Reflection on Religious Liberty and the Freedom of the Church

I learned much at the Libertas Workshop on religious liberty at Villanova and am grateful to Michael, Marc, Zach, and the other participants for an engaging three days.

Chapter 9 of John Courtney Murray’s “We Hold These Truths” has given me much food for thought. I have heard it said that the United States through Murray’s work gave the Church its modern understanding of religious liberty expressed formally in Dignitatis Humanae. But Murray, at least the Murray of Chapter 9, seems deeply skeptical of the American understanding of religious liberty. At one point, he writes: “Modernity rejected the freedom of the Church, in the twofold sense explained, as the armature of man's spiritual freedom and as a structural principle of a free society.” In other words, free society requires not merely freedom of individual consciences but freedom of the institutional church. In fact, freedom of conscience depends on and is formed within the cradle of the church, which must be free to define and shape its own destiny.

This raises several questions for me. 1) Did the Catholic Church adopt an American understanding of religious liberty in Dignitatis Humanae or did it learn from the American experience while developing its own distinctive understanding? 2) To what extent is freedom of the church possible in a religious pluralistic nation such as ours? 3) Is freedom of the church inconsistent with an American/Protestant understanding of churches as voluntary associations? 4) Is the level of dissent within the Catholic Church today due – at least in part – to the cultural acceptance even within the church of an atomized freedom of conscience weakly tethered if at all to the Church operating in its freedom? 5) Should the bishops exercise their teaching authority within the Church to clearly articulate where the American concept of religious freedom convergences and diverges from the Church’s self-understanding?