The Catholic Human Rights Revolution

George Weigel

<Dignitatis Humanae>-the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on
Religious Freedom-is frequently described as an expression of
Christian personalism, because of its teaching that every human
being has an inalienable right to immunity from state coercion in
matters of religious conviction. As the declaration puts it, "the
right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity
of the human person, as this dignity is known through the revealed
Word of God and by reason itself."

Thus religious freedom, according to the Council Fathers, is not
to be understood in subjectivist or voluntarist terms, but rather
as a right arising from the "very nature" of the human person.

But <Dignitatis Humanae> also has what could be termed a "public
meaning": for the doctrine of religious freedom discloses
important truths about the structure and operation of a rightly
ordered political community. The state that honors the principle
of religious freedom is by definition a limited state, which
acknowledges its inherent incompetence In certain crucial spheres
of life.

By reason of its "public meaning," then, the Declaration on
Religious Freedom is a defense of social pluralism as well as a
defense of the rights of the person. This second dimension of the
doctrine of religious freedom (which is, of course, rooted in the
doctrine's personalist dimension) has affected contemporary
history in a dramatic way, giving <Dignitatis Humanae> a public
edge that might not have been fully anticipated in 1965.

The pontificate of John Paul II has deepened and extended both the
"interior" and "public" meanings of the Declaration on Religious
Freedom. By his constant references to the declaration and his
persistent stress on religious freedom as the first of human
rights, the Holy Father has secured the position of <Dignitatis
Humanae> in the tradition of the Church, against the claims of
those who continue to regard the declaration as a fatal concession
to secular modernity, liberal individualism, and/or religious
indifferentism.

Moreover, religious freedom has become the centerpiece of the Holy
Father's defense of the universality of basic human rights, which
the pope regards as essential to the very possibility of a genuine
global dialogue about the human future. <Dignitatis Humanae is
also central to the Holy Father's evolving social magisterium on
the matter of democracy, which has been developed in a triptych of
encyclicals that includes <Centesimus Annus> (1991), <Veritatis
Splendor> (1993), and <Evangelium Vitae> (1995).

Why has <Dignitatis Humanae> loomed so large in the Holy Father's
thought? Surely the answer touches on the fact that the
declaration reflects key concepts in the pope's anthropology. If
man's nature is religious, the state must acknowledge that fact.
By not acknowledging it, the state, in effect, redefines man as
less than what he is. In a century in which false humanisms have
wreaked havoc on humanity, the Christian humanism of John Paul II
is a powerful antidote to the fear that seems to dominate the
human encounter with "difference." The pope's humanism also
provides a sure foundation for a mature hope that humanity remains
capable, under grace, of building a civilization worthy of those
made in the image and likeness of God.

The Thirty Years Since the Council

In the mid-1980s, I found myself in conversation with Sir Michael
Howard, the distinguished English historian. In the course of our
discussion, Sir Michael remarked that, in his view, there had been
two great revolutions in the twentieth century. The first had
taken place when Lenin's Bolsheviks expropriated the Russian
Revolution and began the world's first experiment in
totalitarianism. The second revolution was taking place even as we
spoke: the transformation, as Sir Michael put it, of the Catholic
Church from the last bastion of the <ancien regime> to the world's
foremost institutional defender of basic human rights. A lot of
history, the former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford
suggested, would be determined in the encounter between these two
twentieth-century revolutions.

Serious historians are usually the first to decline the
prognosticator's mantle. But in this case, Sir Michael Howard had
correctly identified one of the chief dynamics of the 1980s and
early 1990s. As I have argued in <The Final Revolution: The
Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism>, the revolution
of 1989 in East Central Europe took place because a revolution of
conscience had transformed the moral-cultural condition of the
countries of the old Warsaw Pact, especially key segments of the
population in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

That revolution of conscience was, in turn, deeply influenced by
the Catholic Church, and particularly by Pope John Paul II.
Indeed, if we wish to pick a single date to mark the beginning of
the end of European communism, we might well consider June 2,
1979. When the Holy Father, preaching to a million Poles in
Warsaw's Victory Square, invoked the great themes of <Dignitatis
Humanae> by urging that Christ not be peremptorily "kept out of
the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or
latitude of geography," a great process of social and cultural
transformation began. The public effects of that process would be
visible the following year, when Solidarity was born at the Gdansk
shipyard and set in motion the political dynamics that would,
almost nine years later, result in the first free election in East
Central Europe in more than forty years. The defense of religious
freedom was thus instrumental in creating what Czech human rights
activists would later call "the power of the powerless": the
distinctive form of nonviolent resistance that brought down the
communist enterprise in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the
German Democratic Republic.

