THE MISSISSIPPI FLOWS INTO THE TIBER
The Second Vatican Council, the American Bishops, and the Debate on Religious Liberty
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A vision remains with me....It is that of Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, speaking in the name of all the American bishops and defending the schema on "religious liberty." From his first words, the power of his voice and the unusual oratorical style brought me, with many others, to the edge of the section reserved for periti. And I was fortunate enough to capture, in the luminous circle of a borrowed pair of binoculars, the tall, purple figure with white hair. He was there, he spoke Latin, this fabulous man who had gone back home shortly after the beginning of the first session because he did not understand this language and was wasting his time....He had promised to come back after the installation of a simultaneous-translation system. He had promised to pay the bill....The installation could not be undertaken, but he had come to take first place in pleading for a great cause, one to which American Catholicism owes its prodigious development and vitality....He evoked that basic conviction that reciprocal tolerance and respect for the liberty of others are a primary value in the concrete life of men and nations, the very earth in which Catholicism has grown, loyally and without bickering in his country. He had come, and he spoke uniquely, syllable by syllable, that Latin which his invincible reflexes sometimes telescoped on final syllables, in spite of enormous effort and fierce concentration....I shared, more deeply than I thought at the time, the emotion of this fighter defending the cause of liberty. And now when this image, this warm voice comes back to my memory, all that remains is the emotion and an admiring sympathy for this great, gray man, doing himself violence to defend an idea for which, obviously, he would give his life. |
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Very little has been written on the role and indubitable influence of the American bishops at the Second Vatican Council. Few sources have been published in English, and even fewer original documents are available, either because they are kept in repositories closed to the Society of Saint Pius X researchers, or because, owing to a certain disdain for "the past," many bishops destroyed or simply lost track of such things as their Council papers, journals, and correspondence.2 Nevertheless, this article will sketch the role of the American bishops in an attempt to discern one of the lines of doctrinal filiation of the Council and some of the responsibilities for its deviations.
The American bishops were considered "conservative" when they arrived at the Council, but were they so? Theologically, they appeared "behind the times," strongly attached to Rome, and upholding what a modern author has described as an "immobile, triumphalistic, and rationalistic view of the Church."3Even after the closing of the Council, many of them seemed to remain unaffected in their conservatism.
They were different from other conservative bishops, though, in one important aspect–in their experience of living under a system of religious liberty. Their common pastoral letter published before the Council shows their awareness of the uniqueness of the testimony they could offer.
...The Bishops of the United States [are] expected to bear witness in the Council to the elements which, under God, have led to the remarkable growth of the Church in the United States and to its generally flourishing condition, and to make known their judgment on whatever further development or reform appears to them to be advantageous for the universal Church. In making their contribution to the Council, the bishops of the United States will be conscious of the limitations of the Church in this country. We are all aware that, relatively speaking, we are a new and recently cultivated part of Christ's vineyard. We cannot boast the saints that have arisen in the churches of Europe and even in some of our own hemisphere. We have not produced the number of profound scholars and brilliant writers who adorn some of the older centers of Christian culture....But whatever the limitations of the Church in this country, we are humbly and gratefully aware of the strengths which have resulted from its experience. We know, first of all, the advantages which have come to the Church from living and growing in an atmosphere of religious and political freedom. The very struggle which the American Church has had to face is responsible in large measure for the vitality which it has developed as it grew to maturity, unaided by political preference but unimpeded by political ties....4
American Catholicism had worked out a particular form of compromise with the modern world, "Americanism," a model highly praised by European Liberal-Catholics in the 19th century. It simply translated into the daily life of Catholics the secular "American spirit," which in turn descended directly from Puritanism and the English Enlightenment. The American bishops, consciously or unconsciously, carried this spirit into the Second Vatican Council, where it was adopted as a model for the universal Church. As a noted American Catholic historian puts it, "Dignitatis Humanae made universal Catholic teaching what had previously been considered an aberration of the American Church."5
The "American Proposition"
In spite of its growth and the late-19th century "Americanist" efforts, Catholicism in America was, in the 20th century, still considered by the Protestant establishment as a distrusted outsider. It remained marginal to political power and cultural prestige because, up to the Second World War, the majority of Catholics lived in working-class, ghetto-like enclaves, surrounded by their own parochial institutions, which provided the Catholic framework for their daily lives. "Affluence and intellectual sophistication ... were simply not a real option for most Catholic families until the mid-20th century."6 The war itself and the anti-communist crusade that followed soon after obtained what the 19th-century Americanists failed to do–by giving Catholics the opportunity to proclaim their loyalty to America and their devotion to the "American way of life," they eased the Catholic transition into the American secularistic ideal of freedom, pluralism, and democracy.
