Catholic Schools and Dignitatis Humanae

In the 1960s, the world had concluded or was concluding some dramatic event. Or it was thinking of starting one. The Second World War. Nuremberg. The United Nations. New states emerging from the victories of Nationalist movements in the so-called Third World. The Sexual Revolution. You name it. The pleasure and pain of these events were paid for in lives, livelihoods and established values. Every person and institution was not just grappling with the new world formed from the coalescence of these events; they were trying to find their place in it as well. The Catholic Church was no exception. In the 1960s, the Church convened the Second Vatican Council – a sort of soul-searching mission to wrest with contemporary challenges, redefine the Church’s mission and re-orient it for action moving forward. Thus, several doctrinal positions were changed or rather modernized in what the Church called in Italian, the Aggiornamento. Though the Church had earlier preached that there was no salvation without the church, it conceded that there could be. This, was an admission, though one grudgingly made: that the church did not have exclusive preserve over what it called “truth”. Such admissions made it easier for the Council to adopt the Declaration on Religious Freedom, simply called Dignitatis Humanae in 1965. This Declaration gave a new lease of life to the Church’s sometimes confusing position on religious freedom.

The Declaration itself is built largely on three main pillars: dignity, choice and truth. On dignity, the Declaration builds on encyclicals (letters from the Pope to the Church) such as Pacem in Terris and Gaudium es Spes. Pacem in Terris is the first encyclical by a Pope to give a coherent account of human rights in an ecclesial context. Pacem in Terris is built on stilts of human dignity. It makes strong connections between divine revelation and human dignity by establishing a correlative relationship between the two. In other words, as we perfect our understanding of divine revelation, so is our understanding of human dignity “incomparably increased”. Gaudium es Spes on the other hand dedicates an entire chapter solely to the subject of the “dignity of man”.

The Declaration equally places emphasis on freedom and non-coercion in faith matters. It reasserts that free will is a fundamental Catholic doctrine which is endorsed by scripture and the Fathers of the Church. “[n]o one therefore is forced to embraced the Christian faith against his own will… [t]he act of faith is of its very nature a free gift”, the Declaration states.

On truth, the Declaration mentions “truth” not less than thirty-two times. Interestingly though, the “truth” that the Declaration seems to articulate appears to be the Catholic Church’s version of “truth”. The Declaration seems to suggest that an atmosphere that fosters choice will inevitably lead everyone to its version of “truth” which in any case is the truth “that God Himself has made known to mankind the way in which men are to serve Him, and thus be saved in Christ and come to blessedness”. This partisanship is understandable considering the fact that the Declaration is an intra-religious document. Such partisanship notwithstanding, it hardly alters the Declaration’s robust foundations on dignity and choice.

What is impressive about this Declaration is the way in which it mirrors religious freedom as framed in international human rights instruments and major constitutions throughout the world. In article 2, it states among other things: “This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.”

Yet fifty-seven years after the adoption of Dignitatis Humanae, it seems very little has changed especially for non-Catholics in Catholic educational institutions, at least in Ghana. The Ghanaian Roman Catholic Church is perhaps one of the largest contributors to social services in the country. It does not only build basilicas, cathedrals, parishes and community churches, it also builds schools, hospital and clinics. Aid agencies affiliated with the church, like Catholic Relief Services are also active. All of this is commendable. Yet the treatment of non-Catholics in Catholic educational institutions has always been of a source of controversy. Non-Catholics usually allege that they are prohibited from practising their faith or compelled to participate in Catholic worship (which in any case is inconsistent with their religious views and convictions). Forced worship and compulsory religious instruction are clearly in violation of the restatement of the doctrine of free will in Dignitatis Humanae. The question is why? I offer three reasons.