Why was the assertion of a basic human right to religious freedom
so publicly potent? Why was the definition of that right by
<Dignitatis Humanae> the crucial breakthrough to the Catholic
human rights revolution that has transformed the politics, not
only of East Central Europe, but of Chile, the Philippines, and
other strikingly disparate venues? And why did that human rights
revolution characteristically seek the establishment of democratic
governments in place of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes?

The answer may lie in a further reflection on the "public meaning"
of the right of religious freedom. As John Courtney Murray has
argued, <Dignitatis Humanae>, along with <Gaudium et Spes>, marked
a decisive turning point in Catholic political theory. In these
two documents, Murray argued, the Church embraced the idea of the
"juridical state," or what we in the Anglo-American tradition
would call "constitutionalism. "No longer would the state be
understood to have plenipotentiary powers across the full range of
social, economic, cultural, and political life. Rather, in these
two conciliar documents, the Church endorsed the notion that the
rightly ordered state had strictly limited and legally defined
powers, having primarily to do with the protection of its
citizens' basic rights and the maintenance of the public order
necessary for civil society's pursuit of the common good.

This was not to suggest that liberal democracy as it had evolved
in the West since 1776 was the only form of government compatible
with "Catholic constitutionalism." But empirical reality suggested
that it was precisely in democracies that the Church's freedom and
the civil rights of citizens-understood-to-be-persons were best
secured. Thus the Council's definition of the right of religious
freedom gave birth to a Catholic human rights revolution, which in
turn was the principal dynamic driving the Church's support for
what Samuel Huntington has called the "third wave" of
democratization. And the results are on display in the recent
history of East Asia, Latin American, and East Central Europe.

Built around the core right of religious freedom, the Catholic
human rights revolution also has had an impact on developed
democracies. At the very least, it has had an impact on the
developed democracy with which I am most familiar, namely, the
United States of America.

In one of those ironies that so often mark moments of great
historical change, it may well be that the crisis of communism at
the end of the twentieth century is followed in the beginning of
the twenty-first century by the crisis of democracy. The crisis of
communism was, at bottom, an anthropological crisis: The communist
project finally failed, not simply because communist economies
could not compete in a postindustrial world, but because communism
was built on a foundation of falsehoods about the human person,
human community, human history, and human destiny.

Similarly, the crisis of democracy also will be anthropological in
character. The institutions of democracy-elections, legislatures,
and courts, the entire edifice we summarize under the rubric "the
rule of law"-are not self-sustaining. Democracy is not a machine
that will run of itself; a people lacking self-command cannot be a
self-governing people. Rather, the institutions of democracy are
dependent for their proper functioning on the virtues of a people,
and those virtues are primarily nurtured and sustained, not by the
state or by "politics" narrowly construed, but by civil society.
The specter of the failed Weimar Republic reminds us that even the
most elegantly constructed democratic superstructure cannot endure
unless it is supported and sustained by an infrastructure of
virtues and moral commitments.

In the American context, the crisis of democracy engages the
debate between those who imagine the American democratic
experiment as a republic of procedures, and those who think of
American democracy as a substantive moral enterprise. The
"proceduralists," if we may call them that, typically think of
freedom in purely instrumental terms. In their construction of
public reality, religious conviction is but a "lifestyle choice"
to be treated by law and public policy like any other expression
of human volition. This position yields a concept of religious
freedom as a pragmatic bargain, a useful tool for the management
of plurality and difference.

The "substantivists," on the other hand, argue that there is a
teleological structure built into human freedom: Freedom is
ordered to the truth and finds its fulfillment in goodness. On
this latter understanding, religious freedom is a public moral
accomplishment. The state that acknowledges and protects the
inalienable right of religious freedom is a state that has
acknowledged a fundamental truth about the human person. That
acknowledgment, as we have seen, requires the state to adopt a
"self-limiting ordinance," a set of limits to the reach of its
power.

Religious Freedom

But religious freedom is more than a barrier against the tendency
of the modern state to extend its reach into virtually every
corner of human life. Rather, religious freedom, protected in law
and nurtured in civil society, gives rise to a robust public moral
conversation about the <oughts> of a people's common life. And in
that conversation, which can at times be quite sharp, the citizens
of a democracy grapple with the truth about freedom, which is that
our freedom is given to us to enable our free pursuit of the truth
and our free adherence to the truth.

