Seán Ó Conaill: Dignitatis Humanae, Theology and History
Dignitatis Humanae (1965), the Vatican II declaration on religious liberty, offers, in just one sentence, a consistent deductive theology that supports the Creed, illuminates the past and can shape the future.
“The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.” (Dignitatis Humanae, Vatican Council II, 1965, Article 1)
In flatly denying that Christian truth can impose itself by force, this 1965 church statement offers a complete explanation of Jesus’ submission to crucifixion in Jerusalem, c. 33 CE.
His only alternative would have been to resist arrest, but that would have been a refusal to accept Roman jurisdiction – an insurrection – leading, if successful, to the re-establishment of the military kingdom of Israel, with himself as supreme ruler. The truth then established for the loyal followers of Jesus would have been imposed, within some defined state frontiers, by force – not ‘by virtue of its own truth’.
However, if that was indeed Jesus’ reason for his non-resistance of Crucifixion – his conviction that divine truth, the truth that God is love only, cannot be established by force – it follows inevitably that the Roman Emperor Constantine must have been mistaken in 312 in claiming to have been authorised by God, in a dream or vision, to conquer under a symbol of the cross – even if this mistake then become embedded in the church-state alliance that grew out of this Constantinian claim.
Did any prominent Christian anywhere publicly question that claim of Constantine in or soon after 312? St Augustine of Hippo (354-430) certainly did not. Nor did St Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) – and these two giants still bestrode Catholic thought at the time of Vatican II.
Moreover, the same St Augustine mistakenly provided in 408 a Gospel argument for state religious oppression – by adapting Jesus parable of the great banquet (Luke 14:15-24) – a rejection of religious presumption – for an entirely different purpose, the coercion of religious dissent. Thousands were to suffer the consequences in the centuries that followed and even yet the church’s mission is struggling wherever Catholic clergy once gained, and then misused, political and social power.
Those who composed Dignitatis Humanae in 1965 were aware that it undermined the Constantinian claim of 312, and that it therefore also questioned the subsequent 1600 year relationship between Christian church and state – an alliance that had mostly collapsed in the cauldron of World War I 1914-18. However, they did not make this explicit in the document itself. Opponents of Dignitatis Humanae such as Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani and Archbishop François Lefebvre represented a Catholic spirit of opposition to any condemnation of that long period, the era of Christendom, in the global church – and the framers of the document – with support from future popes Paul VI and John Paul II – did not wish to wake that spirit into widespread rejection of the council. They left it to the grace of God to convey the full import of this 1965 document to those who would receive it.
Even by 2025 that complete import had not been fully articulated in Ireland.
For example, if the truth can convey itself only non-violently, what are we to make of the scriptural account of the call to Abraham to sacrifice his own son Isaac (Genesis 22), or of the slaying of the eldest sons of the people of Egypt by God’s Angel of Death (Exodus 12), or of God’s supposed support for the expropriation by the Israelites led by Moses out of Egypt of the Canaanite peoples who then occupied the land of Israel – or of the many other Old Testament references to divine violence? How are we even to understand the concept of divine inspiration of scriptural texts, if those texts seem to contradict one another?
And what of the church’s central ritual, the Mass? What exactly are we celebrating in repeating this ritual, especially at Easter? Is it the crucifixion of Jesus by his enemies, to appease a God angered by our sinfulness? Or, on the contrary, is it Jesus’ refusal of the option of violence – in obedience to a Father God who is himself non-violent and still bent on building an utterly peaceful Kingdom of God?
Our understanding of the doctrine of atonement – of how the Crucifixion reconciles us to God the Father – is also determined by how we understand the Mass – but just how clear is that understanding, even in the minds of those who preside? How many have ever heard in Ireland, since 1965, a serious and sustained attempt at clarification?
Reconciled to the church as a history student by Dignitatis Humanae in 1965 my own basic theology is a deductive extrapolation of that emphatic statement in Article 1 – that the truths of the Creed cannot be conveyed by force or compulsion. The Trinity are bent, I believe, on building an utterly non-oppressive Kingdom of God, through a servant church. Scriptural references to divine violence are therefore human projections – the result of our human incomprehension of how truth and justice could prevail without the use of force. The clerical abuse catastrophe is merely the most recent phase of our education in the peril for the church whenever it gains power and status.
René Girard’s insight of 1959 – into how human desire tends to begin with admiration of others, and too often of violent others – settles the issue for me, and confirms that declaration in Dignitatis Humanae.
And wrong models are chosen because they command greater status, greater ‘admiration’, than we do. Our chronic status anxiety, born of invidious comparison, is the true root of the greatest evil – including ongoing denial of the human causes of climate change. Jesus’s holiness is proven by his total lack of that same frailty. His celibacy was incidental, determined by the urgency and supreme danger of his mission, and was not in the least a rejection or deprecation of human sexuality.
