes an enslaving force; it becomes the anti-Christ, for the truth of Christ should make man free and open to all men, to all reality, to all paths to God. Hence, to be authentically Christian, Christians must cease being enslaved by their tribal forms of Christianity; they must stop their fratricidal hate; they need to recall their Jewish roots and the fact that the Jewish people today are still God’s chosen people, for God’s promises are never revoked; they need to turn from their imperialistic convert-making among Muslims, Hindus, and other religious peoples and turn toward bearing witness to Christ by their lives and words, toward helping the Muslims be better Muslims and the Hindus better Hindus. This will make Christians love their liberating tradi­tions not less, but more, for these traditions will then be even more fully Christian.

It is now proper to consider what men are freed for by turning to the other aspect of human reality adjoining free­dom, namely, responsibility. If a man chooses one action rather than another, then he must answer for his choice. He must respond to the question, “Who made this choice? Who is responsible?” The person who is free, who is open and turned toward the other, is also one who will answer for his actions. The person who will run and leave others to answer for his actions, the person who is irresponsible, is not open and turned toward the other, but is turned in on himself, is self-centered, is unfree.

Therefore, if man yearns to be free, if he yearns to be open to all other men, to all reality, to God, as he learns to know more fully other men and God, he must also answer to his knowledge of them. He must be responsible to them. As much as possible and in an ever-broadening and deepening fashion, he must unite and identify with them; he must respond to their needs. In fact, he must make their needs his needs. This is the message Jesus preached by His life. “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or without a job or discriminated against or killed unjustly in Vietnam?” “What you have done to one of these the least of my brothers, you have done to me.” “My little brothers....God is love....and anyone who says ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, is a liar, since a man who does not love the brother that he can see, cannot love God whom he has never seen.”

The development of this concern for others, that is, of the capacity of the individual to make free decisions in a responsible fashion, in other words, the development of maturity, is one of the ultimate goals of every educative process, whether it be in the family, school, or other institution. Such responsible decisions require a certain knowledge concerning the area of decision and a willingness to accept the consequences of the decision. They also of necessity include the ability to make the decisions and carry them out; that is, responsible decisions presume freedom. If a person is not free to make a choice, he cannot be held responsible for the consequences. If there is no freedom, there is no responsibility, since the irresponsible person is trapped within his own self. Hence, the process of education must also include a proportioned involvement of freedom. This parallel development can be seen in a very simple way in the curricula of the various educational systems; the first years of study in general, and of a particular discipline, are rather stringently prescribed, whereas with the development of a certain amount of maturity the student is allowed more freedom of choice in following his own interests in specialization. The same pattern, of course, can be seen in the well run family. where with a very small child there is almost no freedom of choice—nor is he held responsible for his actions—but a real effort is made, as the child grows to give him proportionately greater freedom, for he is able to accept greater responsibility.

The Church, of course, is in a position similar to that of the parent and the teacher. In fact, the Church is often referred to as Holy Mother Church, and one of the most vital functions of the Church is to fulfill her mission to proclaim the Gospel, to be a teacher of the nations, to exercise her Magisterium. If this is true, then at least one of the major goals of the Church must also be that of the parent and the teacher—the development of maturity in those for whom she has concern. In many ways the Church in the past has worked vigorously toward this goal. For example, she fostered learning and the spread of learning in the Middle Ages when no other institution could. However, in recent centuries, as the masses of men have advanced in learning, and commensurate ma­turity, the Church has often tended not to allow men their proportional freedom. She has tended to continue to treat most men like children who cannot be trusted to make responsible decisions, and therefore cannot be given the necessary freedom. However, such a situation cannot continue to endure in­ definitely. Mature adults will either find a way to act freely and responsibly within the institution or in their eventual frustration and embitterment will attempt to withdraw from the institution or even destroy it.

Fortunately, Catholics are now beginning to find ways for increasing numbers of the faithful to act as free, responsible adults in the Church.

II

A SENSE OF HISTORY: A NEW FREEDOM

One of the most powerful forces within Western civilization in the last century and a half has been the burgeoning sense of history, the growing awareness of change, dynamism, evolution, in all of reality and, most particularly, in man—individual and communal. The impact of this new sense of history is only recently beginning to be felt within the Catholic Church, but the delayed impact is rapidly effecting wondrous changes, including the setting free of manifold forces of Church renewal. Hence, to understand adequately the dynamics of freedom at work in the Catholic Church today, one must analyze the bases of this new sense of history and its relationship to the Church.

History is a kind of knowledge, a knowledge of the past of at least part of a human community. As the knowledge of history spreads in a community, it becomes a sort of communal self-awareness; and it is this human self-awareness, already on an individual level, that marks man off from all other earthly creatures. This self-awareness of each individual man includes, not only a consciousness of his own unique being, but also an ever-expanding knowledge of things that are not himself. In fact, the knowledge of the two—the self and the other—are bound together by an indissoluble and proportionately developing dialectic. The more I learn to know the world about me, both in the sense of piling up fact on fact, and in the sense of penetrating somewhat the very structure of a thing, of grasping its reality, both in its essentiality and its particularity, the more 1 learn to know myself. This occurs partly by analogy with what I have learned of the other; having grasped something of the reality of the other, l may suddenly become aware of the existence of something similar in me. It also occurs partly by direct differentiation from the other; in a negative, but not therefore unimportant, way my knowledge of myself grows by learning more about what I am not. And finally, it occurs when in the very act of knowing the other I at the same time perceive myself knowing, how I am knowing, a and, therefore, to some extent, how I am not knowing.

But all of this “growing” knowledge on the part of man does not happen simply in a moment-to-moment fashion. Every man has a memory whereby he is able to accumulate the knowledge garnered from each moment. The memory, however, is a faculty which not only produces in him a quantified build up of information, but also a qualified change in his ability to perceive the reality of the other. One of the startling dis­coveries of the relatively young discipline of psychology has been to see just how much the “recollection” of past events restructures our human apparatus for perceiving the reality that is the other and our self—even though, and perhaps especially, if the recollection has faded from our conscious memory into our unconscious. A second great discovery was the realization that the simple act of recovering the past knowledge from the unconscious realm places the individual in a position to evaluate and integrate it into a more coherent structure of perceiving, assimilating, and reacting to current reality. This is one among many areas the words of Jesus, “The truth will make you free,” apply with unsuspected apt­ness.

