The Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom has put the Catholic Church in step with the aspirations of contemporary men—aspirations which are rooted in their dignity as human persons, Bishop Joseph L. Bernardin said Wednesday in a speech at Ministers’ Week at Emory University.

“Whatever may have been the justification for a different view of the matter, the past has now been laid to rest forever,” Bishop Bernardin said in a talk on religious liberty.

Though the Catholic Church was late informally acknowledging the validity of the principle of religious freedom, the promulgation of the declaration was a significant event, he said.

Pope Paul VI himself has called it one of the major texts of the council. But even more significant than the updating of the Church in this matter will be the new development of the future for which the declaration has made an opening.

“Chief among these, I think, will be the development of a full theology of Christian freedom, of which religious freedom as a civil right will be only one factor,” the bishop said. Such a theology which is much needed in the Church today will surely have internal and ecumenical repercussions of major proportions.

In discussing the declaration, Bishop Bernardin said a number of elements were affirmed by the council. These include:

1. Every human person has the right to religious freedom.
2. This right has its foundation in the dignity can be known in the light of revelation as well as through reason.
3. This right has as its object or content an immunity from coercion at the hands of individuals, social groups, or public powers. This immunity is understood in two senses: no one must be forced to act against his conscience in religious matters; no one must be restrained form acting in conformity with his conscience, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.
4. This right demands recognition and sanction in the constitutional

As you well know, there was a minority of bishops who were opposed to religious freedom, Bishop Bernardin said. Their initial arguments against the principle were the right of truth and the privileges of the Catholic Church in virtue of its divine foundation. In the last phase of the conciliear debate, however, there was virtual unanimity that today the right to freedom in religious matters must be acknowledged by all men.

Bishop Bernardin said the Catholic Church was slow to acknowledge the principle of religious freedom because of two great historical movements of the 19th Century, both of which she bitterly opposed.

The first movement, as Father John Courtney Murray states was from the sacral conception of society and state to the secular conception.

He says that the Church opposed this because after the revolution in continental Europe…the term of the historical movement was not a proper secularity of society and state.

What emerged was the laicized state of rationalist or atheist inspiration, whose function was the laicization of society.

While he agrees that the Church could not accept this new order, he maintains that the Church failed to see, beneath the transitory historical forms assumed by the new movement, that true and valid dynamisms were at work.

The bishop said the second great trend was the movement from a view which holds truth to be not only objective but also existent apart from history and formulated in terms which are verbally immutable, to a view which, while holding fast to the nature of truth as objective, acknowledges that truth cannot be understood in a vacuum.

This movement was condemned by the Catholic Church because it resulted in a system called Modernism which destroyed the notion of truth. The Church had no alternative except to condemn the error, but once again, there was a failure to see that the basic principles of the historicity of truth from which the aberrations stemmed were valid.

“Aside form the work of scholars, it was not until Vatican II that the principle of the development of doctrine was formally recognized.”