This change accelerated in the years after the war.7 The "G.I. Bill" allowed Catholic war veterans to attend secular colleges, and began creating a class of Catholic professionals ready and eager to participate in the American dream of tolerance and material affluence. The suburbanization that followed destroyed the urban Catholic centers, the old "ghettos." The consequent loss of sense of community added to the disorientation and accelerated the "integration" into mainstream American secularistic life,
uncritically but enthusiastically accepting American cultural values...making American Catholics all but indistinguishable as a group from their fellow citizens in terms of ethical values, social mores and cultural tastes.8
The change in their doctrinal stances was soon to follow, as "in the very period that has been labeled the 'era of Catholic triumphalism,' major Catholic leaders were gleefully (if unconsciously) laying dynamite at the foundations" of Catholic identity.9
John Courtney Murray
Fr. John Courtney Murray, who was ordained in 1933, became (after obtaining his degree in Rome) professor of Dogmatic Theology at Woodstock Seminary (Maryland). He saw himself "as rooted in two worlds, the world of Catholic faith and the world of American democracy."10
Fr. Murray was a brilliant, hard-working, sincere man, called by his biographer "the last of the obedient Jesuits," because of his silence after being corrected by Rome in 1955. He gave, in 1940, a series of lectures at Loyola University (Baltimore, Maryland), on how Catholicism could mend America. For him, secularist America, trying to promote a humanism without God, represented at that time all that was decadent in the Western world–no divine transcendence, no spirituality, no collective responsibility– the denial of the reality of the metaphysical, the denial of the primacy of the spiritual over the material, and of the social over the individual.11
He considered that the necessary task of the theologian–his task–was to proceed to a realistic analysis of the present situation, and make an effort to find ways of overcoming those pervasive errors. Unfortunately, having suffered in his Roman days the influence of the writings of Maritain, Teilhard, De Lubac, Chenu, and Congar, he was convinced that the Church and the modern world were not inevitably opposed. Therefore, to overcome the present spiritual crisis, he advocated Catholic involvement in society and culture, urging Catholics to avoid the "siege mentality" that, in his opinion, had so much harmed the Church in America and elsewhere.
As the "Americanists" before him, Fr. Murray was dazzled by the uniqueness of the American circumstances and the prosperity of the Catholic Church in America. Half a century before him, in France, Ferdinand Brunetiere had also reflected upon the American paradox–that the modern liberties so strongly condemned by the Church, when widely applied in America, had in fact served to protect the Church–and he concluded that that should be sufficient to indicate, better than any abstract explanation, what the doctrine of the Church should be. In that light, therefore, from the American experience, Fr. Murray reinterpreted the pronouncements of the Magisterium, to discover what he considered their true meaning.
In the late 1940's, his studies on religious liberty and the relations between Church and State, encouraged by Cardinal Edward Mooney (Detroit, Michigan), and the contacts he established as consequence of those studies, took him a step further, to the "Americanization" of Catholicism–to an attempt to find a way of reconciling the Catholic doctrinal position with the American political tradition. His solution was that the Church should abandon the medieval model of union between Church and State, and adopt the American model of separation.
As a Catholic theologian who knows a bit about political history, I have more sense than to regard past Catholic documents on Church and State as so many crystal balls in which to discern the exact shape of things to come....If I were to venture a prophecy, it would be that the development of the genuinely Catholic and democratic state will mean the end of the concept "religion of the state" as the constitutional form in which the doctrinal idea of the "freedom of the Church" has historically found its expression.12
Fr. Murray overthrew the traditional Catholic thesis on the ideal union of Church and State by a new distinction between the notions of "society" and "state," which, up until him, the popes had used as synonyms. For him, the people, taken as a whole, constituted "society." The "state," which had been defined as "the organized society together with its agencies of government," ceased to be the corporate person under the authority of Christ and was redefined by him to be only a subsidiary organization within "society," an agent delegated by the people to perform a strictly limited function, namely, to maintain the public peace and run the administration.
Fr. Murray concluded that–properly understood–the concepts of "union" or "separation" between Church and State were clearly meaningless, since the "state" was nothing substantive with which to be united!
He affirmed that not only the internal freedom of conscience, but also the external freedom of worship and propaganda are natural rights, rooted in the dignity of the human person. As such, these rights must be proclaimed in the legal ordinations of the nations, that is, as civil rights. The only limitation to be imposed upon the profession of religion in the external forum is the "public peace"–a notion coming directly from the revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man–while Catholic doctrine had always maintained that the exercise of the individual's rights was regulated by and subordinated to the common good of society. In Fr. Murray's words, the State must intervene "only when such forms of public expression seriously violate either the public peace, or commonly accepted standards of public morality, or the rights of other citizens"13–a thoroughly subjective rule!
In this sense, the American constitutional system has established religious liberty simply as an "article of peace," a means to preserve public tranquility, without intending to define or accept it as an "article of faith," something absolutely beyond the competence of the State whose powers "are limited to the affairs of the temporal and terrestrial order of man's existence."14
Finally, the "state" is not bound to conform its laws to Christ's law, and the Church should not have (or claim) any privilege that is denied to other religions. The powers of the state "are not to be used as instruments for the spiritual purposes of the Church–the maintenance of her unity or the furtherance of her mission."15
Confronted with the contrary pronouncements of the Magisterium on these questions, Fr. Murray asserted that they were "historically conditioned." That is to say, the union between Church and State made sense in the Middle Ages, when the ecclesiastical and the political realms were so inextricably intertwined, but only then. The 19th-century condemnations were caused by and directed against the Jacobin State, which promoted "separation" and "religious liberty" only as the legalistic means to impose its totalitarian dictatorship over the Church. But now, with the coming of democratic societies where religious pluralism is the norm, acknowledged in laws and constitutions, the time was ripe for a development of the doctrine.
The American Bishops and Dignitatis Humanae
Dignitatis Humanae is the specific American contribution to the Second Vatican Council. It was commonly referred to as "the American document," not only because its foremost expert was Fr. Murray, but also because the American bishops wholeheartedly endorsed it. The promotion of religious liberty had become for them an "emotional and logical necessity,"16 insofar as their support derived "from the American experience, from which the Church has learned the practical value of the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment,"17 that is, not from the Magisterium, but from the "traditional" American version of Liberal-Catholicism.