As the Holy Father remarked at the United Nations in the fall of
1995, human beings have yet to learn how to cope with our fear of
"the other," our fear of "difference." "Plurality" is another way
to describe "difference." And thus the question becomes: How can
plurality, which is a sociological fact, be transformed into
pluralism, the achievement of an ordered public conversation built
around the question, "How ought we to live together?" Pluralism is
a cultural accomplishment, in which, as John Courtney Murray once
put it, "creeds [are] at war intelligibly."

Democracy understood as a matter of procedures cannot "solve" the
problem of plurality by transforming it into pluralism. Rather,
the procedural republic will, sooner or later, "solve" the problem
of plurality by imposing a monism, in the form of an "established"
secularism or a state-sanctioned political (or ethnic, or
national) ideology. Such a "solution" would, however, mark the end
of democracy, for the imposition of a state-sanctioned ideology
would require the state to assert full control over the
"mediating" institutions of civil society; the old-fashioned word
for this is totalitarianism. Less dramatically but no less
ominously, the imposition of an "established" secularism in the
United States would mean banishing from public life the source of
those moral understandings that justify commitment to democratic
persuasion and rejection of violent coercion in public affairs.

Thus, <Dignitatis Humanae> and the Catholic human rights
revolution to which it gave birth have done more than remind the
world of some important truths about the structure of public life
and the limits of governmental power. Even more importantly, the
Catholic human rights revolution has revitalized the idea of
pluralism, giving it a richer moral and cultural content. By
reminding us that freedom cannot be severed from the truth about
the human person without doing grave damage to both individuals
and to society, <Dignitatis Humanae> has challenged a world
increasingly committed to the institutions of democracy to reclaim
the classic understanding of democracy as a form of government
built on a foundation of certain moral claims about the human
person.

Democratic Consolidation

Those people we used to call dissidents in authoritarian or
totalitarian regimes often said that what they wanted to achieve
was a "normal" society. In the new democracies, it is
understandable that the processes of economic and political
reconstruction have dominated public life in the first stages of
building a "normal" society. But the very core of democracy-in the
morally serious, as distinguished from Jacobin, sense of the term
is constituted by the claims that society exists prior to the
state, and that the state exists to serve society, not vice versa.
Absent these convictions we are left with the self-contradictory
behaviors of so-called "people's democracies." Thus, in the new
democracies, serious attention must be paid to what we might call
the "multiple sovereignties" at play in the life of a "normal"
democratic society.

Here we touch directly on the tangled knot of questions about the
role(s) of religion in public life. Because each new democracy has
its own distinctive history and culture, there is no one template
for properly ordering the relationship between religious
institutions and the state, or between religiously grounded moral
conviction and public life. But reflection on both the Church's
doctrine and the experience of established democracies suggests
certain "brackets" or "boundaries" for the ongoing debate about
these issues.

The commitment of the Church to the "method of persuasion" (as
defined, for example, in <Dignitatis Humanae> and <Redemptoris
Missio 39>) discloses one such "bracket": The Church will not use
the coercive power of the state to advance its evangelical
mission. This boundary implies a certain separation between the
institution of the Church and the institutions of the state. But
the anthropology of <Dignitatis Humanae> and sound democratic
theory tell us that, whatever else this "separation" may mean, the
"separation of church and state" cannot mean the separation of
religion from public life, or the proscription of religiously
grounded moral argument from public life. Any political community
that did construe the notion of separation in these terms would be
involved in a profoundly undemocratic discrimination against
citizens on the basis of religious belief.

<Dignitatis Humanae> itself suggests another bracket for the
debate about democratic "normality": because the state is simply
incompetent in theological matters, the state's basic function
vis-a-vis religious institutions and convictions is to protect the
religious freedom of all its citizens. Thus what in American terms
would be styled the "disestablishment" of religion is ordered, not
to a "neutrality," which inevitably devolves into state-sponsored
and sanctioned secularism, but to the <free exercise> of religious
conviction. The state declines the mantle of the sacred, not only
because such a vesture ill-fits the state, but also in order to
facilitate the public circumstances in which the free exercise of
religion can flourish.

In both new democracies and old, the argument is frequently heard
that publicly assertive religion necessarily results in social
divisiveness, even violent conflict. History tells us that this
concern is not without foundation. But division and conflict need
not result from a robust engagement of religious conviction with
public life <if> four other boundaries are observed:

1. The political process must be open to citizens of all religious
persuasions such that, for purposes of access to the public
square, the state neither offers rewards nor exacts penalties
based on religious conviction or the lack thereof.

2. The Church must acknowledge the limits of its competence in
political and economic life, and must maintain a principled
nonpartisan stance vis-a-vis electoral politics.