Every man, of course, lives in a community, or rather many communities and these communities also provide some kind of collective memories—one does not have to be a nineteenth­-century romantic or an avid devotee of Carl Jung to affirm such a notion; he need simply be an empiricist. Since the Church is one of the communities the Christian does live in—in many ways one of the most humanly important communities—it also has a communal memory. It manifests itself in an almost limitless variety of ways: doctrines, functional relationships of offices, liturgies, alleged recollections of the past, postures toward all other aspects of life. The Church’s memory embraces all of life because the Church is, or should be, a totally comprehensive community; there can be no portion of reality toward which it must not take a stance. This comprehensiveness, of course, in no way necessarily implies an exclusivity, but if the Church is functioning rightly it will provide a vital Gesamtzusammenfassung (the very form of the German is an example of its matter), an integrating overview of all reality for its members.

At almost the same time psychology was uncovering the profound importance to the individual of memory, conscious and unconscious, in the perceiving of current reality, and the liberating force of the act of transferring knowledge from the unconscious to the conscious memory, history was making somewhat similar findings for communities. History in the eighteenth century was often thought to be merely a recounting of the past so as to find examples of the universal qualities of man—what was not of universal character was not looked upon as really human, and hence was often distorted and even more often ignored or not even seen. But in the nineteenth century a passion developed for the particular, for the unique, and in the very growth of this knowledge men became aware of growth and finally perceived how this growth metamorphosed their perception of reality; that is, the nineteenth century positivist view of history—the purist searching for wie es eigentlich gewesen —gave way to an ever growing awareness of just how much the history man writes is formed by what he brings to this study of the documents.

It is rather dramatically apparent how this sense of history, this awareness of growth in all things, has influenced the Church in her liturgy. The very act of learning how we arrived at the various rigid forms of the liturgy was sufficient to release us from an unwarranted bondage to these forms. The past experiences could then be evaluated for what they really were and placed in proper perspective and integrated into all the rest of the Church’s experience—proper to the Church’s current needs, that is. The Church, like all vital communities, must be constantly “aggiornamentoized” to fulfill its proper function. Good history has here deabsolutized historical reality e.g., the Latin silent canon did not pre-exist in some pseudo-Platonic world of ideas and wait until the ninth century to incarnate itself forever thereafter. It developed out of a specific set of concrete, temporal circumstances, and must be evaluated accordingly.

In the area of doctrine the present “coming of age” of the Church is beginning to produce even more spectacular results. First of all, the Church is now acquiring a new awareness of how important it is to know the whole history of a dogmatic formula in order to interpret it accurately. Where before an analytic, scholastic approach was often used exclusively, the problems of theology now are often placed first in historical perspective, with the result that many of the old impasses dissolve. Instead of merely taking a dogmatic formula and analyzing it, as it were, on the table in front of him, the contemporary Catholic theologian—who is also half historian—studies the original documents bearing on the problem. For example, until very recently Catholic theologians took the statements of the Council of Trent on Scripture and Tradition to mean that the sources of Christian faith are found partly in Scripture and partly in Tradition. But historian-theologians like Geiselmann and Tavard now argue very tellingly that such was not the meaning of Trent’s statement at all.¹ In fact, a draft which included the formula “partly in Scripture and partly in Tradition” was explicitly rejected by the Council fathers. Instead they settled for the words “et . . . et,” “both . . . and,” which deliberately left several interpretations possible.

Another timely example might be the final phrase that was added at the last moment to the statement of Vatican I which sweepingly argued that papal statements were irreformable of themselves and not by consent of the Church, ex sese non ex consensu ecclesiae. Such a statement might easily be construed to indicate that the Pope can, merely by fulfilling the prerequisites outlined in the rest of Vatican I’s decree, issue an irreformable decree quite apart from the consensus, that is, the general mind, or faith, of the Church. However, when one becomes aware of the long history of Gallicanism and its influence even into the nineteenth century, and adds to that the awareness of the tendency to associate Gallicanism with the French Revolution—and all the agony for the Church it entailed—it is not difficult to understand how many bishops would have been so intent upon crushing out every possible ember of Gallicanism; and this included the tenet that decrees of the Pope could enjoy infallibility and, hence, irreformability, only if the body of bishops indicated their consent. It is apparent from the speeches and writings of the minority bishops at Vatican I that one of their major concerns was to see that the final formulary did not give the impression that the Pope could somehow be isolated from the rest of the Church in his role as infallible teacher. Except for a handful of extremists like Cardinal Manning, the members of the majority seemed to answer the resisting minority, “Yes, yes, we agree that the Pope is not to be isolated from the Church in his infallible teaching, but that is clear enough; what we must make certain of is that the old virus of Gallicanism, now veiled in the democratic notion that the consent of the bishops must be somehow obtained before the Pope can make an infallible statement, be absolutely stamped out.” Hence, one can make an excellent case for arguing that the phrase non ex consensu ecclesiae was intended to eliminate the requirement that the consent of the bishops be obtained, as in a poll; it did not intend at all to say that the Pope could speak infallibly outside the consensus of the Church. Such an understanding of this statement surely would leave open many more avenues of development than would the former interpretation.

It should also be pointed out that just as the individual attains a greater knowledge of himself, by an ever fuller differentiation of himself from the other—and this, paradoxi­cally, enables one to identify oneself with the other in love much more profoundly because a possible veiled egoism is thereby eliminated—so also does a community, in this instance, the Church. Theologians, often having sympathetically immersed themselves in history, are today much more deeply aware that dogmatic formularies function largely as delimiting factors. They state that outside of certain areas the truth of specific mysteries of the faith is not to be found; which of the many possible understandings of the formulary is the true one the formulary itself, of course, cannot say—only the actual life of the Church can provide the key to this. One student of Catholic theology has stated this notion very well:

To use a metaphor, what a dogma does is to draw a line across an indefinitely wide expanse of possible affirmations. On the one side are the affirmations which it excludes, which, if it is well-formulated, it clearly and unambiguously says are false. On the other side, is an indefinitely large number of mutually incompatible religious meanings and theological interpretations which it admits as possibly true, but only one of which is actually true. It would be nonsense to demand of a dogma that it designate which one of its possible interpretations is the true one. It is no more possible to do this than to square a circle...