The American Bishops in the Council
The American bishops were acknowledged–as a whole–a "conservative" hierarchy, noted not for their theological sophistication, but for being amazing builders, administrators, fundraisers...in a very American way, "doers" rather than "thinkers," a fact that they willingly admitted. The theological controversies of Europe had been quite remote from their daily concerns and ministry,18 and there was no array of first-rate American theologians to lead them too far off track. Most of them, therefore, kept to the doctrine learned in their seminary years, which was Roman orthodoxy. Their attachment to Rome was strong, because it had been the source of their Catholic identity, of their self-definition in a Protestant country. Strong authoritarians themselves, they were suspicious of any movement that might upset the present administrative order, systematically giving the benefit of the doubt to authority or to the status quo.19
At the opening of Vatican II it was said that the American episcopate was a perfect mirror of the thinking, aims and prejudices of the Roman Curia. Arriving in Rome in 1962, the large majority of American bishops were not prepared for new interpretations.20
The undoubted leader of this "conservatism" was Cardinal Francis Spellman (New York City, New York). There was nevertheless a more "progressive" faction, headed by Cardinals Richard Cushing (Boston, Massachusetts), Albert Meyer (Chicago, Illinois) and Joseph Elmer Ritter (St. Louis, Missouri). Their letters and suggestions to the Central Preparatory Commission of the Council permit us to discern the positions that they will later hold during the conciliar sessions.21
The numeric force of the American bishops in the Council was impressive. They constituted 10 percent of the Conciliar Fathers; 26 American bishops and 30 periti sat in the Conciliar Commissions (the greatest number of prelates after Italy and France), and they counted among them three presidents of the Council: Cardinals Spellman, Meyer, and Lawrence Shehan (Baltimore, Maryland).22 Nevertheless, in comparison with other national hierarchies, they came to the Council unprepared and unorganized. As Bishop Robert Dwyer (Reno, Nevada) wrote: "Many of us came expecting to be handed the traditional formulae, asked for our votes, and then sent home in a matter of weeks."23
Until then, they had been absolute princes in their dioceses, and totally absorbed in and by them. Their national organization, the NCWC [National Catholic Welfare Conference], had little impact upon the government of their dioceses–their membership in it was voluntary (in fact, some bishops refused to join it), its decisions were not binding for every member....Therefore, the American bishops, at the beginning of the Council, were not psychologically prepared for unity of action. Even more, they were somehow scandalized by the group meetings and by the public unanimity of national hierarchies they were witnessing in the Council. This unanimity seemed to them dictatorially imposed from above (i.e., by the cardinals and a few leading bishops), rather than the true expression of the personal opinions of the majority of bishops.24
Although they were shrewd, efficient–and even ruthless–administrators in their dioceses, the American bishops seemed somehow naive when it came to conciliar politics. At the beginning of the Council, many did not have a clue about the infighting and maneuvering going on behind the scenes, and when they began to suspect it, some of them did not want any part in it. Bishop Robert Joyce (Burlington, VT) confessed to journalists:
We don't like to lobby. Most of us, I think, feel that lobbying and subterfuge are all right in parliaments, but contrary to the spirit of a Council. A certain amount of discretion has to be left to the chair. We wouldn't want to seem rebellious.25
The same naivety, compounded by their unquestioning trust in democratic processes, left them wholly unprepared to conceive that a determined minority could successfully counter the manifest opinion of the majority.
Their first and almost only common realization in the first session was, typically, practical: the program of press conferences started in October 1962, under the direction of a committee headed by Bishop Albert Zuroweste (Belleville, Illinois). Each day that there was a Council session, American journalists met afterwards with a panel of American periti. These meetings became very successful, attracting the attendance of many others, non-Americans and non-journalists, even non-Catholic observers.
In spite of their initial circumspection, they slowly emerged as an influential group. The contacts established during the first sessions forced them out of their theological isolation, "internationalized" them, giving them "an awareness of theology that they never had before."26 Bishop Joseph Mueller (Sioux City, South Dakota) wrote to a friend: "If you had told me two years ago that I would be voting 'yes' for some of the things I have been voting for this session, I would have told you you were crazy."27
It is only fair to note that a few other bishops, at least less impressionable if not better trained, were able to resist some of the novelties. For example, Cardinal James Francis McIntyre (Los Angeles, California) wrote to Cardinal Spellman, regarding the discussion on the sources of Revelation: "You seem to be impressed with this thinking, [but] I must be frank, [it is] somewhat shocking to me." "McIntyre claimed that his Dunwoodie [seminary] education inclined him to reject many of the notions that Spellman found acceptable, noting that his professors 'in a scientific way refuted many of present-day contentions.'"28
Almost "invisible" in the first session, in the fourth session the American bishops became the most vocal hierarchy, when the discussions focused on ecumenism and religious liberty. They had the practical answers to these questions, quickly became familiarized with the theories behind these answers29and took over the leadership in the debate.
First Session (1962)
As it is well known, the schemata so carefully set up by the Preparatory Commission were summarily discarded at the very beginning of the Council, because they proposed too traditional a doctrine.
Months before the opening of the Council, Archbishop Shehan (Baltimore, Maryland) had sent to Fr. Murray the Theological Commission's drafts concerned with religious liberty, those presented by Cardinal Ottaviani and by Cardinal Bea's Secretariat for the Unity of Christians. In a memo dated August 1962, Fr. Murray decried Ottaviani's draft as firmly rooted in the dualism "thesis-hypothesis," considering religious liberty only as a matter of expediency, a concession to present circumstances. While acknowledging that many American bishops still thought of the problem on these purely pragmatic terms, Fr. Murray argued that the Theological Commission–and the Roman Curia–should be confronted on doctrinal grounds, taking advantage of this opportunity for a necessary and easily done development of doctrine.30
Fr. Murray had been invited to attend the Council as a peritus, but the invitation was withdrawn at the request of the Apostolic Delegate in Washington.
