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Dignitatis humanae
Dignitatis humanae (Of the Dignity of the Human Person) is the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom. In the context of the council's stated intention "to develop the doctrine of recent popes on the inviolable rights of the human person and the constitutional order of society", Dignitatis humanae spells out the church's support for the protection of religious liberty. It set the ground rules by which the church would relate to secular states.
The passage of this measure by a vote of 2,308 to 70 is considered by many to be one of the most significant events of the council. This declaration was promulgated by Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965.
Dignitatis humanae became one of the key points of dispute between the Vatican and traditionalist Catholics such as Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre who argued that the council document was incompatible with previous authoritatively stated Catholic teaching.
Historically, the ideal of Catholic political organization was a tightly interwoven structure of the Catholic Church and secular rulers generally known as Christendom, with the Catholic Church having a favoured place in the political structure. In 1520, Pope Leo X in the papal bull Exsurge Domine had censured the proposition "That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit" as one of a number of errors that were "either heretical, scandalous, false, offensive to pious ears, or seductive of simple minds and against Catholic truth".
However, during the same period, the Catholic Church condemned the Regalist, Gallican and Caesaropapist heresies that aspired to a State, under the pretext of its Confessionality, with inherent rights to intervene in religious matters (such as the Conversion of people or the repression of Heresy) that were typically a protest of the ecclesiastical Jurisdiction. So, the Church rather defended the Augustinian and Thomist doctrine which stated that, only by concession of the Spiritual Power of the Papacy (considered of a higher order according to the Doctrine of the two swords), is that a Christian Government could use its Temporal Power in such matters, so that the civil Authority then could represses heresy or apostasy (if and only there was a just cause, something that only the Papacy could determine), but teaching as magisterial doctrine that it was not an inherent right of the State to be an institution with religious faculties, and therefore, the Church strongly condemned the Christian rulers who, during the European Wars of Religion, abused such concessions of the Church with the Patronato (or usurped the powers of the Catholic ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, as in the case of countries that embraced the Protestant Reformation and founded national Churches controlled by the State, such as the Anglican Church whose head was the King of England) in order to violate the rights of people who were not attached to the true Church, who according to the Holy See should be treated with compassion and called to correct themselves so that they return to Orthodoxy (not be brutally repressed without respect for a Presumption of innocence) while also condemning rulers who wanted to repress or ignore the rights of non-Christians, such as Muslims or Jews, who were not under the jurisdiction of Christians because they were in a different religious communion, and therefore even outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.
The punishment of crimes belongs to civil magistrates only insofar as those crimes are contrary to political ends, public peace, and human justice; but coercion with respect to those acts that are opposed to religion and the salvation of the soul is essentially a function of the spiritual power [the power of the Church], so that the authority to make use of temporal penalties for the purposes of such correction must have been assigned in particular to this spiritual power.
— Francisco Suárez, Defensio Fidei Catholicae adversus Anglicanae Sectae Errores
In short, the Church reserved for the Clergy the right to judge the religious conscience of souls to determine who was a Heretic and how to deal with them judicially (reserving the most severe penalties for repeat heretics or those who admitted to being apostates publicly), while the State did not have such Prerogatives by themselves, but by the grace of the true Church of Christ (the Holy See), which also did not consider it morally acceptable to interfere with the conscience of non-Christians that lacked of Baptism, these having to be respected in their condition as natural non-Christians (according to Jus gentium and Natural law) and to have the freedom to profess their religion among their communities (such as the Ghettos) as long as they do not proselytize what the Church understands as false religions whose expansion would endanger Salvation in Christianity (the Church then leaning towards defending Catholic Unity, which involved religious Uniformism at a political level, and so Catholic political supremacy in societies with a Catholic majority).
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Dignitatis humanae
Dignitatis humanae (Of the Dignity of the Human Person) is the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom. In the context of the council's stated intention "to develop the doctrine of recent popes on the inviolable rights of the human person and the constitutional order of society", Dignitatis humanae spells out the church's support for the protection of religious liberty. It set the ground rules by which the church would relate to secular states.
The passage of this measure by a vote of 2,308 to 70 is considered by many to be one of the most significant events of the council. This declaration was promulgated by Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965.
Dignitatis humanae became one of the key points of dispute between the Vatican and traditionalist Catholics such as Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre who argued that the council document was incompatible with previous authoritatively stated Catholic teaching.
Historically, the ideal of Catholic political organization was a tightly interwoven structure of the Catholic Church and secular rulers generally known as Christendom, with the Catholic Church having a favoured place in the political structure. In 1520, Pope Leo X in the papal bull Exsurge Domine had censured the proposition "That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit" as one of a number of errors that were "either heretical, scandalous, false, offensive to pious ears, or seductive of simple minds and against Catholic truth".
However, during the same period, the Catholic Church condemned the Regalist, Gallican and Caesaropapist heresies that aspired to a State, under the pretext of its Confessionality, with inherent rights to intervene in religious matters (such as the Conversion of people or the repression of Heresy) that were typically a protest of the ecclesiastical Jurisdiction. So, the Church rather defended the Augustinian and Thomist doctrine which stated that, only by concession of the Spiritual Power of the Papacy (considered of a higher order according to the Doctrine of the two swords), is that a Christian Government could use its Temporal Power in such matters, so that the civil Authority then could represses heresy or apostasy (if and only there was a just cause, something that only the Papacy could determine), but teaching as magisterial doctrine that it was not an inherent right of the State to be an institution with religious faculties, and therefore, the Church strongly condemned the Christian rulers who, during the European Wars of Religion, abused such concessions of the Church with the Patronato (or usurped the powers of the Catholic ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, as in the case of countries that embraced the Protestant Reformation and founded national Churches controlled by the State, such as the Anglican Church whose head was the King of England) in order to violate the rights of people who were not attached to the true Church, who according to the Holy See should be treated with compassion and called to correct themselves so that they return to Orthodoxy (not be brutally repressed without respect for a Presumption of innocence) while also condemning rulers who wanted to repress or ignore the rights of non-Christians, such as Muslims or Jews, who were not under the jurisdiction of Christians because they were in a different religious communion, and therefore even outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.
The punishment of crimes belongs to civil magistrates only insofar as those crimes are contrary to political ends, public peace, and human justice; but coercion with respect to those acts that are opposed to religion and the salvation of the soul is essentially a function of the spiritual power [the power of the Church], so that the authority to make use of temporal penalties for the purposes of such correction must have been assigned in particular to this spiritual power.
— Francisco Suárez, Defensio Fidei Catholicae adversus Anglicanae Sectae Errores
In short, the Church reserved for the Clergy the right to judge the religious conscience of souls to determine who was a Heretic and how to deal with them judicially (reserving the most severe penalties for repeat heretics or those who admitted to being apostates publicly), while the State did not have such Prerogatives by themselves, but by the grace of the true Church of Christ (the Holy See), which also did not consider it morally acceptable to interfere with the conscience of non-Christians that lacked of Baptism, these having to be respected in their condition as natural non-Christians (according to Jus gentium and Natural law) and to have the freedom to profess their religion among their communities (such as the Ghettos) as long as they do not proselytize what the Church understands as false religions whose expansion would endanger Salvation in Christianity (the Church then leaning towards defending Catholic Unity, which involved religious Uniformism at a political level, and so Catholic political supremacy in societies with a Catholic majority).