First, the church is relying on outdated notions of religious freedom. Johannes A. van der Ven’s article, “Religious Freedom a Challenge for the Church” in Christianity and Human Rights: Christianity and the Struggle for Global Justice discusses the systems of religious freedom that the Church developed along the way. The very first was that of the Constantinian system which, though acknowledging the difference between freedom and truth, subordinated any freedom a person might have to the truth of empire, which in any case was Christian truth. Though scholars like Augustine argued that non-believers could not be compelled to believe. Yet he supported the use of force to compel subjects to follow the conversion of their master to Christianity. For Aquinas, tolerance was only permissive and other religions were permitted simply because the Church allowed them to exist. A hybridized version emerged later in the nineteenth century in which the Church subordinated freedom to truth in Catholic-majority countries and claimed permissive tolerance where Catholics were in the minority. The Church’s old positions on religious freedom were steeped in dynamics of power and a configuration of the Church as empire. All of that was supposed to have gone with the adoption of the Declaration. However, it is my argument that these outdated notions of religious superiority and a faint nostalgia for the past are precisely the ghosts that continue to haunt the Church. The Church’s institutions seem unable to resist the urge to exert its “truth” within its sphere of influence. In Catholic schools, the Constantinian system as explained by Johannes is alive and well.

Second, Catholic schools as a subset of mission schools are historically agents of proselytism. In other words, they were specifically established to spread the word and imbue students with a sense of the Church’s version of truth. However, the fundamental nature of many of these schools have changed. The Government of Ghana has absorbed them into the public school system. A significant part of their funding comes from the Government. For all intents and purposes, these schools are now public schools seeing that they are funded by the taxpayers’ money. The religious attributes of these schools are nominal, often reduced to a name. On the contrary, the Church refuses to see this radical change of status. The schools in their view remain Catholic. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Third, the Catholic Church refuses to acknowledge that human rights collectively are an ideal with practical utility. Non-Catholics attending or wishing to attend Catholic schools hinge their religious freedom claims on a right: the right to hold a belief and manifest that belief in practice. Religious freedom couched in terms of belief and practice is, undoubtedly, a human right. Unfortunately, we live in a part of the world where people, egged on by the Church, think of human rights as individualistic claims that undermine the corporate identity of the country as an entity. Human rights are seen as antithetical to culture and religion. This cannot be further from the truth. Though the Catholic Church does not often resist the claims of persons belonging to other religious groups in terms of rights, they unknowingly state their own position in terms of religious freedom –the corporate identity of religious groups/communities. The same holds true for schools established by the Reformed traditions. To reframe the controversy then, both sides – the individual and the Church – are on the same side. It is not a clash of rights and religion but rather a reconciliation of competing religious claims. Because rights seem to have a secular basis that cements their legitimacy, the Church is averse to rights, of whatever name and whatever nature.

I think there is a way out of this quagmire. In my view, we must stop appealing to religious groups using a secular basis as a justification for human rights. We need to start exploring these groups, reading their history, their doctrine, and their texts and showing that human rights as seen in secular contexts are visible too in the group’s religious context. This is what I call the internal legitimacy of religious freedom. Internal legitimacy is stronger because of the claim each religious group makes to exclusive truth. If it is so revealed to the group through its leaders or prophets that religious freedom is a right, then the psychological import of that truth will weigh heavily on adherents leading them to restructure their thinking. For the Ghanaian Catholic Church in particular, I argue that the church and its educational institutions have no basis whatsoever prohibiting the manifestation of belief or coercing manifestation based on the prescriptions in Dignitatis Humanae. Of course, this is an anti-Rawlsian way of going about it because we are importing religious norms to buttress secular ones. But as Jeremy Waldron says, there is life beyond Rawls. Confronting the Church with the Declaration is the only sure way to purchase the Church's support for religious freedom.

Criticizing a group to which one belongs is never an easy thing. At that moment – at least linguistically – as the initiator of the discourse that establishes the criticism, one has power over the group one criticizes. But one also knows that the group will come fighting back after one is done. To quote Toni Morrison out of context, “to be given dominion over another is a hard thing”. For a Catholic reflecting critically on the church’s role in contemporary society, one might be accused of stirring division and inspiring heresy. But truly, it is an act of love. Chimamanda Ngozie Adiche in her address to the Nigerian Catholic Bishops Conference last year echoed similar sentiments.

I make the disclosure: that I am Catholic and what I have done here, I have done out of love.