The positive theological meaning and concrete religious significance of a dogmatic formulation must be viewed as coming from outside, from the Bible the worship and the life of the Christian community, and the general cultural and intellectual context. The primary function of a dogma must therefore be to exclude error; its role, not only as a matter of historical fact but in the very nature of the case, must be primarily negative and defensive.²

But perhaps most deep-going of all the changes the modern sense of history is beginning to work in the Church and its doctrine is the inchoative acceptance of the fact that doctrine grows or develops in a much more profound way than was previously thought. Development of doctrine is not just a mak­ing explicit, by way of logical deduction, of what was previously implicit. It certainly is not a simple, always progressive, “or­ganic” growth as from the acorn into the oak tree—to use Newman’s image—for there have been some obvious reversals, such as in the teaching on religious freedom in the last one hundred years. Nor is it sufficient to say that the substance of the doctrine remains the same in each age, but the formulation of it can be changed and perhaps improved, as good Pope John stated in such quiet revolutionary fashion. What is de­manded as the community of the Church attains a greater knowledge of itself and the other (in dialectic fashion) is not just a reformulation of the mysteries of the faith, but also a reconceptualization.

As the community becomes more fully human (the element of hope grows ever stronger here, for as we scale the mountain of our potentialities, the heights become evermore dizzy and could lead to an evermore disastrous fall), it is naturally going to require a proportionately greater degree of freedom in conceptualizing and expressing the mysteries of the faith. This by no means implies a complete sort of relativism; there are a number of definite constants: the revelation as found in the Scriptures and the Apostolic Church; Tradition, which will provide us with a sort of series of proportionalities (for example, what transubstantiation was to the mystery of the Real Presence in the Middle Ages, “transsignification” and other attempts at reconceptualization are trying to be today); the living Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. These, of course, are not the building blocks of a mechanistic kind of system which can produce the eternal verities in concepts and formularies eternally valid for all people, times, and places. They are more like the living tissues which in vital organic interaction can transcend themselves.

Here we fumble with the latest gift of the new sense of history; the past leads to the present but it also implies the future, which contains the radically unknown; for history shows us that because of man’s freedom the present is not limited to an unfolding of the potential of the past. Man’s freedom, despite all its restrictions, places in his hands the power of creativity. This has always been so, but now that the new sense of history has made the Christian more profoundly aware of it, its opera­tion on the communal level of the Church will be the more profound.

III

THE CATHOLIC ATTITUDE

TOWARD HISTORY AND FREEDOM

Because man is most profoundly the product of his past, he must study that past very carefully so that he may know himself more precisely. This is doubly mandatory for the Christian since Christianity is a historical religion. Yet if the history of man can be summed up in one or two words, they would be, as Lord Acton indicated, freedom and unfreedom. Hence it is very important today, as the new sense of history and freedom dawn on us both as men and as Christian men, to analyze carefully what our understanding of and attitude toward history and freedom has been.

In studying his own past, man must approach the task as diligently, critically, and sympathetically as possible, taking care to be as objective as he can. However, at times man must also take on another task when reviewing his past, a task that is incumbent upon him not specifically as a student of the past, as an historian, but rather as a man: namely, making a judgment about the object studied. Again, this obligation will be doubled when a Christian and the study of the Christian past is involved.

After an event or an institution has been studied in true historicist fashion—that is, after it has been discerned with meticulous objectivity, using all the sources possible, and leaving no evidence aside because it does not seem to fit an a priori schema, and after the subject has been evaluated in terms of the principles of its time and not ours—there will, I believe, be occasions when a judgment should be made by the Christian on the “Christian-ness” of an institution; and obviously no one is in a better position to render such a judgment than the intelligent Christian who has carefully studied the institution in question. Some would side with Herbert Butterfield¹ and say that the student of the past should never make moral judgments—except in the historic fashion; some would agree with Isaiah Berlin and maintain that men studying their past cannot avoid making moral judgments.² What I am suggesting here is that “for the sake of argument” Mr. Butterfield be granted his point—although I personally am inclined to side with Mr. Berlin— but that the student of the past, not as an historian, but as a Christian man, decide whether or not the spirit of Christ has been in the institution under study. I am suggesting this for institutions, not men, for, as Mr. Butterfield points out, the hearts of men are hard to read for anyone who is not God.

Perhaps an example will help make the point clearer. In studying the Inquisition, the Christian—and here permit me to narrow the category to Roman Catholic in order to eliminate the possibility of polemics—will, like every other student of the past, have the obligation of describing the institution and the conditions of its time. He will have to point out that in this period of Western civilization Church and State, the sacred and secular, were so interwoven that a revolt against one would most probably have involved a revolt against the other. Any one who preached heresy was also a disturber of the civil peace. Moreover, the Church as such did not perform the execution, but merely handed the culprit over to the State authorities. Torture was a common practice among civil officials in at­ tempting to extract confessions, and so this inquisitorial practice must be seen as a reflection of the cruelty of the times. At the same time it must be recalled that there was a great deal of hypocrisy and abuse in the practice of the Inquisition, al­though of course an institution cannot be condemned because of the abuse of it.

But after all this has been said, the Catholic must then step back and as a Catholic hold up the Inquisition to the most objective standard of Christianity he can find: the life of Jesus and the early Church as found in the New Testament and early documents. Of course some subjectiveness will creep in here. But this is an inevitability in the human structure of things. However, in this instance I believe the facts in the documents loom so large that they cannot be pulled out of focus by the honest person. When this comparison is made, the conclusion must be that the Inquisition is essentially unchristian in almost every aspect. The very idea that adherence to a belief in Christ and a loving worship of Him can be forced is inimical to the whole spirit of the Gospel. The “joyful news” cannot be crammed down someone’s throat under the threat of the torch. Fortunately, Catholic historians are finally taking this position today. One Catholic scholar refers to the erecting of the Papal Inquisition in the thirteenth century as one of the darkest pages in the history of the Church, a phenomenon that no one today will justify.³

In the light of past experiences, it would seem that Catholics are especially prone to certain temptations when they consider specifically Catholic institutions.