In October 1962, the Secretariat for Unity was made a Conciliar Commission, and therefore enabled to present texts for the discussion of the Council Fathers. Cardinal Bea's schema was to be ready for the beginning of the Second Session.
Second Session (1963)
On April 4, 1963, after Cardinal Spellman applied pressure in appropriate quarters, Fr. Murray was again invited to attend the Council as a peritus.
Towards November 1963, Fr. Murray sent the American bishops a memo indicating the reasons why the schema on religious liberty should be reintroduced in the Council's agenda (it had been dropped because deemed too controversial). The idea was endorsed by a plenary meeting of the bishops. In a letter addressed on behalf of all to Cardinal Cicognani, the presidency, and moderators of the Council, Cardinal Spellman demanded the discussion of the issue and the use of Bea's schema as the basis for such discussion. Owing to this forceful intervention of the American hierarchy, the issue was restored to the agenda. But Cardinal Ottaviani and other members of the Central Theological Commission delayed the examination of this unorthodox schema, so Cardinal Spellman persuaded Pope Paul VI to call a special meeting of the Commission to discuss it.31
On November 11 and 12, 1963, Fr. Murray attended the meeting of the Central Theological Commission, invited by Bishop John Wright (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), where he defended the schema. The vote was for 18 to 5 in favor of its reintroduction. Fr. Murray called it "a glorious victory for the good guys."32
A few days later, Fr. Murray asked Cardinal Spellman to defend the American constitutional system and its version of religious liberty:
The functions of government and law are limited to the temporal and terrestrial affairs of men. In particular, the First Amendment declares government to be incompetent in the field of religion; government is not a judge of religious truth; it has no right to repress religious error; it has no share in the euro, animarum [i.e., literally, the "care of souls"–Ed.]; its sole function in the field of religion is the protection and promotion of freedom of the Church and of the churches and of all citizens.33
The "free exercise of religion," as stated in the First Amendment, should be given a positive approval by the American bishops, as something demanded by their civic and religious conscience, and not simply accepted as a matter of tolerance. Cardinal Spellman asked Fr. Murray to write the speech and agreed to deliver it, although it was never given because the debate was cut short.34
The schema–textus prior–was distributed to the Council Fathers, and Bishop Emile de Smedt presented it, as relator. He repeated Fr. Murray's thesis–which is not surprising, since Fr. Murray himself wrote the initial draft of the address!35 He affirmed that no man has the right to choose error over truth, that no one can be forced to believe, and that no one can be prevented from the exercise of his beliefs in public, setting as limitation only the common good. The previous Magisterium was easily disposed of, particularly Pope Pius IX's condemnations, which were understood as referring only to the excesses of European Liberalism and not intending to set down permanently valid principles. Pope Leo XIII was presumed to have advanced the doctrine by asserting that modern freedoms could only be tolerated; and Pope Pius XII had gone a step further, declaring that, in modern times, toleration had to be the norm. Papal declarations in favor of the freedom of Catholics were quoted as demanding freedom for all. The address concluded with the (gratuitous) assertion that the doctrine of the schema was in perfect continuity with the previous teaching, and that whatever differences remained were only due to their different wording and to their different relative historical circumstances.
In spite of this insistence on the schema's "doctrinal continuity," Paul Blanshard36 saw accurately:
Pity the poor progressives at Vatican II! In order to get their religious liberty statement adopted they were saddled with the necessity of reconciling their own relatively advanced ideas with the Church's reactionary teaching about liberty in the past. The published record of anti-liberty statements by the Church, confirmed even in recent years, is overwhelmingly on the side of the conservatives.37
The session ended without discussion of the chapters on religious liberty and the Jews. It seems that, although they felt cheated, the American bishops did not lobby to counteract the delaying tactics of the opposition because they were informed that Pope Paul VI had already irrevocably decided to postpone the discussion.38
Third Session (1964)
In between Council sessions, Fr. Murray, now consultor for the Secretariat for Unity of Christians, prepared an essay, which was sent to all American bishops at the insistence of Archbishop Shehan and Bishops Ernest Primeau (Manchester, New Hampshire) and Charles Helmsing (Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri), all three members of the Secretariat. It was also translated by the Dutch Documentation Center in Rome, to be distributed to the Council Fathers, and it became the leading influence upon the schema presented by the Secretariat in the third session.