3. When they enter the public square, as is their democratic
right, religious leaders and religious believers must make
genuinely <public> moral arguments that can be engaged by fellow
citizens, rather than sectarian or authoritarian claims.

4. Religious institutions must not be penalized in terms of access
to public funds when they undertake public activities (such as
education, health care, and social service) that serve genuinely
public purposes.

Democratic public life within these boundaries will not always be
placid; democratic "normality" means an ongoing dialogue about the
<oughts> of a people's common life, and that dialogue will not
infrequently take the form of a serious argument. But if these
boundaries are observed by both Church and state in the new
democracies (as well as the old), that argument can yield a
measure of wisdom in self-governance and can serve to build a
community marked by what Jacques Maritain once called "civic
friendship."

The Universality of Human Rights

It is another historical irony that the "third wave" of
democratization, which seemed to vindicate the notion of the
universality of human rights amid the world's cultural diversity,
has been accompanied, at least in its latter stages, by a new
assault on the notion of universality from East Asian autocrats,
the world's remaining communists, certain Islamic activists, and
western deconstructionists and multiculturalists. On the surface,
the new argument is that the universality of rights, as defined,
for example, in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
was an act of western imperialism, imposed on other societies
whose cultural traditions require a radically different
understanding of the relationship of the individual to the
community and the state. At a deeper level, the new attack on
universality is an attack on the very idea of a common human
nature.

No serious observer doubts that the new assault on the
universality of human rights is driven in part by the desire of
certain authoritarian or totalitarian regimes to legitimize their
continuing hold on power. But prescinding from such exercises in
hypocrisy, we still have to meet the argument that the dramatic
diversity of the world's cultures poses a sharp challenge to the
idea of universal human rights. John Paul II took up this
challenge at the United Nations:

If we make the effort to look at matters objectively, we can see
that, transcending all the differences which distinguish
individuals and peoples, there is a <fundamental commonality>. For
different cultures are but different ways of facing the question
of the meaning of personal existence. And it is precisely here
that we find one source of the respect which is due to every
culture and every nation: <Every culture is an effort to ponder
the mystery of the world and in particular of the human person; it
is a way of giving expression to the transcendent dimension of
human life.> The heart of every culture is its approach to the
greatest of all mysteries: the mystery of God.

The Holy Father then went on to argue that this profound human
dynamic, observable in all cultures, discloses, upon careful
reflection, the foundation of a universal structure of human
rights rooted in a universal human nature:

Our respect for the culture of others is therefore rooted in our
respect for each community's attempt to answer the question of
human life. And here we see how important it is to safeguard the
fundamental right of freedom of religion and freedom of
conscience, as the cornerstones of the structure of human rights
and the foundation of every truly free society. No one is
permitted to suppress those rights by using coercive power to
impose an answer to the mystery of man.

We may be reasonably sure that this teaching will not lose its
salience in the years ahead, not least as the cultures of the West
interact more frequently with the cultures of the East.

Answering Dostoevsky

By ratifying a genuine development of doctrine within the Roman
Catholic Church, <Dignitatis Humanae> altered the character of the
Church's encounter with the world. When the Church defends the
fundamental human right of religious freedom, she is speaking, not
in defense of her own "interests," but on behalf of the integrity
of humanity, of which the Church is the servant. In this sense,
the Church's defense of religious freedom since <Dignitatis
Humanae> has been different than the medieval defense of the
<libertas ecclesiae> against the threat of royal or imperial
absolutism.

At the end of the second millennium, <Dignitatis Humanae> is
Catholicism's most compelling response to the enduring temptation
of the Church, which was defined with great literary power by
Fyodor Dostoevsky in "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor." The
great temptation of the Church is to substitute its authority for
human freedom. <Dignitatis Humanae> committed the Church to resist
that temptation as a matter of doctrinal principle. Thus, on the
threshold of the third millennium, <Dignitatis Humanae> freed the
Church to be at one and the same time a more vigorous and a more
"disinterested" actor in the world.

But that seems entirely appropriate for a Church whose Master came
"not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom
for many."

GEORGE WEIGEL is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy
center. This piece is excerpted from a lecture given in Rome in
December 1995 at an international conference marking the thirtieth
anniversary of <Dignitatis Humanae>.

This article was taken from the July/August 1996 issue of "Crisis"
magazine. To subscribe please write: Box 1006, Notre Dame, IN
46556 or call 1-800-852-9962. Subscriptions are $25.00 per year.
Editorial correspondence should be sent to 1511 K Street, N.W.,
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