The first temptation is one that is peculiar to all men who are committed to an institution of long standing, and is particularly acute when the institution is one that has claims of infallibility: witness the writing of history by some Russian Marxists. The temptation for the Catholic is to defend everything that the Church, or that Church authorities, have done in the past. By starting out with this attitude, even unconsciously, the Catholic destroys himself as an honest man. He becomes instead a more or less technically sophisticated polemicist. He is not seeking the truth really; he is seeking to discomfit his enemy and win an argument. Moreover, he in reality does God and the Church a grave disservice. God is pleased by nothing less than the complete truth; how could He be other since He is Truth? And when the Church is defended by something less than the whole truth, she is stained and contaminated by the falsity involved: she to some extent becomes captive to the “lie”; and one lie always leads to other, bigger ones and to a constriction of freedom. And when the truth does finally come out, there is a horrible disillusionment and very painful catharsis for all the faithful.

Perhaps an example will again help to clarify this point. Catholics for centuries have felt called upon to defend the late medieval and early modern Church in almost all its aspects. The most they would admit was that there were some unhappy conditions, but not nearly so many as non-Catholics have insisted; besides, these “peccadillos” are to be expected in all human institutions, and the Protestant Churches were just as bad or worse. Somehow the Calvinist execution of Servetus “justifies” the St. Bartholemew’s Day Massacre. We are all familiar with this approach; we have seen it in our grade school, high school, and even college textbooks, in the pamphlets at the rear of the churches, and heard it in sermons from the pulpit and talks in parish halls and at church banquets. But what were the conditions of religious life in Christendom at the beginning of the sixteenth century? They were indeed bad, so bad that one Catholic scholar, Josef Lortz, says that the Reformation was “historically necessary.”⁴ Catholic historians like Lortz, Jedin, and other European scholars have at last begun to admit the evils that were rife in the Catholic Church at that time, not in some sort of gleeful masochism, but with penitent “nostra culpa’s” before God and the world—both of whom Catholics have offended. And this action has not injured the Church. On the contrary, it has improved the Church in the eyes of those within and without it.

Another temptation for Catholics, quite similar to the one just discussed, is an inordinate falling back on Providence in describing Christian history. One Catholic thinker has remarked that there can be really no philosophy of history, but only a theology of history.⁵ For the Christian this is perhaps true, for we can speak of the ultimate goals of the movements of history only within the framework of God’s revelation in Christ. The inclination of many Catholics in the past has been in effect to play God. They have often seen all sorts of divine patterns in events, patterns that frequently had a greater reality in their imaginations than in God’s Providence, which we refer to as inscrutable. It seems to me that it is inscrutable not only in the present and future, but also most often in the past. Saying that all history is in God’s hands says so much that, as far as seeing patterns in concrete details is concerned, it comes close to saying nothing. We may be able to make out some very large and very general patterns and faint glimmerings here and there. But we should be very careful not to try to apply these patterns in too specific a fashion or even be too wedded to the general patterns, for they may appear to need adjustment at some future date. Otherwise there will arise the problems of Leibnitz’s best of all possible worlds.

This aspect of the problem concerning the relationship of history and Providence may not be quite so pressing today as another side of the problem which is most closely related to the tendency to defend everything. The Catholic who cannot bring himself to controvert the unpleasant facts he finds in the history of Christianity or the history of the Church may suc­cumb to the temptation to say that it was obviously all in the Providence of God, that He must have willed it that way so that something better could grow out of it. Here we come very close to the ancient’s concept of fate: whatever happened did so because it had to; it was inevitable. The pseudo-Christian version is that it had to happen because it was in God’s Providence. Obviously there is a sense in which this is true: all things happen because God permits them. But this fact in no way eliminates intermediate causes. It was all right for the scientifically naive man to stop with saying that the grain grows because God makes it grow; but the agronomist surely must search for more immediate, physical causes. So too must the student of history: he also needs to search for the more im­ mediate, historical causes, whether they be social, political, economic, geographic, or a combination of several of these. Moreover, it must be especially noted that here a free creature is involved; and although God’s omnipotence is not to be frus­trated, His dealings with man do not, cannot—by God’s own fiat found in the natural structure of reality—destroy this freedom. There have been endless discussions about determin­ism and free will, God’s omnipotence and man’s freedom on the natural level, and about grace and free will on the super­natural. But we must remember that two mysteries are in­volved here: the ultimately “unexplainable” free will of man, and the essential omnipotence of God. Not being able to com­pletely analyze the two, man finds it impossible ever to see clearly how the two intermesh.

Another kindred temptation for the Catholic is, after having found unpleasant facts in the history of the Church, to attempt to explain them away with specious, post-factum arguments and maintain that the actions taken were necessary, were the best possible at that time and under those circumstances, and that if those measures had not been taken matters would have been even worse. Sometimes, many times, this will be true. But to assume that it is always true is to canonize the past merely because it is past, a slightly paraphrased version of Alexander Pope’s dictum, “whatever is, is right.” It has already been pointed out that the best contemporary Catholic historians have complained that the founding day of the Inquisition was a dark day for the Church. It was a dark day, not only as seen from the twentieth century, but an evil day, a day injurious to the Church, in the thirteenth century. If the Church had not inaugurated the Inquisition but had met the problem—it was profound, widespread, and demanded drastic action—with positive approaches in preaching and teaching that were com­patible with the spirit of the Gospels, the Church and society would have been better then, and now, for it. True, the Al­bigensian and other heresies were suppressed after many bloody decades. But the cure was worse than the disease; the reforms that were called for explicitly or implicitly by the Waldensians, Lollards, and others were merely postponed until the day of reckoning came in l5l7.

Recently the Index was abolished, and many Catholics have taken the attitude that the Index has now become outmoded and therefore a change was in order. The temptation for Catho­lics is to say that, of course, in the sixteenth and ensuing centuries it was necessary and good that the Church established and maintained the Index (it was first drawn up by the ex­tremist Cardinal Caraffa, then Pope Paul IV, in l 559 ). The fact that the Index has been in the Church for four hundred years is prima facie evidence that it was a good thing. But the intelligent Catholic cannot stop with such superficial evi­dence. The evil of nepotism was a long time with the Church, but that does not justify it at its beginning or anywhere during its history. A thorough study of the facts will indicate, l believe, that the Index caused more harm than good even in the sixteenth century.