In it, Fr. Murray described the "traditional" and "liberal" positions on religious liberty (although not identifying them in these words), and insisted on the core of the problem as he understood it: are those doctrinal statements to be taken as literally true, without qualifications, as forever fixed and directly and universally applicable? or are they, on the contrary, historically conditioned, demanding to go beyond the letter to find "the dynamic intent, whose relevancy to changing circumstances demands periodically revised formulations"?39 The traditional position was considered too abstract, too theoretical, divorced in fact from the present reality. The liberal position was presented as being the truly traditional position of the Church, embedded in history, maturing as the political and social conditions of the world changed, taking its arguments from natural law, the dignity of man, and the limited power of civil authority, all of them acknowledged today by the developing political and moral consciousness of man.40
Fr. Murray insisted that "an adequate doctrine of religious liberty could not be based on theological grounds alone,"41 it had to be solved along pragmatic lines, as the American experience under the First Amendment has shown, giving due consideration to the political and legal aspects of the problem, and to the concrete historical circumstances. As the Spanish hierarchy argued that their proposition of the "Catholic State" as ideal was the appropriate solution for their own historical circumstances, Fr. Murray hastened to add that the pragmatic situation had to be stated in such terms and so undergirded by considerations of principle that it would disallow any contention that the "Catholic State" is the ideal.42
This shows that, for Fr. Murray, the whole question rested upon the evidence of the practical effectiveness of the American solution-consequently, the doctrine had to be modified to reflect that experience. Doctrine no longer directs the acts to be performed, but the acts, if successful, determine what the doctrine is. Historian Jay P. Dolan says as much: the triumph of the American doctrine on religious liberty in Vatican II proves that culture shapes religion, as much as it is shaped by it.43
Of course, the objection was soon raised that such relativization of the doctrine was not really so different from the "two standards" so criticized by the progressives in the traditional position. What would impede the Church to abandon religious liberty when different historical circumstances make it unnecessary? Fr. Murray countered that, while historically conditioned, the doctrine on religious liberty will never be abandoned, because the present demand for freedom arises from man's heightened consciousness of his own dignity. It is "a demand of natural law in the present moment of history,"44 a better understanding of human nature which has now been achieved and will never pass away....
On September 1964, Fr. Murray prepared a series of interventions for the American bishops, which developed, successively, his doctrine on religious liberty.45 Archbishop Shehan would present its remote biblical and theological foundations, showing God's respect for man's freedom, and how the Church models her dealings with man upon God's pattern. Bishop Primeau would object that it is absurd to affirm man's internal freedom of conscience while denying him its external expression. He would also distinguish the notion of "right" as empowerment and immunity, pointing out that the schema referred only to immunity from coercion without asserting that man has the right to practice any religion he chooses. Bishop John Joseph Carberry (Lafayette, Indiana) would assert the incompetence of civil government on religious affairs, and Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle (Washington, D.C.) would set down the theoretical bases for the limitation of government involvement in the matter, by distinguishing between "society" and "state," and their respective, different ends, the "common good" and the "public peace."
In a letter to Archbishop Shehan, Fr. Murray advised that an American bishop should recommend the addition in the schema of a section stressing that, based on divine law, the Church has always claimed only freedom for herself, but that today she claims for all men and churches the same freedom she enjoys herself.46
The American bishops approved the Secretariat's text, the textus prior presented as an appendix to the declaration on ecumenism, as an adequate point of departure for the debate. In the conciliar Aula, on September 23, Cardinal Cushing asserted, in line with Fr. Murray's suggestion, that the matter can be reduced to two propositions. One is the "libertas Ecclesiae" the Church's own freedom in civil society and before the public powers, to teach, worship and live according to the dictates of Christian conscience without state interference. The second is that the Church "now, in this our age, champions for other churches and their members, indeed for every human person" the same freedom in civil society that she has always claimed for herself.47
Cardinal Meyer insisted on the expectation of the whole world for the Church to make a statement on religious liberty–the credibility of the Church was at stake. He also pointed out that it would facilitate the mission of the Church, by stressing that the faith is spread not through violence or propaganda, but through freedom and the convincing power of truth, and also that the future of the ecumenical movement depended on such a declaration.48 On his part, Cardinal Ritter asked that all argumentation would be removed from the text, to reduce it to the simple, uncontested assertion that religious liberty is "the innate right of all who come into this world"–a right founded on human nature, not something special, but simply one aspect of the freedom that belongs by definition to man.49
In spite of a bit of maneuvering that brought up a succession of opponents to the schema,50 the text was overwhelmingly approved and sent back to the Secretariat to be rewritten according to the modi expressed by the Council Fathers. Bishop Emile-Jozef De Smedt (Brugge, Belgium) charged Fr. Murray to be the "first scribe" for the new version, in collaboration with Msgr. Pavan, Cardinal Willebrands, and Fr. Hamer.
The "October Crisis" (October 9-11, 1964) was the opposition's almost successful attempt to take the redaction of the text away from the Secretariat for Unity and entrust it to a new theological commission formed by a majority of opponents to religious liberty (Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre among them). It was counteracted by the prompt reaction of a group of cardinals, among whom, of course, were Cardinals Meyer and Ritter. On receiving their letter, starting with the words "magno cum dolore (with great sorrow)," Pope Paul VI compromised: the text would remain under the Secretariat's jurisdiction, and it would be reviewed by a different commission (of which Archbishop Lefebvre was not a member), which in turn would offer only "suggestions" for its improvement.51
The new version, the "textus emendatus" now a separate schema exclusively on religious liberty, was finally delivered to the Council Fathers on November 17, 1964. In fact, the Secretariat for Unity had cunningly maneuvered the text and its timing. The more controversial passages had been watered down to get the text approved in the current session, with the intention of restoring them to full force when the "modi" were added. Moreover, the presentation of the text was delayed to the last possible moment, to impede its careful examination by the opposition.52
The maneuver failed. As it was so massively revised and rewritten, it was clear that it constituted a completely new text. On November 19, 1964–"Black Thursday" for the liberals; the "Day of Wrath" for Fr. Murray–the opposition obtained the tabling of the text for discussion in the next conciliar session.53
