Introduction

Fifty years ago, in its declaration on religious freedom at the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church renounced coercion as a means of enforcing its claim to truth. This renunciation of coercion in Dignitatis humanae is an act of self-imposed restriction regarding religious claims to truth that is exceptional in the history of religions. It is still extremely difficult to explain even today how an institution so steeped in tradition as the Catholic Church could have altered its position so fundamentally. The sincerity of the “turn” to religious freedom is hardly disputed, and its effects are obvious – the church’s role as an advocate of human rights is widely accepted, as is its role as the engine of the so-called “third wave of democratization” in the 1980s and 1990s. But what is disputed still is how the church arrived at such a position, what reasons and motives led it to reposition itself, what shape this process of change took, and the steps that comprised the process. The characteristics, conditions and dynamics of the path taken by Catholicism to recognizing religious freedom in all its diversity were the object of research of the project “Renouncing coercion in religious traditions: mod- ern Catholicism in the field of tension between distinction and integration”, which was carried out in the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Muenster. This volume, which appears as Volume 2 in the series “Catholicism between religious freedom and coercion”, draws on the findings of the previous volumes, which were compiled as part of the research project. We shall discuss the following working hypothesis (already formulated in Volume 1): “On the one hand, the increased identity of each religious tradition influences how it can behave with regard to contextual factors – and therefore determines to some extent the range of possibilities in which development [in this case, modernization] can be realized. On the other, different contextual embeddings can lead to very different developments on the part of religious traditions – and therefore determine to some extent the realization of one particular possibility from the range of potentialities” (Gabriel/Spiess/Winkler 2010a, 13-14)1. It has become apparent that we should recognize two factors in particular as being decisive when it comes to analyzing and interpreting the modernization process undergone by Catholicism. First, we cannot regard Catholicism as a self-contained entity; we can therefore not assume an internally homogeneous

1 Where we cite a text published originally in German in this volume, the English version given is our translation.

Catholicism that changes in its entirety all at the same time (Gabriel/Spiess/ Winkler [Eds.] 2012). Rather, Catholicism comprises a plurality of actors, lines of reasoning and contexts, which means that processes of modernization occur at different times and also sometimes unintentionally. It has become apparent, for example, that the opposition between “anti-Catholic liberalism” and “anti- liberal Catholicism” is much less clear and unambiguous than is sometimes assumed in the research. A multilayered approach to investigating the conditions that led to the paradigm shift concerning religious freedom both inside and outside Catholicism therefore seems appropriate (Gabriel/Spiess/Winkler [Eds.] 2013). Second, we must assume that a collective learning process, such as the one undergone by the Catholic Church, was, and still is, a contingent and open-ended historical process. We have to bear in mind that the process of establishing religion as an autonomous entity can certainly not be regarded as an intentional process. This is why we have also not, or not only, chosen to approach the subject through the logic of differentiation.2 Political calcu- lation and motivational charisma, for example, had a decisive influence on the course taken by the learning process; but neither can really be explained by pointing to the logic of differentiation. A more general approach, one that takes into account the whole discursive process in its various facets and tem- porally bound dynamics, and that pays particular attention to the prevailing conditions, therefore appears necessary. Our interpretation emphasizes neither break nor continuity. Instead, we de- scribe a collective learning process that in character is both multidimensional (with manifold links within Catholicism on the one hand, and between the framework conditions and church groups and actors on the other) and open- ended. The thesis that we wish to develop here therefore describes a historical process that leads into the debates at the Council. Diverse factors facilitated and drove the shift to religious freedom up until the Second Vatican Council; at the Council itself, a window of opportunity opened in a sense, and it be- came possible to argue for religious freedom and to build a majority for that argument. Since the events at the Council constitute, as it were, the culmination of the learning process, we will begin by presenting in our first chapter the stages of development of Dignitatis humanae. Besides describing dynamic processes within the Council and the tenacious struggle for majorities, we will focus on the question of what arguments played a role in the course of the Council, and what effect they were able to have in the different conciliar phases.

2 See the contributions in: Gabriel/Spiess/Winkler (Eds.) 2010.