Catholic Social Doctrine: Freedom of Religion and Conscience

By Andrew M. Greenwell, Esq.
4/18/2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Man has a natural inclination, an intellectual and felt need, to seek the truth and to worship God

In dealing with the issue of religious freedom and freedom of conscience, we are not yet dealing with the God of revelation, the Deus revelatus. We are not yet dealing with the Deus quaerens hominem, the God seeking man of the Old Testament, much less the Deus quaerens in homine hominem, as St. Augustine so beautifully put it in one of his sermons, the God seeking man in man of the New Testament.

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CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - In exploring the issue of religious freedom, we may conveniently divide the issue into two. The first: the issue of religious freedom as a fundamental human right. The second: the relationship between that fundamental human freedom and the Catholic Church. In this article we shall deal with the first issue. In our next article on this topic, we shall deal with the second.

For the first matter, we must turn to human nature which, indeed, is the source and foundation of the natural moral law, and hence also the source of human right. Man has a natural inclination, an intellectual and felt need, to seek the truth and to worship God. He has this inclination to seek the truth and to worship God irrespective of, one might say "before" coming upon, God's own revelation of Himself as Truth, and God's revelation to man as to the means of worship.

In short, there is in man a religious impulse. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it: "The desire for God is written in the human heart," and this desire is satisfied only with the God that reason only outlines in the most vague way. This religious impulse, of course, is what explains the world's religions, since these represent cultural expressions of man-seeking-God, of homo quaerens Deum. We find it so beautifully displayed--albeit with admixture of error--in, for example, the writings of Plato, e.g., his Timaeus, in Cicero's De natura deorum, and in some of the sacred and philosophical texts of Hinduism such as the Katha Upanishad VI.12 or the Shvetashvatara Upanishad III.7, 9.

In dealing with the issue of religious freedom and freedom of conscience, we are not yet dealing with the God of revelation, the Deus revelatus. We are not yet dealing with the Deus quaerens hominem, the God seeking man of the Old Testament, much less the Deus quaerens in homine hominem, as St. Augustine so beautifully put it in one of his sermons, the God seeking man in man of the New Testament.

This religious impulse or natural inclination is of the natural law puts a duty upon man. And the natural law is therefore the source of any right related to the fulfillment of that duty, specifically, the right to religious freedom. Man, alone and with others of his kind, must be free to exercise this religious impulse, to search for the truth and for God in freedom, to find that balm of Gilead for his restless heart. It is this natural inclination that is ordered to truth and to God that the Church seeks to protect when she proclaimed in the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae the right of the person and of communities to social and civil freedom in religious matters.

As the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church elaborates: "In order that this freedom, willed by God and inscribed in human nature, may be exercised, no obstacle should be placed in its way, since "the truth cannot be imposed except by virtue of its own truth." The dignity of the person and the very nature of the quest for God require that all men and women should be free from every constraint in the area of religion. Society and the State must not force a person to act against his conscience or prevent him from acting in conformity with it."

"Freedom of conscience and religion," the Compendium continues, "'concerns man both individually and socially.' The right to religious freedom must be recognized in the judicial order and sanctioned as a civil right . . . . ." (Compendium, No. 421)

Inextricably intertwined with religious freedom is the freedom of conscience. Conscience, though not infallible, is nothing less than man's internal window to God, a "window through which one can see outward to that common truth which founds and sustains us all." It is the aperture of the soul wherein man finds an "openness to the ground of his being, the power of perception for what is highest and most essential." It is the soul's route by which "the way to the redemptive road to truth," into "a 'co-knowing' with the truth" that is God, is gained.

This is the conscience which Cardinal Ratzinger described in his book On Conscience as "an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine."

Conscience's link to God is well stated by the puritan Thomas Brookes, who called conscience "God's deputy, God's spy, God's notary, God's viceroy."

The right to religious freedom and freedom of conscience is therefore one ordered to truth and to God. It is for this reason, that the Church distinguishes ...

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1 - 7 of 7 Comments

Robert Duffy
1 year ago
Mr. Greenwell--Thanks, I will definitely have a look at that article!
Juneau Alaska
1 year ago
Andrew Greenwell,

What are the odds a devout Muslim would say you're quite mistaken? I'm sure I can find one. Debating whether fitrah and Natural Law are synonymous or even superficially so is about as useful (to me) as comparing the Elvish language to Klingon.

I say this because I find the concepts of Natural Law and fitrah preposterous and un-evidenced. What's the old saying? Not all religions can be right, but they can all be wrong.

