Religious Liberty or Killing Heretics? Thomas Pink's Catholic Integralist Reading of "Dignitatis Humanae"

 

                                          Preparing the Burning of Jan Hus at the Stake in 1415

In 1415, the Council of Constance (1414-1418), an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, conducted the heresy trial of Jan Hus, a Czech priest.  Hus had condemned the ethical abuses of the Church, such as the selling of indulgences, and he had called for the moral reform of the Church.  His teaching would later influence Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers of the fifteenth century.  The council declared Hus to be a "contumacious heretic."  He was turned over to the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund for punishment--by being burned to death.  Hus's supporters in Bohemia revolted in protest to his execution.  Popes called four crusades to put down the Hussite rebellions.

The Council of Constance was following the traditional doctrine of the Church that popes and councils of bishops have the supreme authority over the religious life of baptized believers, which includes the power to coerce belief in the Church's doctrines, and to ask the state to act as the "secular arm" of the Church in punishing those baptized Christians who have been identified as heretics or apostates.

In 1999, Pope John Paul II offered a public apology for the Church's killing of Hus, praised him for his "moral courage," and condemned the Church's policy of killing heretics.

Ever since the Second Vatican Council issued its "Declaration on Religious Liberty"--Dignitatis Humanae--in 1965, which declared that the "dignity of the human person" required the free exercise of religion without coercion by the state, most Catholics have assumed that the Catholic Church has rejected its traditional practice of religious coercion such as killing heretics.  But over the past ten years, some Catholic philosophers and theologians who identify themselves as "integralists" have argued that Dignitatis Humanae has been misinterpreted as a change in the Church's doctrine, and that one should see how Dignitatis Humanae leaves unchanged the traditional Catholic doctrine of the Church's authority to coercively enforce religious belief among baptized Christians.

This intellectual movement began in 2012 with the publication in First Things--the leading journal for right-wing Christian intellectuals--of an article by Thomas Pink (a professor of philosophy at Kings College London).  Pink interpreted Dignitatis Humanae as a change in policy but not a change in doctrine.  "The Church is now refusing to license the state to act as her coercive agent, and it is from that policy change, and not from any change in underlying doctrine, that the wrongfulness of religious coercion by the state follows."  The unchanged doctrine is that while the state has no authority on its own to coerce religious belief, because the ultimate authority over religious belief belongs to the Church, the Church can authorize the state to act as the "secular arm" of the Church in enforcing religious belief.  In particular, the Church can ask the state to punish those baptized Christians who have been condemned by the Church as heretics, apostates, or schismatics.  

Pink relies heavily on a passage in the first section of Dignitatis Humanae: "Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society.  Therefore, it leaves unchanged (integram) traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ."  Pink infers that if "traditional Catholic doctrine" remains "unchanged" by Dignitatis Humanae, that must mean that the traditional doctrine about the Church's authority to use the state as the "secular arm" of the Church in coercing religious belief has not been changed by Vatican II.  

There are lots of problems with this interpretation.  One is that there is no reference anywhere in Dignitatis Humanae to the "secular arm" doctrine of the Church.  Another problem is that when the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2105) quotes this passage about the "unchanged traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion," the Catechism identifies this as affirming the moral duty of the Church to be "constantly evangelizing men," and nothing is said about the possibility of using a "secular arm" to coerce Catholic faith.

Pink concluded his article by saying that we need to deepen our understanding of the theology of the Church's authority to use the coercive power of the state to promote the Catholic religion as the one true religion.  Here are his last two sentences: "This will involve an appropriate theology of baptism and in particular of the obligations to the Church incurred through baptism.  These are the very obligations that, as traditionally understood, could take political form and thus underpin state involvement in coercion, and which Dignitais Humanae so carefully undertakes to preserve, but not to explain."

