Jesuit On Dignitatis Humanae

The essay written by Father Francis Canavan, S.J. With much subtlety and erudition, Canavan convincingly argues that “what the Church actually changed in DH was the concept of the state on which the previous confessionalist doctrine was based, not its own authority or the duty of its members to uphold and defend that authority” (69).

Indeed, for Canavan, the idea of the Catholic Church’s basic ability simultaneously to affirm its own authority and priority in the economy of salvation and the legitimacy of the individual human being’s divinely given duty freely to pursue the truth about God essentially flows from the transpolitical nature of Christian revelation.

As Canavan rather impishly puts it, Christ did in fact present “his listeners with a clear-cut choice: Either accept his invitation to eternal life or lose it … he did not advocate civil or criminal penalties for those who rejected the invitation” (70).

This, according to Canavan, explains why a series of Catholic thinkers beginning in the Middle Ages with St. Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suarez , S.J. provided theoretical defenses of a kind of limited constitutional government, “even if all the political implications of that defense for religious freedom were not developed fully by its proponents” (70).

I would add that it also explains why Augustine, the first Christian thinker to treat Christianity’s response to the theologico-political problem in a sustained and serious way, forcefully argued that there is no such thing as a distinctively Christian polity. As Canavan implicitly shows, DH reaffirms Augustine’s central point in the City of God that the faith and sacramental life extended to man through the Church transcends all regimes, including the modern regime, and is therefore of limited direct practical use to the workings and ordering of political life.

Link (here) to the Acton Institute review

Read Dignitatis Humanae

Read Fathers essay on entitled, Edmund Burke: Christian Statesman (here), more of Fathers writings on Burke can be found (here)

Who is Edmund Burke?