Is Vatican II’s Religious Freedom Just Tolerance by Another Name?

In 1965 Vatican II promulgated Dignitatis Humanae, which declared in favor of the idea of religious freedom. Ever since then, the language of religious tolerance (or toleration) has largely fallen out of the Church’s vocabulary. It does not even appear in the current Catechism.

Some commentators see this change as an improvement, asserting that:

A respect for religious freedom stands head and shoulders above a supposed tolerance for religious belief… (“The Myth of Religious Tolerance”)

But is there really such a significant difference between religious freedom and tolerance?

1. What Does Scripture Say?

The Church traditionally began its reflection on tolerance with Scripture, where there are two distinct sets of relevant texts.

Firstly, there are texts which some theologians have cited as approval of tolerance, such as The Parable of the Tares. In that parable a farmer finds weeds growing in a crop. The farmer says:

Let them grow together until harvest. (Matthew 13:30)

Secondly, there are texts which clearly reject tolerance, such as the message to the church at Thyatira, in which an angel says:

Yet I hold this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. (Revelation 2:20)

What these texts show is that Scripture has a complex view of tolerance. Sometimes tolerance is appropriate, but on other occasions it is not appropriate.

2. The Complexity of Tolerance

Scripture’s complex view of tolerance is repeated in Church documents.

Sometimes the Church approved of instances of tolerance. For example, in 1841 Pope Gregory XVI said about mixed marriages (marriages of Catholics to non-Catholics):

Such marriages are tolerated… It is in no way to be considered approbation or approval, but merely a toleration, brought about not willingly but by necessity to avoid greater evils. (Quas Vestro 1)

But at other times the Church has rejected the appropriateness of tolerance. Sometimes those rejections have involved generalizations about “intolerable evils” (see Pope Leo XIII’s 1894 Praeclara and Pope Pius XI’s 1931 Quadragesimo Anno 49). However specific instances have also been cited, such as rejecting the tolerance of avarice (Pope Benedict XIV, 1741, Quanta Cura 4), or the tolerance of misusing Scripture (Pope Gregory XVI, 1834,  Singulari Nos 5) or the idea of tolerating unjustified violence (Pius XII, 1956, Datis Nuperrime 4).

The Church has also rejected some forms of religious tolerance, especially when they equated tolerance with indifferentism and either treated all religions as equal, or viewed it as impossible to know which religion was right. (See Pope Leo XII, 1824, Ubi Primum 12.)

As the Church has traditionally recognized that there can be both acceptable and unacceptable instances of tolerance, this shows that tolerance is an ethical concept which must have criteria governing its appropriate application.

3. Ethics: Tolerance and Evil

The Church’s ethics of tolerance begins with a classification of tolerance. People cannot “tolerate” something that is good, they can only tolerate something that is “evil.” (See Cardinal Lercaro, “Religious Tolerance in Catholic Tradition.”) In 1968 Pope Paul VI illustrated that language when he said:

In truth, if it is sometimes licit to tolerate a lesser evil in order to avoid a greater evil or to promote a greater good, it is not licit, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil so that good may follow therefrom. (Humanae Vitae 14)

Linking tolerance to the idea of evil raises a problem for English speakers, as the English word “evil” is not a precise translation of the Latin word malum. For St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), the word malum meant “an absence of good” (Summa Theologiae 1, Q.48, ad.3). So, in Latin, a missing tooth is an “evil,” in the sense that there is an absence of a good (i.e., the tooth) which ought to be present. But a missing tooth wouldn’t typically be described as an evil in English. English tends to view evil as more of a moral wrongness.

Associating tolerance with evil (in the English sense) can lead to misunderstandings. In 1749 Pope Benedict XIV spoke about tolerating orchestral music in church (Annus Qui Hunc 13), and in 1755 he talked of tolerating different liturgical rites (Allatae Sunt 9). But orchestras and liturgies are not “evils” (in the modern English sense), even though they may indeed involve an “absence of a good.”

What this all means is that when the Church traditionally spoke of tolerating other religions, the Church wasn’t necessarily implying that other religions are evil (in the modern English sense). It was saying that those religions involved an absence of a good. What was absent was essentially the elements which would have made them Catholicism.

When those missing elements were doctrinal, the Church tended to refer to their omission as an “error.” We can see that language usage in 1928 when Pope Pius XI described Ecumenism as “tolerating their errors” (Mortalium Animos 12).

4. Ethics: Tolerance and Complicity

One of the ethical issues raised by tolerance is the problem of complicity.

That issue arises from the first principle of ethics, which Aquinas stated as follows:

This is the first precept of law,… “good is to be done and… evil is to be avoided.” (Summa Theologiae, 1-2, Q,94, a.2)

That principle insists that people must avoid doing evil. But doing evil involves more than just direct action. People can also do evil by not acting (i.e., sins of omission). For example, turning a blind eye to a murderer’s activity would be a sinful complicity in murder, not a (morally permissible) tolerance of the murderer.