It was a rude awakening for the American bishops. Some of them, well connected with the Curia (as Bishop Wright, for example), had heard rumors about this move, but failed to warn their fellow bishops, convinced as they were that it could not succeed when confronted with the overwhelming majority in favor of the discussion. Cardinal Ritter judged that they had been "too trusting, and innocently confident,"54 but their reaction was "immediate, violent, spontaneous, and, for once, instinctively well-organized."55 Cardinal Meyer was instantly on his feet, arguing with the President, Cardinal Tisserant, and then storming away in disgust and joining a group of equally distressed bishops. It seems that it was Bishop Francis Frederick Reh, newly appointed rector of the North American College [after having been Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina, for less than a year and to be named Bishop of Saginaw, Michigan, in 1968–Ed.], who called for some paper....Soon, a handwritten letter to the Pope, starting with the words " instanter, instantius, instantissime," was circulating around the tiers in the conciliar Aula, gathering signatures, while new copies were made. With 441 signatures, Cardinals Meyer, Ritter, and Leger (Montreal) went directly to Pope Paul VI. In the meantime, Bishop De Smedt, seemingly choking with emotion and on the verge of tears, proceeded to read his relatio without changes, except for a negative clause added at the beginning: "This text that we do not present today for your vote...."56 His delivery was "a masterpiece in itself,"57 punctuated by thunderous applause and by a standing ovation at the end, particularly persistent at the back of the Aula, where the younger bishops sat–by far the most emotional moment of the whole Council.58
The Pope refused to intervene, mindful, as he said, not to interfere with the freedom and procedure of the Council, but promised that religious liberty would be the first matter to be discussed in the next session. In a previously scheduled meeting with the Pope, later that day, two of the American cardinals said that if the debate on the schema on the Jews were also to be postponed, they would be obliged to abandon the Council in protest....59
The Americans returned home heartsick by this temporary defeat, for this victory of what they called "legalism," this primacy of rules of procedure over the expressed will of the majority.60 Fr. Murray, on his part, was not completely unhappy with the delay. He was confident that it would allow for the preparation of a better text, especially by getting rid of the concessions made to the opposition, such as the awkward connection with the Syllabus of Errors, and the special claim of the Catholic Church for religious freedom because of her possession of the truth....61
Fourth Session (1965)
On December 29, 1965, Cardinal Ritter sent a letter to all American bishops, asking for their explicit support for the schema, by means of letters and modi to be sent to the Secretariat during the inter-session period. As there had been no preliminary vote on it, the text was not yet "received" by the Council and there was time to rework it.
In June 1965, the Secretariat sent the "textus re-emendatus" (!) to all the Council Fathers, profoundly modified, following a plan proposed by Bishop Carlo Colombo (Auxiliary of Milan, Italy), and accompanied by a long anonymous commentary and justification, most probably written by Fr. Murray.62
Fr. Guy de Broglie, S.J., peritus of the French episcopate, had sent previously a critique of the text to Fr. Murray, who promptly answered it. Their disagreement was only methodological. The French-speaking theologians and bishops favored an ethical-theological approach to the question, to arrive at a definition of religious liberty. The English-speaking periti and bishops supported the legal-political approach, that is, to address the question squarely from a practical point of view, and then argue the ethical and theological principles in its support.63 A compromise between the two approaches was arrived at thanks to the intervention of Bishop Jean Sauvage (Annecy) and Fr. Yves Congar, and the textus re-emendatus obtained the full support of the French episcopate in the Aula.
On September 15, 1965, when the debate started, "the old-faithfuls of the American hierarchy were back in Rome to defend the 'American schema'."64An impressive succession of American speakers steered the discussion: Cardinals Spellman, Cushing, Ritter, Shehan, and Bishops Primeau, John King Mussio (Steubenville, Ohio), Robert Emmet Tracy (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), John Whealon (Hartford, Connecticut), Paul Hallinan (Charleston, South Carolina), Philip Hannan (Auxiliary of Washington, D.C.)....Bishop Charles Maloney (Auxiliary of Louisville, Kentucky) presented the lay auditors' unanimous endorsement of the schema.65Certainly, the opposition rallied against what was seen, in the words of Bishop Robert Tracy, as a "mere American political document aimed at easing pressures from a pluralistic community back home, no matter the cost to Catholics in other countries."66 If it was so, the opposition failed to realize that this support did not arise from a pragmatic deviousness, but from a deeply felt conviction that rendered the American bishops totally incapable of acknowledging the traditional doctrine as immutable.
On September 21, the overwhelmingly favorable vote rendered the text "acquired," "in possession," no longer to be contested or substantially altered. Fr. Murray, hospitalized for a collapsed lung, was unable to work in the inclusion of the bishops' suggestions into a new draft.
On October 25, 1965, Pope Paul VI visited the United Nations. The following day, the "textus recognitus" was presented to the Council Fathers, and approved on October 27. A few changes, deemed "insignificant" by the commentators, had been added, mostly under pressure of the opposition. Fr. Murray complained that those additions weakened the text, and left it somehow ambiguous67–those few changes were not so "insignificant," then. The text was voted on again on November 19 and definitively approved and promulgated on December 7, 1965.
Bishop Robert Dwyer, speaking on Vatican Radio on November 5, 1965, had expressed the American hierarchy's evaluation of the Council and of their own work in it:
What will history record as the outstanding achievement of the Council? As the definition of the Trinity was the work of Nicea; and the dual nature, divine and human, of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Mary, was the accomplishment of Chalcedon; as the doctrine of justification by works, no less than by faith, was the hallmark of Trent; and as the clarification of the infallible teaching office of the Church as exercised by her head, the vicar of Christ, was the triumph of the First Vatican Council, what will be celebrated as the supreme contribution of the Second? For our part, and without any false modesty as one less wise,...we would answer, without a moment's hesitation, the Declaration on Religious Freedom....It is with no thought, certainly, of downgrading such towering monuments as the schema on the Church or that on Divine Revelation or the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, that we suggest that they will have less of an immediate impact upon the thinking and believing world, and that they will assume less prominence in the perspective of history. For there is something epoch-making about this Declaration which exalts it to the stature of one of the great landmarks of religious history. It could mark more clearly than anything else...the beginning of a new era in the religious understanding of mankind....Surely, in time to come, men will say of the Second Vatican Council that it wrote the charter of man's spiritual freedom as a child of God. It is something for any bishop, however obscure, to have played some part, however microscopic, in the framing of such a charter.68
Conclusion
The Liberal error, ancient as the world but still the capital crime of modern times, underlies all Council documents–the substitution of Man for God. Present in all of them, in Dignitatis Humanae it appears under the disguise of the "dignity of the human person," proposed by Fr. Murray as the foundation of religious liberty.
