chapter 1 Dignitatis humanae: Development of the Text The Genesis of the Declaration of the on the Right of the Person and of Communities to Social and Civil Freedom in Matters Religious

What is revealing for the issue of the Church’s doctrinal develop- ment from rejecting to recognizing the human right to religious freedom is the development of the text that was finally promulgated as the declaration on religious freedom at the Second Vatican Council. It is in fact a text that was initially pieced together from two source texts and then developed in a rela- tively steady and straightforward way – although the document did undergo considerable expansions and deletions. The individual phases of develop- ment and intermediate stages of the text reflect the debate within the church about religious freedom, and sometimes also the influences that came from outside. The intentions and means of argumentation used by proponents and opponents of the turn to recognizing religious freedom become just as clear as the problems that actually existed with regard to the compatibility of the new position on religious freedom with the tradition. In this chapter, we will differentiate eight individual versions of the text: two were developed prior to the Council, five were presented, discussed, and again modified during the Council, and one was finally adopted as Council decision, and announced by Paul VI on 7 December 1965.

1.1 The Document of Fribourg (27 December 1960)

One document that can be regarded as the first preliminary text to the later Council declaration on religious freedom was discussed in Fribourg in the last days of December 1960 by two bishops and two theologians – namely, by Franz Charrière, bishop of Fribourg, and Emil-Joseph De Smedt, bishop of Bruges, as well as by Georges Bavaud, professor of dogmatics in Fribourg, and Jérôme Hamer, already since 1960 consultant to the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, and also a theologian teaching in Fribourg, but sometimes in Rome and at a faculty of Dominicans in France, too. The group did not conceive this text out of nothing, of course, but rather on the basis of one text on “The freedom of conscience” and another on “Religious freedom” (see Hamer 1967, 59). Three

© Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783657789009_003 6 Dignitatis humanae: Development of the Text questions were at the centre of the considerations that marked the three major challenges that the saw itself as facing. First, the question of tolerance; second, the question of the church’s relationship to persons and col- lectives who did not share its beliefs; and, third, the question of the relation- ship of the Catholic Church to the societies in which it existed, as well as to governments and to the international community and its organizations. The question of tolerance offered on the one hand an obvious point of entry to the issue of religious freedom, since it is thematically at least adjacent to it, and was traditionally chosen in doctrinal teaching as a means of dealing with the phenomenon of different ideological beliefs and resulting questions of coexistence or its legal organization (see, for example, Pius XII 1954) – we will return repeatedly to the church’s doctrine on tolerance in the period prior to the Second Vatican Council. On the other, it was also precisely here that the difficulty of approaching the idea of religious freedom lay, since the doctrine of the church had up until then shaped the idea of tolerance in such a way that it was very strongly opposed to a fundamental and comprehensive right to religious freedom (in the sense of a liberal right to freedom). The thesis- hypothesis formula of the Catholic doctrine of tolerance tended to provide ar- guments against religious freedom rather than a bridge to its recognition; and taking up the idea of the doctrine of tolerance brought very much into play the problem of doctrinal continuity. However, it would have been barely possible, and let alone credible, to speak about religious freedom from a Catholic point of view without also talking about tolerance – precisely because the church always spoke about tolerance when it wanted to talk about questions of reli- gious freedom. The second focus (the question of the relationship to persons or collectives with different beliefs or with no beliefs) points already to the relationship be- tween religious freedom and , a relationship that was also purely externally discernible in the further course of the Council since the statements on religious freedom were initially supposed to be part of an ecumenical con- stitution. However, ecumenism raised profound theological questions that would in fact later lead to considerable conflict at the Council. Religious free- dom was justified in the further course of discussions in a more or less theo- logical way, but the question of religious freedom was no longer seen as an essentially theological problem, but rather as a constitutional issue – and many interpreters of the Catholic Church’s positioning on religious freedom place great value on this fact. Against this background, it was then appropriate for both strategic and substantive reasons to remove religious freedom at a later date from the ecumenical context and to deal with it in its own declaration.