Of all the documents that came out of the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Liberty) was, says Omar F.A. Gutierrez, the most revised, debated, and controversial. But as Gutierrez argues, it also represented a development, rather than a reversal of Catholic teaching:

The perception of the Church’s teaching by many was that whenever she found herself in the minority, the Church would cry religious liberty. However, if the Church was in the majority, the state would be obliged to suppress other faiths. If that perception was not addressed, argued the Secretariat, the desire of Blessed Pope John XXIII to make inroads with non-Catholic Christians would be impossible.

This was a tension particularly acute in the Catholic Church in America. Paul Blanchard’s 1949 anti-Catholic bookAmerican Freedom and Catholic Powerportrayed the Church as a menace to the US Constitution and real religious freedom. Thus Father John Courtney Murray, Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston, Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, and other American prelates agreed and worked to advance the declaration at the Council.

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