Any number of events happened in the Church during the Reformation and Counter-reformation periods that intelligent Catholics find shocking today: the almost absolute freezing of the liturgy in the Latin language, the forbidding even of the translation of the prayers of the Mass into a modern language (renewed by Pope Pius IX in 1857 and in force until the time of Pope Leo XIII),⁶ the extremely severe restrictions on possessing and reading the Bible by Catholic layman⁷ and many more. Catholics in the past have leapt to the “defense” of the Church here again—as they also have in the very embar­rassing Galileo case. But again I believe a case for challenging the value of these proscriptions may be made by an objective Catholic who has studied the facts thoroughly without an a priori inclination to assume that they must have been good for the Church, at least at that time. For example, many “concessions” on the vernacular in the liturgy were made to countless Germans to good effect as far as the Catholic Church was con­cerned. The historical research of Lortz, Veit, Lenhart, and others strongly indicates that a more open, permissive policy on the vernacular by Catholic authorities in the sixteenth cen­tury would have been far wiser;⁸ from just the Counter-Refor­mation point of view it would have “stolen some of the thunder” of the Protestants.

Several special tasks confront the Catholic when he considers the past history of his own Church.

One task may be well designated as an apologetical one, not in the sense of “leaping to the Church’s defense,” a tactic which has already been discussed, but in the sense of translating the significance of the past history of the Church to the world, a sort of demythologization of the Church. Obviously there will be times when deliberate misrepresentations will have to be set aright. But what is meant here is of a kind of kerygmatic presentation of Christianity and the Church to the world; this is in some way a participation in the bringing of the Word of God to the world, but the Word as He has extended Himself in His Church over the centuries. This in no way means a dis­tortion of facts or a covering of blemishes in the body of the Church; all must be made bare so that it may be cleansed. The Catholic should be able to understand the central Christian meaning of historical Christian institutions—whether they be distorted in outward form or no—and explain them to his contemporaries in a language that will speak to them and their problems. Mutatis mutandis this is the perennial task of all students of the past. The presentation of the facts, all the facts, and their significance is all that is necessary—but it is all necessary. This is what Leo XIII had in mind when he opened the Vatican archives to scholars and admonished them to re­port only and all the truth. Leo’s admonition was needed not only by non-Catholics but even, sadly, by Catholics who were members of the hierarchy. For example, the editor of Lord Acton’s correspondence, Cardinal Gasquet, muted or even sup­pressed many of Acton’s stronger expressions, presumably in Acton’s and the Church’s interests⁹. More recently Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler, auxiliary bishop of Munich, has been ac­cused of altering and suppressing portions of documents on Catholic Church-State relations under the Nazis, which he edited in the book Kreuz und Hakenkreuz (Munich, 1946).¹⁰ These and the like, of course, are unforgivable sins for the non­-Catholic scholar; they do not become less so for the Catholic.

Another task the student of history must perform for all society, and this is also a task the Catholic must perform for Christian culture, is to prevent temporal, historical conditions from becoming absolutized. This is a particularly critical task in such a long-enduring—and hence tradition-revering and authoritarian-oriented—institution as the Catholic Church. Many of the customs of the Catholic religion and the institu­tions and cultures it has inspired are presumed to be absolute essentials, whereas they are merely the results of historical ac­cident.

A familiar example is the notion that the very essential sa­credness of the liturgy necessitated its being performed in Latin. We now know, thanks to historical research, that nothing could be farther from the truth. When the Apostles preached the Word, they naturally spoke in the language the people under­stood. When the first Christian communities worshiped to­gether, they also naturally used a language they understood; to have thought of doing something else would have been the hallmark of a madman. So it happened that the first liturgy that developed in Rome was in koinè Greek, the language most generally understood at that time and place. When in the latter part of the second century and the first part of the third, Greek became less and less understood, a switch was made in the Roman liturgy from Greek to Latin, the language which was then understood by most. Matters were fine for the next few centuries, but gradually from the sixth through the tenth cen­turies the spoken Latin language—the lingua vulgata of St. Jerome in the beginning of the fifth century—became the various vernaculars, the ancestors of the modern Romance lan­guages.

But the Mass remained in Latin, a language some of the clergy had an opportunity to master, but very few others, and this also increased the clergy-laity split. This meant that the Scriptures read to the people could no longer be understood by them; the whole of the liturgical act of the Mass, the com­munal worship, became something mysterious, sacral, distant from the people, something which belonged mainly to the priests and monks, and before which the people were to stand in un-understanding, humble awe. The Jesus Christ of the Bible and of the Lord’s Supper tended to disappear, and in his place there appeared the unapproachable, transcendent Panto­crator. All this is reflected in those magnificent monuments of architecture and liturgical monstrosities, the romanesque and gothic cathedrals. First, they are of gigantic size—to think of having a supper in them is preposterous. Then the altar is set far off at one end—obviously to be observed only from a great distance. A long, long choir space between the high altar and the first rows of the faithful assured the proper distance between the great unwashed and the august mysteries cele­brated by the clergy, with an ever multiplying number of very esoteric ritualistic gestures. Not to be outdone by Orthodoxy’s Iconastasis, scores of Western cathedrals set up rood screens, by means of which the sanctuary was almost entirely shut off from the view of the congregation.

But these medieval cathedrals also reflect something else that resulted from the failure to understand, and hence to participate in, the communal Christian worship. Hundreds of churches were dedicated to Mary under one title or another throughout the Middle Ages. Because Jesus Christ became so remote and because the official liturgy did so little to satisfy man’s natural religious needs, medieval man turned to someone who was closer to him, someone who could sympathize with him, who would be warm and human to him, stand between him and the terrible, judging God. He turned to Mary and the saints. Without question there is a definite place in the Christian economy of salvation for the saints and the Mother of God. Remembering them and honoring their memories in certain ways helps Christians to remain more closely united to the whole Christ; they can also often serve as models and inspira­tions. But there is also no question but that the veneration of the saints, and particularly of the Blessed Virgin Mary, grew far out of proportion in this period in the life of the Church. Communion at Mass was very rare in the Middle Ages, but all sorts of extra-liturgical devotions, largely in honor of the saints and the Virgin Mary, multiplied greatly. The search for relics became at times a mania; pilgrimages were all the vogue; no­venas proliferated; the rosary—a poor substitute for the l50 psalms of the psalter—was stressed; the Blessed Virgin “ap­peared” to more and more people; almost every village canon­ized its own saint; and so it went, up to the eve of the Reforma­tion. And why? Largely because the Lord’s Supper, the liturgy, had become meaningless to the people, and that largely be­ cause of the use of Latin. Catholics continued to hold tena­ciously to this liturgical custom spawned in the so-called Dark Ages. But at long last historical research and Vatican ll opened the way to deabsolutize this medieval custom.