Thanks for the feedback and the chance to provide a different point of view.
Andrew Greenwell
1 year ago
@Juneau
Yes, Islam was left out of the lineup. The concept of fitrah is only superficially alike the natural law. And pulled out from Islam in general, it has similarities. But in reality, you have to understand the concept of fitrah within the overwhelming divine positivism of the shari'a and the occasionalism and voluntarism that is so endemic to mainstream Islam. Since the suppression of the Mu'tazila and the victory of the Ash'ariyya in the 8th century, there is no suggestion of parallel and mutually dignified ways to understand God's will--reason and revelation--in mainstream Islam. Shari'a pretty much elbows substantive reason out. (For example, you could not argue from reason to a traditional Muslim that polygamy or slavery is against the divine law because it contradicts reason, because he shari'a allows it. If the shari'a allows it, there is no appeal to reason.) Reason is used only to implement the shari'a. It is, in a manner of speaking, a slave to the shari'a) Modernly, some Muslims have tried to revive something like Mu'tazilite thought which allows the shari'a to be tempered by reason, but they are often regarded as heretics. As the ʻUmdat al-Sālik wa-ʻUddat al-Nāsik (Reliance of the Traveler) puts it (a1.3-4): "The position of the Ash'aris, the followers of Abul Hasan Ash'ari, is that the mind is unable to know the rule of Allah about the acts of those morally responsible except by means of His messengers and inspired books . . . The measure of good and bad, according to this school of thought, is the Sacred Law, not reason (الشرع لا العقل)."
Andrew Greenwell
1 year ago
@Robert: The article is written to persons of "good will" as the Church typically states it, not necessarily those of the household of faith, or even Christianity. The Church is convinced that the natural law, which is universal, is the means to approach all peoples that do not share our confession. For sure, there's a lot of work that is to be done in this area. A nice start is the International Theological Commission's 2009 document entitled In Search of a Universal Ethic: A New Look at the Natural Law (2009). Unfortunately, there is no official translation in English: the official translations on the Vatican website are only in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. But several intrepid individuals (including myself) and the Catholic Truth Society in England have translated it into English, and these are available on the internet. After I complete my series on the Compendium, I hope to make this document better known to the Catholic laity through a series of articles.
Juneau Alaska
1 year ago
The phrase, religious impulse, inasmuch as it's represented in Hinduism and Plato as the article insists, also sounds exactly like the Islamic concept of fitrah. Interesting that Islam was left out of the lineup.

Fitrah is the theological explanation for why Islamic scholars refer to converts moreso as reverts, since they are just "coming home."

I look forward to Part II.
Robert Duffy
1 year ago
First of all, thank you for this. I thought this was carefully thought out, and clearly delineated, and helped me to think through and understand some things I hadn't gone through before with this much rigor.

I have a question as to your audience though. Was this intended mainly for Catholic audiences, and, what's more, devout Catholic audiences? The question of religious freedom, it seems to me, has all of a sudden become a very relevant topic, for the first time (as far as the United States is concerned) in several hundred years, and for the first time (as far as the west in general is concerned, excluding the USSR) since WWII. By which I mean, don't you think something with more appeal to the reader already estranged from and hostile to Church teaching might be necessary at a time like this?

Specifically, the argument relies heavily (almost solely) on natural law. As far as I understand the issue, natural law is not universally understood in the same way, and in specific cases it can prove ambivalent. While I agree with your use of it in cases like homosexual marriage, I have seen good cases made that, while homosexual marriage is not marriage, the strongest grounds for rejection are not necessarily natural law. To argue from natural law in this way almost amounts to begging the question: it requires that one interlocutor set the definition of what is natural--well, one might say, one natural end of sex is reproduction. Well, what about married cripples? Sterile people? Marriage late in life? Of course the natural law argument can handle these objections--as I said, I agree with it--but because of the necessarily limited scope of natural law--that is, it requires prudence to interpret in the particular case, otherwise we could not address the questions I mentioned above--it is not a sound basis on which to base or limit religious freedom. It is too easily rendered ideological, especially given the fact that different historical epochs have different ideas of what is "natural," and it's got to be hubris to say "we've got the ahistorical god's-eye-view and can be sure now that we've got it right."

Even if natural law didn't have these pitfalls, I think we've got to start philosophizing where the rubber hits the road. Meet our interlocutors at their own questions. Don't submit to their presuppositions, but grant that their concerns are real ones. When religious freedom is genuinely at risk of disappearing, we shouldn't be concerned with delimiting it to what the Catholic tradition, rooted in natural law, says is legitimate religious freedom. We should be more concerned with starting from ground zero to build up a genuine conception of religious freedom with as much objectivity as possible, and without an eye to the particular interests of the Catholic Church. Incidentally, I'm confident that the interests of the Catholic Church would coincide with the conclusions of absolutely rigorous thought about religious freedom, so it's an experiment I'm interested in seeing undertaken (although I'm by no means equal to it myself...)

If your intended audience is people already in the fold and seeking to understand their own faith better, then disregard everything I said except for, thank you for this well thought out article!
abey
1 year ago
God is pure & Holy so is the word to which is the Absolute truth, nothing Hidden, except that man in his corruptions think otherwise. Of all the fruit bearing trees the tree of good & evil was banned & its consequences told, whereas the tree of Life was not banned, but then they fell for the devil's words to man today swimming in a sea of laws & the never ending Karmas but in vain, with no hope & to this in the Love & Mercy of God came the Christ to get man back the tree of life, made for him when all this troubles could have been avoided just by adhering to the word of God, through which word could have said "No" to the devil, for that "No" is to the love of God into the power of resistance & to this is what Jesus says "Just as I overcame, so should you" in the revelations, which is the requirement to the tree of life, except now it comes about in a round about & hard way to the same but at a great loss of time without the slightest of gain to the Truth of overstepping the word of God is not to profit but to loss, the loss of Time again to the understanding that every word from GOD is of such importance to the very question of life & death in the eternal , reflecting the words of Jesus in the temptation "Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that Proceeds from the mouth of God." Ask Adam or Eve & they for a sure will confirm it, as no greater witness to this Truth.

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