Continuity in Error
Few of the errors contained in Council documents are so clearly traceable as the doctrine on religious liberty. It comes down in a straight line from the Protestant Reformation, through Puritanism, its necessary secularist transformation, its embodiment in the American constitutional system and its pragmatic–and soon unconsciously dogmatic–acceptance in the American Church. It is "Americanism" reborn. The American flaws of temperament and spirit, of liberal law and practice, had been translated into universally applicable doctrine.
For Fr. Murray, though, the great achievement of Dignitatis Humanae was to bring to the surface something that was latent in the work of modern theologians. More than to proclaim the civil right to religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae forced the Church to accept openly the notion that the magisterial documents of the past are historically conditioned, that is, that they are relative to the times and circumstances in which they are written. As such, they should be reinterpreted and changed to fit new circumstances.
Pragmatism Over Doctrine
The very aim proposed of the Council–to be pastoral rather than doctrinal, to convince and to attract rather than to condemn–loudly proclaims this pre-eminence of expediency over truth, and the debate on religious liberty makes it evident to all, except to the willfully blind.
The American bishops insisted that the Council had to arrive at a declaration on religious liberty because that was what the world expected. The Church had to be brought into line with the "Zeitgeist" as men and civilized nations had already agreed on religious liberty in principle. As Fr. Murray put it, the achievement of Dignitatis Humanae was "to bring the Church abreast of the developments that have occurred in the secular world. The fact is that the right to religious freedom has already been accepted and affirmed by the common consciousness of mankind."69
Ambiguity
It is commonly asserted that the documents of the Council juxtapose sound traditional doctrine with modern errors or, at least, with propositions liable to be interpreted in a liberal, modernistic sense. The truth of this assertion appears clearly in the very history of the elaboration of Dignitatis Humanae. The wording of the different drafts was manipulated either to lure the opposition into approving the text, or at least to render that opposition less vocal and convincing. Although that was the method chosen by the Secretariat for Christian Unity, Fr. Murray himself decried it, I believe, out of intellectual honesty, but, more importantly, because in his opinion such concessions to the opposition weakened the text–that is, rendered it less clearly revolutionary.
The Zeal of the American Bishops
The promotion of religious liberty in the context of the redefined relations between Church and State became for the American bishops an emotional and logical necessity because the doctrine on religious liberty, as proposed in the Council, was, in fact, the translation into theoretical terms of what had been their own experience in America.
In this context, the American obsession with success also had an influence over the American bishops' stand on the question. The Puritan theory on predestination has left in the American spirit, as an unspoken corollary, the ingrained idea that those who are right (the "good guys") will indefectibly win, sooner or later. Although the American bishops had enough Catholic sense not to accept success, at least not consciously, as the definitive measure of the truth of a decision or practice, it nevertheless colored their doctrinal position on the matter. Their underlying assumption seemed to be–for a non-American observer–that if it had worked in America, if the Church had flourished under such a system, the system itself couldn't be wrong. If the Magisterium has until now opposed it, the simplest explanation was that Europeans had not yet properly understood what America was all about.
In other words, their most basic, almost instinctive, argument did not derive from the Magisterium, but from the "traditional" American version of Liberal-Catholicism. Its approval would validate what they had personally done, and to some extent believed. It also would, at long last, prove that the American Church, by accepting the American constitutional system as the best of all possible worlds, had been right throughout all her history, and that the Roman suspicions and sanctions of the past were unjust.
It was enough to fire up the American bishops with a crusading zeal. The history of the Council shows that, when the subject under discussion touched them so closely, they became "alive." Even more, in the third and fourth sessions, they replaced the French-German-Dutch clique in the leadership of the debate.
Fr. Murray's Decisive Influence
Although Fr. Murray was one among many theologians working on Dignitatis Humanae, his doctrine was fundamental for many episcopal interventions and for the final text.
He was acknowledged as the leading expert on the question. He instructed the American Bishops on the theoretical questions of religious liberty in their weekly meetings at the North American College in Rome, advised them on their interventions in the Aula, wrote those interventions himself, drilled the bishops, and even organized the order in which they should speak to present a comprehensive explanation of his doctrine to the Council. He offered similar advice and wrote similar interventions or drafts for other, non-American bishops.
As a consultor of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, he wrote himself–or was the leading editor of–the different drafts of the schema on religious liberty presented to the Council. He even prepared the addresses delivered by the Relator of the Secretariat for this question, Bishop Emile-Jozef de Smedt. As fitting capstone for such influence, parts of the definitive text of Dignitatis Humanae are almost literal quotes from Fr. Murray's published writings.
The American bishops became, on the question of religious liberty at least, little more than spokesmen for Fr. Murray's doctrine. As Bishop Robert Tracy acknowledged, "the voices are the voices of United States bishops, but the thoughts are the thoughts of John Courtney Murray."70
Fr. John Courtney Murray died August 16, 1967.