Another example of an “absolutized” custom is the notion that lay people per se cannot engage in preaching; that this is a responsibility and a privilege that belongs essentially and exclusively to the cleric. One may try to argue from philosophical or theological grounds that this is not so, but that is not even necessary. Using the principle ab esse ad posse the student of history needs only to point out the many times in past history that Catholic Church authorities, indeed Pope Innocent III himself, empowered lay people to preach in Church. Even Cardi­nal Wiseman. of whom it was said that he “subordinated the laity to the clergy in all matters in which religion was con­cerned, including education and politics,”¹¹ reported laymen preaching from the pulpits of churches in Rome in the middle of the nineteenth century.¹²

To carry out his tasks properly, the Catholic must live in an atmosphere of freedom, freedom to search out the truth and speak it, regardless of the embarrassment it may cause. This also is true when the Catholic is looking at the history of the Church. It has been noted that no less a person than Pope Leo XIII said that this was the right and duty of the student of history. Unfortunately, such has not always been the atti­tude of all Catholic Church authorities. The problem of free­dom has long been an issue of concern in the Catholic Church. It certainly was not missing even in the earliest days of Christianity. But it was particularly sharpened during the latter part of the so-called Dark Ages and the Middle Ages as the Church and the State became more closely wedded. This marriage was especially pregnant with mischief for Christian freedom: as witness the essentially new Christian phenomenon of burning heretics at the stake, as witness the Inquisition and all its horrors, under the threat of the torch.

Still, there was a great deal of liberty within Christendom—within certain limits—and in some ways this liberty was in practice expanded at the time of the Renaissance—only partly because the papacy suffered formidable blows against its authority and prestige with the rise of the national monarchies, the Avignon Papacy, the Western Schism, and Conciliarism. Unfortunately these events, and others, helped to prepare the ground for the Reformation that was long overdue. Also unfortunately the reforms effected by Luther, Calvin, and others did not produce a unified reformed Christian Church, as they had hoped. Rather, it divided Christianity into warring camps which proceeded to close ranks, to whip their citizenry into phalanxes prepared for total war. Thus the Protestant Reforma­tion exacerbated the problem of freedom—at least for Roman Catholics.

In the latter half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries there was a certain relaxation of this closed-rank, vigilant attitude among Catholics, if only because of weariness, the inroads of the Enlightenment and rationalism, and the attacks upon the authoritarianism of the Church by the Philosophes and others: witness the dissolution of the Jesuits, the rise of Gallicanism, Febronianism, and Josephinism.

But it is in the nineteenth century—the century of freedom and liberalism—that we witness an extraordinary rolling back of Christian freedom, an extraordinary growth of archconserva­tive authoritarianism, of Catholic ghettoism.

This is the century that saw the condemnation by Pope Gregory XVI of the perfectly orthodox Lammenais, who had attempted to foster a rapprochement between Catholicism and liberal thought. This was also the century which witnessed the pontificate of the longest reigning pope in the history of the Catholic Church, Pius IX. It was he who, on the strength of the papacy, declared the doctrine of the Immaculate Concep­tion; it was also he who issued the infamous “Syllabus of Errors” in 1864 in which he stated that it was erroneous for anyone to say that “the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile and align himself with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” All this reached a climax with the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870 and the forbidding of all Italian Catholics to participate in Italian politics or to even vote, because of the loss of the Papal States to the newly unified Italian national state. Thus in a way all liberalism, all democracy, all science, all contact with the non-Catholic and modern world was condemned as being at best a waste of time and highly dangerous.

However, the reaction on the part of Roman Catholics—perhaps best exemplified on the civil scene by Count de Maistre and his insistence on the reestablishment of those two pillars of society, the Pope and the executioner—is by no means historically and psychologically unintelligible.

Already during the Enlightenment, the Catholic Church was attacked from many sides under the banner of liberty. During the French Revolution, with its slogan of liberté, fraternité, egalité, the Church was tremendously ravaged—and not merely on the physical level. Priests and religious were persecuted, exiled, and murdered. Church property was desecrated—some being rededicated to the goddess of reason—and confiscated all over France and Central Europe. The situation was only somewhat ameliorated by Napoleon—the same Napoleon who kidnaped and browbeat Pope Pius VII. But the Church’s troubles were only just starting. The movement of democratic liberalism in its wider nineteenth-century sense cut away at the very foundation of the authoritarian, hierarchical structure of the Church and of society in general. This was followed by the more perverse movement of socialism, which would destroy the very basis of society—and hence the Church—that is, private property. And as if this were not enough, there then came the satanic development of communism—the embodiment of materialism and atheism. Add to this the fact that the period between 1815 and 1870 was constantly filled with revolutions all over Europe and North and South America, the development of anarchism, scientism, evolutionism, and Protestant liberal theology” with its debunking of the Bible as a Jesus myth foisted upon humanity by a dozen or so Jewish  fishermen. and one will begin to see why so many nineteenth-century Christians were in a panic. Nothing seemed certain; nothing seemed stable anymore Everything appeared to be washed away in the deluge of revolution and isms that swept across nineteenth-century Europe. In terror people frantically searched for something stable Many Catholics found it in all authority in Church with its structured-from-above hierarchy and the papacy at its apex. The cry among many seemed to be, “To Peter, to the rock!” An impenetrable bastion was built around the rock fortress, and the condemned world was shut out. Until better times would come, only invectives and sallies were to come forth from the rock.

