In an insightful essay recently published at Public Discourse, legal scholar Gerry Bradley examines the teachings regarding church and state between the last two Leonine popes. The former, Leo XIII, inaugurated—among other things—the modern genre of Catholic Social Teaching with his landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. The latter, Leo XIV (formerly Robert Prevost), was elected and crowned in May, 2025, and currently serves as the first American-born pope in history.
As Bradley notes, standing between these two popes is the Second Vatican Council and its declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis humanae. Promulgated 60 years ago this past December, the declaration stands as a landmark statement of a principled Christian commitment to the integrity of human responsibility before God and the consequences for civil liberty. And it is worth revisiting this document for those within as well as those outside the Roman Catholic Church as it stands as a kind of temporal as well as conceptual mid-point between the two Leos.
The Second Vatican Council has sometimes been described as the Roman Catholic Church’s premier engagement with the modern world. For critics this engagement too often came to expression in accommodation or prevarication. For its supporters, however, the council’s conclusions—addressing the liturgy, evangelization and cultural engagement, ecumenism, as well as religious liberty and many other topics—represent worthy attempts to translate the timeless and immutable teachings of the church and apply them to a changed historical moment.
These tensions are clearly at play in the church’s teachings with respect to religious liberty. On its own, Dignitatis humanae represents a straightforward and cogent expression of a longstanding tradition within Christianity that emphasizes the priority of the conscience, the impotence of coercion in matters of faith, and the corollary responsibility to protect religious liberty in civil law. In this way Dignitatis humanae is in continuity with what the historian Robert Louis Wilken has identified as a consistent set of arguments going back to the early church, notably as expressed by Tertullian and Lactantius.
In fifteen short sections Dignitatis humanae sets out the case for religious liberty clearly and convincingly. The Christian case for religious liberty does not depend, as many secular arguments do, on relativistic claims or merely pragmatic grounds. Instead, it recognizes that “all men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and His Church, and to embrace the truth they come to know, and to hold fast to it.”
In defending himself before an imperial hearing, the reformer Martin Luther once warned that “it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.” Properly understood this was not a claim to absolute subjectivity with respect to religious belief or freedom of worship. It was, instead, a heartfelt recognition of the absolute priority of the divine-human relationship which must be appropriately and justly affirmed and protected in civil law. In the same way the Second Vatican Council observes that “in all his activity a man is bound to follow his conscience in order that he may come to God, the end and purpose of life. It follows that he is not to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his conscience. Nor, on the other hand, is he to be restrained from acting in accordance with his conscience, especially in matters religious.”
Grounding its articulation of religious liberty in the inherent and inalienable dignity of the human person as well as the intrinsic spontaneity of faith, Dignitatis humanae states that “this Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom.” It is a moral and a spiritual right as well as one that must be respected in positive law: “This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed and thus it is to become a civil right.”
This right to religious liberty, while grounded in the “very nature” of the human person, is not limited to individual rights or private conviction: “The social nature of man, however, itself requires that he should give external expression to his internal acts of religion.” This means that religious liberty includes not merely individual rights and responsibilities but also social and institutional liberties and duties. As the council puts it, “Religious freedom therefore ought to have this further purpose and aim, namely, that men may come to act with greater responsibility in fulfilling their duties in community life.”
Because religious liberty as required by the nature of the human person revealed both in special revelation and in rational reflection is a requirement of a just social order, its violation necessarily creates conflict and invites advocacy for reform. As Dignitatis humanae concludes, “it is necessary that religious freedom be everywhere provided with an effective constitutional guarantee and that respect be shown for the high duty and right of man freely to lead his religious life in society.”
These deep truths about the relationship between the nature and dignity of the human person are contested no less today than they were 60 years ago. Indeed, resurgent reactionary movements within Catholicism as well as Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy not only interrogate but also often condemn such respect for human rights and religious liberty as expressed in Dignitatis humanae.
There is an intriguing discussion about how to interpret and understand the Catholic Church’s teachings over time, and Bradley’s essay is noteworthy in this regard. Bradley contends that “Leo XIII was no integralist. He was not even an establishmentarian, at least not dogmatically.” There are indeed important shades of nuance between a simple binary of integralism and absolute freedom. Thus in the nineteenth century (to say nothing of the previous millennia and a half of both doctrine and practice), Pope Leo XIII could proclaim that “it is not lawful for the State, any more than for the individual, either to disregard all religious duties or to hold in equal favour different kinds of religion; that the unrestrained freedom of thinking and of openly making known one’s thoughts is not inherent in the rights of citizens, and is by no means to be reckoned worthy of favour and support.”
These kinds of statements and arguments are by no means unique to Roman Catholics. As Wilken also points out, such views were the dominant tradition throughout Christendom in the medieval period up through to the modern world. Different Protestant traditions have had to grapple with a renewed emphasis on human dignity—often by updating their confessional standards as in the case of the Dutch Reformed and the American Presbyterians. The historian John Coffey thus characterized the 1789 revisions to the Westminster standards as “Presbyterianism’s Vatican II moment, analogous to the Catholic Church’s landmark Declaration of Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae) in 1965.”
Of course it was a moment for Presbyterians that predated Vatican II by nearly two centuries, but nevertheless Dignitatis humanae stands as a signal contribution to and statement of the intrinsic and undeniable connection between human dignity and religious liberty. And as such it is a declaration that has much to teach us, for Catholic and non-Catholic as well as for believer and unbeliever alike.