Fr. Juan Carlos Iscara, a native of Argentina, was ordained in 1986 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. For the last nine years, he has been teaching Moral Theology and Church History at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, Winona, MN. This article is a modified version of the paper read by the author at the "Theological Symposium on the Second Vatican Council," held by the Society of Saint Pius X in Paris (France), on October 4-6, 2002. The title was suggested at the same Symposium by Rev. Fr. Alan Lorans, SSPX.
1. Article for Le Figaro, quoted in Msgr. Vincent Yeoman's, American Participation in the Second Vatican Council (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1967), pp. 626-627.
2. Ibid., pp. 5-6.
3. Michael Novak, The Open Church: Vatican II, Act II (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 326.
4. Complete text in Msgr. Vincent Yzermans, A New Pentecost (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1963).
5. Fr. G. P. Fogharty, S.J., President of the American Catholic Historical Association, in The Catholic Virginian, July 20, 1992. Quoted in Michael Davies, The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty (Long Prairie, MN: The Neumann Press, 1992), p. 161.
6. Mark S. Massa, Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (New York: Crossroad, 1999), p. 8.
7. See an excellent description of this process in Massa, pp. 2-14, of which this paragraph is but the briefest summary.
8. Massa, Catholics and American Culture, p. 10.
9. Ibid., p. 10.
10. Jay P. Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 156.
11. Ibid., pp.l56-157.
12. "The Catholic Position: A Reply," in American Mercury, LXIX, Sept. 1949. Quoted in Donald E. Pelotte, S.S.S., John Courtney Murray: Theologian in Conflict (New York: Paulist Press, 1976), p. 19.
13. "Theological Studies," XXV, December 1964. Quoted in Davies, The Second Vatican Council, p. 78.
14. Ibid., p. 80.
15.Ibid.
16. Paul Blanshard, quoted in Davies, p. 116.
17. John Courtney Murray, in Yzermans, American Participation, p. 668.
18. Novak, The Open Church, p. 336.
19. Ibid., p. 321.
20. Pelotte, John Courtney Murray, p.78.
21. A forthcoming article will deal with these "suggestions" and the doctrinal positions of the American Bishops before the Council.
22. Yzermans, p. 7.
23. Quoted in Novak, The Open Church, p. 325.
24. Ibid., p. 321.
25.Ibid., p. 330.
26. Yzermans, p. 3.
27. Quoted in Novak, The Open Church, p. 326.
28. Msgr. Francis J. Weber, His Eminence of Los Angeles, James Francis Cardinal Mclntyre (Mission Hills CA: St Francis Historical Society, 1997), vol. 2, p. 396.
29. Novak, The Open Church, p. 327.
30. Pelotte, John Courtney Murray, pp. 79-80.
31. Novak, The Open Church, p. 256.
32. Quoted in Davies, The Second Vatican Council, p. 119.
33. Pelotte, John Courtney Murray, p. 83.
34. Ibid., pp. 86-87.
35. Ibid., p. 84.
36. In those days a noted anti-Catholic propagandist, now almost completely forgotten.
37. Quoted in Davies, The Second Vatican Council, p. 124.
38. Xavier Rynne [Francis-Xavier Murphy, CSSR], Vatican Council II (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1968), p. 256; Robert Rouquette, La fin d'une chretiente: Chroniques, in the series Unam Sanctam, vols. 69/a-69/b (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1968), p. 512.
39. Pelotte, John Courtney Murray, p. 89.
40. Letter from Archbishop Karl Alter (Cincinnati), quoted in Pelotte, John Courtney Murray, pp. 89-90.
41. Ibid., p. 91.
42. Ibid.
43. Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism, p. 161.
44. Pelotte, John Courtney Murray, p. 92.
45. Ibid., pp. 92-94, summarizes the following interventions.
46. Ibid., p. 94.
47. Yzermans, American Participation in the Second Vatican Council, p. 626.
48. Rynne, Vatican Council II, p. 299.
49. Yzermans, American Participation in the Second Vatican Council, p. 628.
50. Rynne, Vatican Council II, p. 301.
51. Davies, The Second Vatican Council, pp. 135-137; Rynne, Vatican Council II, pp. 317-319; Rouquette, La fin d'une chretiente, pp. 513-519.
52.Rynne, Vatican Council II, p. 417.
53.Rouquette, La fin d'une chretiente, pp. 544-549.
54. Rynne, Vatican Council II, p. 418.
55.Ibid.
56. Jerome Hamer, O.P. and Yves Congar, O.P., editors, La Liberte religieuse: Declaration "Dignitatis humanae personae" in the series Unam Sanctam, vol. 60 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1967), p. 89.
57. Yzermans, American Participation in the Second Vatican Council, p. 620.
58. Rynne, Vatican Council II, pp. 419-420.
59. Ibid., p.421.
60. Yzermans, American Participation in the Second Vatican Council, p. 621.
61.Article in America, January 9, 1965. Quoted in Rynne, p. 416.
62.Rouquette, La fin d'une chretiente, p. 609.
63. See the address by Bishop Karl Alter (written by Fr. Murray), on September 24,1964, quoted in Yzermans, American Participation in the Second Vatican Council, p. 630.
64. Ibid., p.631.
65. Ibid., p. 634.
66. Quoted in Pelotte, John Courtney Murray, p. 98.
67. Ibid., p. 99.
68. Quoted in Yzermans, American Participation, pp. 641-642.
69. John Courtney Murray, quoted in Pelotte, John Courtney Murray, p. 100.
70. Ibid., p. 98.
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