RELIGIOUS CULTURE AND HISTORICAL CHANGE: VATICAN II ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

At Vatican II and since Vatican II there have been Catholics who have held that the Council's teaching on religious freedom is in contradiction to the Church's earlier teaching and practice. The Council defended it as a legitimate development of doctrine in part through claiming that changing human experience in history shows us only gradually what human dignity entails, and the Church learns from this experience. True, the Council's teaching is in part a denial of its earlier teaching and practice. The present article defends the legitimacy of this development through showing that there is a change of paradigm by which the Church now views this issue, a change that includes both continuity and discontinuity. This reliance on what is revealed to us by changing human experience is accepted by the Church only when it sees it as critically evaluated by an adequate philosophy and as in accord with Christian revelation, but its acceptance moves us to a growth in our understanding of revelation itself.