Those loyal Catholics of the nineteenth century who saw no incompatibility between the legitimate claims of liberalism and Catholic principles, between modern historical research and science in general on the one hand and the advancement of the Catholic faith on the other? unfortunately received short shrift. Lord Acton and his colleagues were a dramatic example; there were many others not so dramatic. For several years in the 1850s and 1860s Acton was one of the editors of an English Catholic quarterly, the Rambler; the articles published were on a high intellectual plane—by far the best in Catholic England. But because the Rambler exulted in the variety and freedom of Catholic thought in all areas beyond matters of faith, because it affirmed its right to speak on all matters not defined by the Church and to proclaim the truth regardless of the inconvenience that might be caused or the reputations that might be impugned, it came to be regarded by the hierarchy, ever fearful of anything that might disrupt the delicate balance of English Catholicism, as an enfant terrible. The pressures on Acton to say nothing controversial, to conform in the name of the faith, became almost overpowering. Acton, however, spoke out many times for intellectual freedom. On one such occasion he said:

Solicitude for religion is merely a pretext for opposition to the free course of scientific research. which threatens, not the authority of the Church, but the precarious influence of individuals. The growth of knowledge cannot in the long run be detrimental to religion but it renders impossible the usurpation of authority by teachers who defend their own false opinions under pretense of defending the faith....They want to shelter their own ignorance by preserving that of others. But religion is not served by denying facts! or by denouncing those who proclaim them.¹³

Nevertheless, Acton and his friends were eventually forced out of Catholic journalism through the pressures of the English hierarchy and the Vatican.¹⁴ In fact, Acton’s whole scholarly life was pretty well ruined by the stifling restrictions present in Catholic England. He never produced his magnum opus, a history of freedom, for which he had huge bundles of notes.

The conservatives were dominant during the rest of the pontificate of Pius IX and on into the time of Leo XIII, although here they were gradually restricted and held back. Leo, for example, gave the Cardinal’s hat to the aged and almost broken John Henry Newman; many of the Vatican archives were thrown open to all scholars; the relatively revolutionary social encyclical Rerum novarum was written. There was the beginning of a renaissance, an upsurge of Catholic freedom; Catholic historical and biblical studies began to catch up with the rest of the world; there was even a beginning of a flowering of a Catholic lay movement in this country.

But this seemed to be only a hiatus, for soon after Pius X came to the papal throne in 1903 a terrible purge took place under the guise of rooting out the heresy of “Modernism.” Doubtless there were nonorthodox elements in the ideas of several so-called modernists. But unfortunately these elements were used as an excuse for the conservatives to conduct a campaign of terror, driving practically all of the Catholic Church’s best scholars into silence, for example, Pére Marie Lagrange, the founder of modern Catholic biblical scholarship. Vigilance Committees were ordered to be set up in every diocese throughout the world; these were to meet periodically—in secret—to report on any modernist tendencies noted among the priests or their writings and take appropriate measures to stamp them out. The censors worked overtime; Catholic schol­arship was relegated to mouthing outdated, and hence in­effective, formulas.

Only after many years did the fervor of the heresy-hunt abate. But the restrictions on Catholic freedom remained very severe. Gradually, in slow, piecemeal fashion Catholic schol­ars pushed forward in various areas—but no one will ever know the number of books that never saw the light of day because of lack of ecclesiastical permission. Not that all of the books would have been good or that none of them would have contained nonorthodox ideas; but in man’s human condition he must be permitted to make errors in the search for truth—there is no alternative.

Those who would “protect” the Church by chaining freedom were, and are, always there insisting that certain problems are not open for discussion, that certain aspects ought not to be publicized, or at best that they should not be brought out into the open now. One Catholic, however, defended himself thus:

One’s obligation to historical truth does not admit of half-way measures, and facing up to this obligation has time and again proved to be the best way of serving one’s cause. Certainly, in times of open or concealed ideological conflict every impartial statement and every unbiased argument can be misused like a poisoned arrow. But anyone who considers a word of critical reflection within the Church to be opportune only when it could not be turned against her by an enemy would have to wait to the end of time. It is part of the conditions of existence for the Church that at no time does she lack enemies lying in wait for her....

Rather, it can only be a question of faithfully reporting what ac­tually happened and of getting at the root of the mistakes that were made at that time. That is the easiest way to learn lessons and draw conclusions applicable to the present and to the future.¹⁵

Gradually the so-called “new theology” developed, almost in underground fashion. At any rate the impression was given by the conservatives, who held most of the key positions of power, that this “new theology” was at best very dangerous and most likely contained large heretical elements. Those who had “liberal” ideas in the Catholic Church were made to feel that they were a very small minority, with very suspect ideas, who were kicking against the goad of the majority. All of the liberals apparently believed this; whether or not from their ecclesiasti­cal vantage points the conservatives also sincerely believed is difficult to say. Judging, however, from their very negative re­ action to Pope John’s suggestion that a Council be convened—and the dogged resistance on the part of some, notably in the Curia—the conservatives either knew that they were a minority overruling a majority, or at least had a terrible fear—a justified one, it might be added—that this would prove to be so.

The liberals all strove mightily before the Council in a sort of desperate hope that a breakthrough in progress and liberty could be made. For the most part they were not optimistic—at least not in public and not in print. Hans Küng’s book on reform and the Council, which came out in German in the middle of l96l, was mildly optimistic, but mostly urgent in its plea that everything be done to make the Council a success. But a year later, shortly before the Council opened, his articles on the Council indicated a growing pessimism. It was not only the liberals who were striving mightily to promote their cause at the Council. The conservatives were diligently at work, too. Moreover, they seemed to have all the advantages. They sur­rounded Pope John and influenced him in many ways, as witness the papal statement Veterum sapientia in 1962, legis­lating greater insistence on the use of the Latin language in the Church. Pope John, who by his own admission never could speak Latin with any facility, certainly did not think of this himself. Probably even more important, the conservatives held most of the chairmanships and other key positions on the various commissions that worked to prepare the draft material to be discussed by the Council Fathers. The conservatives were all set to push through the Council their rather polemic, nineteenth-century scholastically phrased schemas with a minimum of discussion.