So, when it comes to religious tolerance, the Church has always insisted that each instance of tolerance needs to be evaluated to determine whether it would involve a sinful complicity, or whether there was some factor which could morally justify tolerance in that context. That reasoning can be seen in the following comment by Aquinas:

Though unbelievers sin in their rites, they may be tolerated, either on account of some good that ensues therefrom, or because of some evil avoided. (Summa Theologiae 2-2 Q.10, a.11)

What this means is that tolerance is never automatically justifiable. Pope Pius X confirmed that point in 1910, when he said:

Catholic doctrine tells us that the primary duty of charity does not lie in the toleration of false ideas, however sincere they may be, nor in… indifference towards the errors and vices in which we see our brethren plunged, but in the zeal for their intellectual and moral improvement as well as for their material well-being. (Notre Charge Apostolique)

5. Ethics: Tolerance and the Common Good

One of the key principles which determines whether instances of tolerance in society can be morally justified, is whether they promote the Common Good. As Aquinas put it:

If, therefore, a multitude of free men is ordered by the ruler towards the common good of the multitude, that rulership will be right and just. (De Regno, Bk.1, Chp.1.10)

However, determining what promotes the Common Good is complicated because the idea of the Common Good can involve factors of cultural relativity. For example, building public libraries might promote the Common Good within a literate population, but it would not do so if the population were illiterate.

Perhaps the most extreme example of variability with the Common Good is the medieval practice of executing heretics. Aquinas stated:

With regard to heretics… if he is yet stubborn, the Church no longer hoping for his conversion, looks to the salvation of others, by… deliver[ing] him to the secular tribunal to be exterminated… from the world by death. (Summa Theologiae, 2-2 Q.11, a.3)

Aquinas’ position is that the Common Good (in his context) can be promoted by executing heretics. (For further details on executing heretics, see A. Vermeersch’s 1913, Tolerance.)

Leaving aside considerations of whether Aquinas’ opinion was correct in his own context, it is also the case that since his era theologians have recognized that in their (different) cultural contexts executing heretics does not promote the Common Good.

What this shows is that there are unavoidable issues of variability and relativity associated with the concept of the Common Good. This means that no one should be surprised if the Church’s policies about religious tolerance should sometimes evidence changes, especially in radically different cultural contexts.

6. Leo XIII

A summary of the Church’s position on religious tolerance can be found in Pope Leo XIII’s 1888 encyclical, Libertas. It clarifies three main principles.

Firstly, because what is tolerated is an “evil” (see section 3), then there can be no right for it to exist. He said:

While not conceding any right to anything save what is true and honest… [the Church] does not forbid public authority to tolerate what is at variance with truth and justice, for the sake of avoiding some greater evil, or of obtaining or preserving some greater good. (Libertas 33)

It is quite unlawful to… grant… freedom of… worship, as if these were so many rights given by nature to man. (Libertas 42)

Secondly, the morality of religious tolerance arises, in part, from the fact that what is being tolerated involves humans having a limited (or balanced) freedom of the will. He said:

Things may be tolerated wherever there is just cause, but only with such moderation as will prevent its degenerating into license and excess. (Libertas 42)

Thirdly, the issue of complicity (section 4) means that tolerance can only be viewed as a temporary concession, which in ideal circumstances would not be accepted at all. He said:

But the more a State is driven to tolerate evil, the further is it from perfection… In the extraordinary condition of these times the Church usually acquiesces in certain modern liberties… because she judges it expedient to permit them. (Libertas 34)

7. Pius XII on Tolerance

In 1953 Pope Pius XII spoke about tolerance. He made four significant points.

He began by reiterating that there cannot be a right to what is being tolerated, because:

that which does not correspond to truth or to the norm of morality objectively has no right to exist, to be spread or to be activated. (Ci Riesce 5)

Secondly, whereas Pope Leo XIII suggested that tolerance can only ever be a temporary expediency (see section 6), Pius XII suggested an alternative possibility. He said:

Could it be that “in certain circumstances”… [God] would not give men any mandate, would not impose any duty, and would not even communicate the right to impede or to repress what is erroneous and false? A look at things as they are gives an affirmative answer. (Ci Riesce 5)

What Pius XII is suggesting is that there could be a situation where despite the fact that a community has no right to a particular error (i.e., no right to practice an alternative religion), nevertheless there might also be no right to impede or repress that error, even when it is possible to do so.

