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The Diarchy of Religious Freedom

Keith Pavlischek

June 4, 2008

Council on Faith & International Affairs

Kenneth Grasso and Robert Hunt, eds., Catholicism and Religious Freedom: Contemporary Reflections on Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Liberty (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 258pp. $28.95.

Kenneth Grasso and Robert Hunt have been diligently at work over the past 15 years reflecting, writing, and convening the efforts of scholars on the social and political implications of Catholic social thought. Their persistence has paid off with several collections of essays, including John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation (1992), Catholicism, Liberalism, and Communitarianism (1995, with Gerard Bradley), and A Moral Enterprise: Essays in Honor of Francis Canavan (2003).

While such essay collections will inevitably be uneven, they do serve as an excellent starting point for scholarly engagement with modern Catholic social thought, to which Catholicism and Religious Freedom is a fine addition. It would be a shame, however, if these essays were read only by scholars with narrow academic interests, for the issues addressed are broadly relevant for how we think about religious liberty in the 21^st century-especially as brought to bear in the momentous challenge of a religiously and politically intolerant Islam.

In an excellent introductory essay, Grasso and Hunt describe their two goals for this volume. "The first is what the Second Vatican Council called ressourcement, a return to the sources," which means taking a close and detailed look at the Second Vatican Council's Dignitatis Humanae (the Declaration on Religious Freedom, hereafter "DH"). The aim is to compare and contrast DH to "some of the competing conceptions of religious freedom articulated by other Christian traditions and by secular sources." Their second stated objective is "to begin the long-overdue task of addressing the questions that collectively constitute DH's unfinished agenda."

Two Catholic leaders are a particular focus in this volume. The first is John Courtney Murray, who, while his influence on DH was "certainly not determinative," indisputably left his imprint on the Declaration and all American Catholic out-workings of religious freedom. The second is Pope John Paul II, whose significance comes "from the treatment of DH in the social teaching of his papacy. Through his encyclicals and addresses he emerged as one of its leading interpreters by insisting on the Declaration's centrality to the Church's social magisterium."

Prior to DH, Grasso and Hunt tell us, Roman Catholic thinking on religious liberty boiled down to a few premises, namely that individuals are obligated to embrace religious truth, that Catholicism is the one true religion, that total care of the common good is committed to the state, and that religious truth is an integral element of this good. Often summarized as the "thesis-hypothesis doctrine," the pre-Vatican II understanding was that if Roman Catholicism prevailed among the people in a given state, then there should be "the legal establishment of Catholicism as the religion of the state," which also meant "sharp limits on the religious freedom of non-Catholics." Only under conditions in which Roman Catholicism was a minority could non-Catholic religions and sects be tolerated.

However, it is important to note here that it was never really the case that belief in a "confessional state" constituted the essence of Catholicism. The older Catholic notion of the confessional state was still substantially different from classical Islamic notions of Shari'a law, whose extension (which includes penal sanctions for apostasy and blasphemy as well as the dhiminutization of Christians and Jews) was required by Islamic canonical sources. To put it simply, even for pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic defenders of the thesis-hypothesis doctrine, there was considerable conceptual wiggle room for the development of a relatively robust idea of religious freedom.

The fundamental difference between even the older Roman Catholic position and traditional Islamic understandings of Shari'a law rests on a notion that is uniquely Christian. In a famous chapter of We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, titled "Are there Two or One?", John Courtney Murray insisted that the most important, indispensable, and revolutionary contribution of Christianity to political thought was the insistence on the dual nature of society. Murray called this the "diarchy," and for two centuries Christian theologians, jurists, and political thinkers have referred to these two jurisdictions in a number of ways: ecclesiastical and lay, sacred and profane, spiritual and temporal, religious and secular. The effect was a profound challenge to all forms of political monism.

Murray was fond of citing the celebrated statement of Pope Gelasius I, writing to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasious I in 494 A.D.: "Two there are, august Emperor, by which this world is ruled on title of original and sovereign right-the consecrated authority of the priesthood and the royal power." In the history of Western political thought, this fundamental idea was expressed in many different and even competing ways: Augustine's two cities, Luther's two kingdoms, and even modern notions of "separation of church and state." As a result, we tend to lose sight of the common denominator in these diverse articulations of the diarchy. As George Weigel has put it recently, the reason the distinction between regnum and sacerdotium, political power and spiritual authority, has been so crucial in the history of the West is because, "by putting limits on political power, it created conditions for the possibility of the social pluralism of the medieval world, which in turn shaped the public terrain from which democracy eventually grew."

By contrast, however, as Bernard Lewis points out, "the Founder of Islam was his own Constantine, and founded his own state and empire. He did not therefore create-or need to create-a church. The dichotomy of regnum and sacerdotium, so crucial in the history of Western Christendom, had no equivalent in Islam." Indeed, the resurgence of Islam (and not just terrorism or "Islamism") as a political movement has forced us to recognize how the idea of a diarchy (as encompassed in a duality of authority, in the very idea of the sacred and profane, in the historical insistence of the "freedom of the church" from political control) is a specifically Christian artifact. But if, as Fr. Canavan, Murray, Grasso, Hunt, and others compellingly suggest, the diarchy is the most fundamental idea supporting the Church's and the West's ideas of religious freedom, then to reach a consensus with the West Islam will need to go through a profound process of reinterpretation of its original political theology, such that it moves beyond monism to a paradigm supportive of pluralism.