But then that which the conservatives most feared, and the liberals most hoped for, happened. A number of liberal Cardinals spearheaded a resistance against the conservatives’ attempt to make the Council a rubber-stamp affair. For the first time in a century the Catholic episcopate began to learn to know one another. The liberals found to their surprise and joy that they were not some small suspect minority, but that they formed a large part of the Church; and before the first session of the Council was over, they formed an overwhelming majority on many issues. Doubtless all those who voted for the reform schemas did not go to the Council as liberals. But the liberals appeared to be the ones with the most dynamic ideas. Moreover, those very theologians who had been constantly plagued with restrictions and censorship were at the Council, and increasingly were asked to address various national groups of bishops: men like Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, John Courtney Murray, Godfrey Diekmann, Jean Danielou. The influence of these theologians and the contact with liberal bishops, and particularly the more freewheeling missionary bishops, wrought amazing changes in many bishops—including American bishops. A spirit of ecumenism and freedom reigned, as it had not for a long, long time in the Catholic Church.

The conservatives, however, were by no means completely displaced or cowed, as was indicated by the Catholic University affair in the spring of 1963. This affair, however, marked not only a new high point in the intransigence of the conservatives, but also a turning point in the history of freedom in the Catholic Church in America. There had been some very forward-looking American bishops at the end of the last century who promoted a lay revival and a progressive attitude in the Church in general: men like Archbishop Ireland, Bishop Spalding, and Cardinal Gibbons. But in many ways the open spirit of these and like-minded men dried up in the reaction against the phantom heresy of Americanism at the turn of the century and the modernist hunt shortly thereafter. The Catholic press was usually quite conservative, the diocesan newspapers being official organs for the hierarchy. Commonweal, founded in the middle 1920s by a group of Catholic laymen, often provided a single beacon light. But here, too, in America the climate changed—very, very slowly. The influence of the “new theology” made itself slowly felt among the American clergy and educated laity. If the first session of Vatican II can be said to mark the wedding anew of the Catholic Church and freedom, the Catholic University affair of the spring of 1963 was its consummation.

A list of potential speakers for a Lenten series of lectures  to be sponsored by the university was submitted by the appropriate committee of graduate students. The Rector of the university then struck from the list the names of Gustave Weigel,  John Courtney Murray, Godfrey Diekmann, and Hans Küng, four of the most respected theologians of the Catholic Church. This was all to remain private—in the usual fashion. But it didn’t. The student newspaper bravely protested. Time maga­zine picked up the story, and so did a few Catholic diocesan newspapers. In the past such a situation would probably never have developed even that far. But if it had, the most that would have been forthcoming would have been a few scat­tered remarks and then silence. But the old days were gone. Dozens of Catholic newspapers carried the story week after week. Many of them courageously criticized the administration of Catholic University—whose board of trustees is composed of all the American Cardinals, a number of bishops, and a few laymen. Several of the faculties of the Catholic University, including the Theology Faculty and the Canon Law Faculty, publicly censured the administration for its actions. Other Catho­lic University faculties also raised objections. As the protests spread and grew, evidence of a practice of past suppression came out. Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, a most highly respected American Catholic Church historian, stated openly that similar suppression had been going on for at least the past ten years—with specifics given. An article was published by a Pittsburgh priest—in the Steubenville, Ohio, Catholic newspaper—criticizing openly the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Vag­nozzi, in Washington, D.C., for having manipulated the whole suppression.

In the midst of all this Hans Küng, the celebrated—and banned at Catholic University—German Swiss theologian arrived in this country for his previously scheduled lecture tour. Several other places had forbidden him to lecture, notably Philadelphia and Los Angeles. But wherever he did speak, the hall was jammed to overflowing; his audiences ran as high as five and six thousand. When he arrived at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, for example, he spoke in the auditorium which normally holds one thousand persons. Chairs were put every­where, including 200 on the stage, so that 1,600 could be packed in. For days ahead of time it was announced that people were not to come if they didn’t have tickets. Still there were an additional two hundred who sat in the cafeteria to hear by loud speaker his speech entitled “Freedom and the Church.” Hans Küng had suddenly become the symbol of the new freedom of the Catholic Church. Without the first session of Vatican II all this would have been impossible. But since it happened, the Catholic Church could never be the same again.

Indeed, this spirit of freedom continued to make new advances. Pope John followed his epoch-making encyclical on the social question, Mater et magistra, by his even more epoch­-making encyclical, Pacem in terris, in which amid a wealth of wisdom he pointed out that even though error itself has no right to exist, those persons who may be erroneous are the bearers of rights; one may not force a conscience for any reason. This was a landmark for freedom in papal statements, as was also the Vatican 11 decree on religious liberty in conciliar statements.

Of course? the millennium is not yet; there is much yet to be accomplished in the area of freedom: for example, the elimination of prepublication censorship, and, in general, the dealing with men in subordinate positions in a manner that is commensurate with their human and Christian dignity.

If Catholics could live and work within such an atmosphere and in vital contact with other Christians and non-Christians, they could help to lead the Church, and hence eventually the whole world, into a new age. This is not some utopian dream. The spiritual, moral, and intellectual developments in Catholicism in the last few decades have already transformed it so that Cardinal Manning, who so fearfully harassed Newman, would hardly recognize parts of it. Many avenues of thought seem to be bearing prodigious fruit, opening up areas that a hundred years ago were thought closed—Teilhard de Chardin’s whole world of evolution. for example—or were not even dreamt of. And the key insight in so many of these new developments is found in history.

IV

CATHOLIC CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS

AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

While freedom is one of humanity’s central characteristics, another most its intimate characteristic is religiousness. The Christian Scriptures and Tradition are full of references to both of these key notions, but it was only in 1965 that the Catholic Church put the two together in a solemn public espousal—in the Declaration on Religious Liberty of the Second Vatican Council. It took almost two thousand years for this fusion to take place in the Catholic Church. Why?

The Christian religion began with no recognition whatsoever by the State; in its first years it was viewed merely as a Jewish sect. After it was distinguished from Judaism, it led a checkered career in its relations to the State, sometimes being tolerated, sometimes being persecuted. But by the end of the fourth century the Christian Church had become the established religion. In the Eastern Roman Empire there developed a caesaro-papism, while in the West the situation—much more anarchic than in the East—evolved toward a papal-caesarism.

The apogee along this line of Church-State relations was reached in the infamous two-sword theory, which was put forth in its greatest clarity and vigor by Pope Boniface VIII in his Bull Unam sanctam (1302), directed against Philip the Fair of France.