The last sentence seems to suggest that the policy change in Dignitatis Humanae--that the Church no longer asks the state to act as the Church's agent in enforcing Catholic religious belief--could be (or even should be) reversed, so that the Catholic Church could reclaim its authority to ask the state to act as its "secular arm" in enforcing Catholic religious belief coercively--perhaps even by killing heretics and apostates.

This would support Catholic integralism--the idea that we need a confessional Catholic state enforced by religious coercion--as grounded in the theological doctrines of the Catholic Church as the one true religion.  In fact, Pink has identified himself as a Catholic integralist; and he has explained how his interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae shows that integralism is part of the infallible teaching of the Church--the Magisterium--as declared by the popes and the councils of the bishops.

In my previous posts on integralism, I noted Edmund Waldstein's summary of Catholic integralism in three sentences:  "Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding that political rule must order man to his final end. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power." 

Waldstein recommends the medieval Catholic kingdom of St. Louis IX in thirteenth-century France as a historical model of a social order in which the temporal power of government was subordinated to the spiritual power of the Church.  Here then is a clear rejection of the modern liberal regime and endorsement of the medieval illiberal regime.

Oddly, even the most radical right-wing critics of liberalism--like Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher--refuse to embrace the illiberalism of integralism.  While they reject modern liberalism, they also reject medieval illiberalism, because they want to build on the achievements of liberalism in promoting liberty, equality, and justice.  That's what I mean in saying that their argument is incoherent.

Deneen condemns the medieval social order for its "practices of slavery, bondage, inequality, disregard for the contributions of women, and the arbitrary forms of hierarchy and application of law" (19, 23, 185).  Similarly, Dreher says that medieval Europe was "no Christian utopia," because "the church was spectacularly corrupt, and the violent exercise of power--at times by the church itself--seemed to rule the world."  

The Catholic Church's "violent exercise of power"--particularly against Protestant Christians--was justified by Counter-Reformation Catholic theologians like Francisco Suarez and Robert Bellarmine, and Pink defends Suarez and Bellarmine as reliable exponents of the Church's doctrine of religious coercion.  Bellarmine argued that just as a heretic like Hus was rightly punished with death, so could all Protestants be identified as heretics and executed by Catholic rulers acting as the "secular arm" of the Catholic Church (Bellarmine 2012, pp. 102-20).  Pink (2016) agrees.

It should be noted that Bellarmine cannot cite any New Testament texts for his Catholic theocracy.  Instead, he has to rely on Old Testament teaching about coercive religious authority in ancient Israel.  This confirms my observation that the New Testament can be read as teaching classical liberalism, in that the New Testament churches were voluntary associations that did not employ violent coercion to enforce belief.  Roger Williams made this argument in his criticism of the theocracy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as violating Christian religious liberty.  Dignitatis Humanae also appealed to the New Testament as teaching religious liberty (see secs. 9-12).

Although the modern proponents of Catholic Integralism are often evasive about the need for religious violence to enforce Catholic belief, they occasionally admit that this will be required.  For example, Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister--in their book Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy (2020)--have said that in a Catholic state, capital punishment for public heresy and blasphemy will be a duty of the Church acting through the state as its "secular arm" (249-53).  Presumably, all Protestant Christians would be threatened with capital punishment for their heresy.

REFERENCES

Crean, Thomas, and Alan Fimister.  2020.  Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy.  London: Eurospan.

Pink, Thomas.  2012. "Vatican II's Teaching on Religious Freedom Changed Policy, Not Doctrine."  First Things,  August.

Pink, Thomas.  2016.  "Suarez and Bellarmine on the Church as Coercive Lawgiver."  In Legge e natura: I dibatti teologici e giuridici fra XV e XVII secolo, eds. Ricccardo Saccenti and Cinzia Scilas, 187-221.  Arricia, Italy: Aracne Editrice.

Pink, Thomas.  2018.  "In Defense of Catholic Integralism."  Public Discourse, August 12.

Bellarmine, Robert. 2012.  On Temporal and Spiritual Authority.  Edited with an Introduction by Stefania Tutino.  Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.