Thirdly, Pius gave an example of where there might be a situation where there is no right to repress an error, suggesting that it could involve people who are in invincible ignorance (i.e., unaware of their error). He said:

Concerning tolerance… in cases in which one could proceed to repression, the Church—out of regard for those who in good conscience (though erroneous, but invincibly so) are of different opinion—has been led to act… always for higher and more cogent motives… The attitude of the Church is determined by… the… Common Good. (Ci Riesce 6)

Fourthly, he identified a potential limitation in the traditional practice of clarifying what is appropriate for tolerance, on a country-by-country basis (i.e., in Vatican Concordats). He suggested that tolerance might also need to be viewed as a global issue. He said:

The attitude of the Church is determined by what is demanded for safeguarding and considering [both] the… common good of the Church and the State in individual states, and… the common good of the universal Church. (Ci Riesce 6)

8. Vatican II

Although Vatican II’s declaration Dignitatis Humanae (DH) proclaimed “religious freedom,” the issues it dealt with were those which Leo XIII and Pius XII referred to as matters of “tolerance.”

Vatican II essentially followed Pius XII’s suggestion of dealing with matters globally. It therefore clarified what was appropriate for ALL human beings, stating:

This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. (DH 2)

Then the Council took up Pius XII’s suggestion that there could be a situation where there is no right to impede or repress error. It used that idea at the heart of what it explained as religious freedom. It said:

This [religious] freedom means that all men are to be immune from… [external] coercion… no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly. (DH 2)

Although the Church had not previously supported the public expression of other religions, that is arguably just the logical consequence of Pius XII’s 1953 suggestion that there could be a situation in which there was an absence of a right to impede or repress the expression of an error.

One difference between Vatican II and Pius XII was how Pius XII explained that there could be a religious freedom arising out of the absence of a right to repress. He explained it as a matter of “regard for those in invincible ignorance.” One of the problems with that proposal is that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to know who was actually in invincible ignorance. So Vatican II explained matters in relation to the objective factor of human nature, stating:

The right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature. (DH 2)

Some critics say that those words contradict Leo XIII’s claim that religious freedom cannot be a (positive) right conferred by nature. (See section 6.) However Vatican II said that religious freedom is a (negative) right consisting of an immunity from coercion. And the text above does not affirm what Leo XIII rejected, i.e., that human nature confers the right to religious freedom. It says instead that the right has its foundation in human nature, which can be understood as simply stating that the need for religious freedom arises due to other aspects of human nature, such as what is needed for the operation of Free Will. (For further details see “Did Vatican II Reject Pope Leo XIII’s Doctrine of Religious Freedom?”)

Some critics have also said that Vatican II’s view of religious freedom conflicts with the teaching of Pope Pius IX’s encyclical Quanta Cura, some of which was repeated by Leo XIII. To understand why that is not the case see “Does Vatican II’s Religious Freedom Contradict Pius IX’s Quanta Cura or Syllabus of Errors?”

9. Conclusion

The Church’s views on tolerance are complicated because they represent a moral judgment which has to be applied on a case-by-case basis. (See section 1.) This means that there are types of religious tolerance which are incompatible with Church teaching. (See section 2.)

The ethical principles determining the appropriateness of toleration (sections 3–4) also involve aspects of relativity (section 5). So we should not be surprised to see differences over time in Church pronouncements about tolerance.

That explains why there is difference-amidst-continuity in what Popes Leo XIII and Pius XII said about tolerance. (See sections 6–7.) It also explains why there is difference-amidst-continuity between the views of Vatican II and Pope Pius XII. (See section 8.) Whether the latter difference is enough to require the renaming of “tolerance” as “religious freedom” is a debatable point.

Part of what makes it debatable is that Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae left several important issues of interpretation unresolved. Some people read the document as making eternal claims about human nature, with the consequence that it seems to promote a radical new doctrine which conflicts with prior Church doctrine.

But it is equally possible to read the document as simply stating what is appropriate in the modern world, in the light of the (culturally relative) requirements of the Common Good. We know that the relativity of the Common Good was discussed at Vatican II in relation to its occurrence in paragraph 7 of Dignitatis Humanae, as Bishop De Smedt made the following comment in 1965 to the bishops at Vatican II:

This elucidation regarding the common good clarifies many points in the text… Now some fathers wanted us to add [to the text] that in judging… shortcomings of the past, one should take into account the fact that human society itself has exhibited different modes of thinking and living in different ages. This is quite true, but it is equivalently expressed when we affirm that the norm for the care of religion is the common good. The common good as everyone knows is something relative; it is linked to the cultural evolution of peoples and has to be judged according to that development. (Quoted from Brian Harrison, 1988, Religious Liberty and Contraception, p. 89)

If Bishop De Smedt was right, then it raises a question of whether, and to what extent, significant elements of the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae are just the latest (culturally relative) application of the deeper doctrinal principles which govern what used to be called tolerance.