'Dignitatis humanae' and the Development of Moral Doctrine: Assessing Change in Catholic Social Teaching on Religious Liberty

Description Degree awarded: Ph.D. Moral Theology/Ethics. The Catholic University of America
Details
Title
'Dignitatis humanae' and the Development of Moral Doctrine: Assessing Change in Catholic Social Teaching on Religious Liberty
Type
Text Dissertation
Advisor
Capizzi, Joseph E
Other
Lantigua, David M Ruddy, Christopher J Hittinger, F. Russell
Created
2015-01-01T00:00:00Z
Abstract
Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, 'Dignitatis humanae' (DH), poses the problem of development in Catholic moral and social doctrine. This problem is threefold, consisting in properly understanding the meaning of pre-conciliar magisterial teaching on religious liberty, the meaning of DH itself, and the Declaration’s implications for how social doctrine develops. A survey of recent scholarship reveals that scholars attend to the first two elements in contradictory ways, and that their accounts of doctrinal development are vague. The dissertation then proceeds to the threefold problematic. Chapter two outlines the general parameters of doctrinal development. The third chapter gives an interpretation of the pre-conciliar teaching from Pius IX to John XXIII. To better determine the meaning of DH, the fourth chapter examines the Declaration’s drafts and the official explanatory speeches ('relationes') contained in Vatican II’s 'Acta synodalia'. The fifth chapter discusses how experience may contribute to doctrinal development and proposes an explanation for how the doctrine on religious liberty changed, drawing upon the work of Jacques Maritain and Basile Valuet. I argue that DH can be understood as a homogeneous development by clarifying the three elements of the problem in the following ways. First, two pre-conciliar developments in Catholic social teaching prepared for DH, namely, Pius XI’s personalistic doctrine of the common good and Pius XII’s articulation of the new demands placed upon nation-states in an international juridical order. Second, I argue that DH preserves in a new modality doctrines that some scholars assume were discarded by Vatican II, such as the duty of civil authorities toward the Catholic Church and the place of the objective moral law in limiting free exercise. Third, I draw upon Maritain and Valuet to argue that the inherent elasticity of society, being an operational and not substantial unity, indicates the limits and possibilities of change in Catholic social doctrine. In the process I introduce to the English literature Valuet’s theory of a development in the 'ius gentium' as a necessary condition for universal exercise of the natural right of religious liberty.
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/1961/cuislandora:28311
Local
Turner_cua_0043A_10614

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