Finally, God the Father was never aloof, tapping his foot. His reaction to the crucifixion of Jesus was also a refusal of the option of violence – in raising Jesus to life beyond death. He is present always in the eternal presence of the obedient Son – who died and yet lives because he would not – and could not – force anyone to follow him. Requested sincerely, the gifts of the Holy Spirit will enable us, through the synodal revolution now ongoing, to convey these truths, always gently, in the post-Christendom era.
In a review of the Oxford Handbook of Vatican II, published today, I said this: “Reading Silvia Scatena’s account of the debates on religious freedom, one may recover the excitement they generated, but one also has the sense of wandering in a remote historical enclave, since the entrenched positions that had to be overcome by the French and American theologians at that time are now entirely archaic.” I have the impression that this Declaration does not arouse much interest today, in contrast to the other Declaration, Nostra Aetate.
“We hold the pearl of great price – and there is a huge hunger out there for what we have. And people need the faith, they need the treasure that we have … but somehow we are finding it difficult to reach them!” (Archbishop Eamon Martin, 18th Oct 2025, Kilkenny)
What exactly is the root of that difficulty?
Take the Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church (‘YouCat’) Article 101 as an example:
“Q. Why did Jesus have to redeem us on the cross of all places?
“A. The cross on which Jesus, although innocent, was cruelly executed is the place of utmost degradation and abandonment. Christ, Our Redeemer, chose the Cross so as to bear the guilt of the world and to suffer the pain of the world. So he brought the world back home to God by his perfect love.”
Isn’t this is the theology of St Anselm – with no mention whatever of the early church astonishment at Jesus victory over evil, without striking a blow? And no mention whatever of the particular evil that was revealed by the Cross, the mistaken pride of his accusers, the direct and obvious cause of Jesus’ crucifixion?
Pride is obviously status anxiety in control, the ‘fear of falling’ that drove Jesus’ enemies and judges – Caiaphas, Herod and Pilate – but you will look in vain in YouCat for any explication of pride. Constantly the word ‘sin’ is used in YouCat as though its referent was obvious – when it is anything but. This goes to the root of our incoherence and of our psychological muddle over evil.
Are teenagers today still being taught that their own ‘bad thoughts’ helped to put Jesus on the cross when what put him there was obviously something else – adult status anxiety, the very problem that is in our own time crucifying migrants, fuelling grotesque inequality and preventing the world getting a grip of climate change?
And no mention whatever in YouCat of Jesus’ rejection of violence. That he was resisting, and overthrowing the ‘shame or be shamed’ ethos of all imperialism – without violence – is totally unseen.
Just as soon as Jesus’ – and God the Father’s – rejection of violence is unseen by our theology, that theology becomes one of muddle and even of suspicion over where the violence of the crucifixion begins – with that suspicion falling even on the same God the Father – because ‘divine justice’, according to Anselm, required the satisfaction of his ‘honour’, a squaring of accounts.
This why we have difficulty evangelising. We don’t have a coherent theology of salvation because we don’t have a clear scriptural, theological and historical grip on the sin of pride, as obviously at work in AD 33 in Jerusalem as in the scapegoating of migrants today. We need urgently to return to the ‘Christus Victor’ understanding of the Cross.
“And no mention whatever in YouCat of Jesus’ rejection of violence.”
Mea Culpa. YouCat does indeed cover Jesus’ rejection of violence – in Article 397. The problem is that YouCat does not connect the Cross and Redemption directly with Jesus’ non-violence – or say bluntly that the violence of the Cross arose directly out of the pride of his accusers and judges. This is worse than a missed opportunity. It leaves the reader to infer that the violence of the Cross arose out of the demands of divine justice – and straight away we are in a hopeless muddle.
It does look like the Youcat is educating Catholic youth in the narrowest possible ideas of sin, redemption, atonement. This conduces to a masochistic groveling over sexual “sins.” I watched the 1968 movie Ïf…” a few days ago — after Columbine and Sandy Hook a film glorifying a school massacre is disturbing. But there is a scene where a boy confesses to the chaplain that he is plagued by “bad thoughts” and the chaplain tells him that every Christian has to battle with temptation, as if encouraging him to advance on the battlefield. Millions of Catholic boys and men are still confessing their struggles with masturbation, and some see it as the most important sin of all, and so on. Meanwhile the medical verdict seems to be that masturbation is good for one’s physical and psychological health, a protection against prostate cancer. With regard to Dignitatis Humanae, the International Theological Commission has a statement which wanders all over the place, straying more into the territory of Nostra Aetate… https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_20190426_liberta-religiosa_en.html Why is church communication so hopeless? Is it not because of the crackdown on honest open discussion (including the suppression of theological debate from 1978 to 2005, which has not been made up for in the Francis years)?