Is there a contradiction between Vatican 2 and Lateran 4 on Religious Liberty?

[dmar198]

Vatican 2 declared that everyone has a right to religious freedom and that no one, not even the government, should use violence because they think someone is a heretic. At least, that is my understanding.

Obviously this hasn’t always been practiced by secular authorities. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both said that secular authorities can be called upon to compel heretics back to the faith or to administer capital punishment if they can’t be silenced. Again, I may be misunderstanding something here, so I’d like clarification if anyone knows anything about that.

Now if it was only some saints and doctors of the Church who had held this, I would be fine with saying it was simply a misunderstanding of the government’s role and that doctrinal development has shown us that those two particular saints were wrong about this particular thing. We don’t believe that all the doctors of the Church were always right about everything – as long as this was never proclaimed dogmatically by the Church, then there is room for additional insight to change that idea. But then I read that the 4th Lateran Council made a declaration in this regard, and I have a text here where they say that secular authorities must strive to, and this is a quote, “exterminate in the territories subject to their jurisdiction all heretics pointed out by the church.” (Canon 3) And that seems like a contradiction between two Councils: Lateran Council 4 says secular authorities must exterminate heretics, Vatican Council 2 says they must leave them alone, within due limits. Is there anyone here who is able to clarify how one or the other of them isn’t dogmatic, or if there isn’t really a contradiction here?

 

[Genesis315]

Vatican II does not advocate for an absolute religions liberty, but one limited by the objective moral order/natural law and the common good. (see also Catechism of the Catholic Church 2109). Summed up, Catholic religious liberty means man has the right to be free from coercion from the state in acts of religion, when those acts are not contrary to the moral law and when they do not harm the common good (note, according to Catholic doctrine, the common good must also take into account man’s spiritual well-being). Depending on the make-up of society and the actions of the heretic, more or less restrictions may be necessary.

It should be noted that the kind of heresy that was punished with the death penalty was the kind that threatened to destroy society–in a completely Catholic society it amounted to treason and rebellion, which is why the secular power had such an interest in it as well. Given the makeup of society today, such punishments would most certainly not be justified for your average non-Catholic or even dissenting Catholic, but that doesn’t mean some heretics weren’t justly punished in the past. The heresy in question threatened the very existence of the human race and it was spread through violence, murder, and terror and advocated all sorts of unnatural sins. it was extremely harmful to the common good.

(see my next post).

 

[Genesis315]

continued from above…

Regarding Lateran III and IV (which both say the same thing about the same heretics) 19th century Archbishop of New York John Hughes explained why this particularly heresy justified strict punishments in a formal debate on religious liberty with a Protestant minister. The second quote is probably the most on point of the two as to why this heresy needed to be stamped out so harshly.
Archbishop John Hughes:

These deluded and abandoned people, supported by the Counts of Thoulouse, Comminges, and Foix, had set their sovereigns at defiance, carrying fire and sword through their dominions, slaughtering their subjects without distinction of age or sex, and by their conduct as well as their doctrine waging open war against Christianity, morality, society, and human nature. As far back as the year 1022, Robert, King of France, had been obliged to take measures of safety against their doctrines and their crimes. The infamous name, which, even at this day, is given to unnatural lusts, is derived from their appellation — “Paterini et Bugares de quorum errore male tacere quam loqui.” Knowing the errors and the infamy of the Albigenses, the man who is acquainted with ecclesiastical history must feel amused or shocked to behold them ranked, as they sometimes are, by ignorant advocates on the gentleman’s side of the question, among the religious progenitors of Protestantism.

We must now turn to the Council of Lateran. The errors of the Albigenses were referred to, and condemned in the first and second canons. The object of the third canon, now in question, was to check the spread of those errors, and the progress of slaughter and desolation, which the Albigenses, on every opportunity, for two hundred years before, had not ceased to perpetrate. It was also to maintain the rights of sovereigns against the factious lords, who encouraged the excesses of the ‘Albigenses, for their own political purposes. Besides the bishops and abbots, there were at the council ambassadors representing the temporal sovereigns of Germany, Constantinople, England, France, Hungary, Arragon, Sicily, Jerusalem and Cyprus; besides those of many other inferior states. Now the wording of the canon shows its limitation; first, to the Albigensian heretics alone; and, secondly, to the "secular powers present’’ at the council. The gentleman on a former occasion thought it advisable, in making the quotation, to suppress the word “present.” Having been exposed for this, he now inserts it, and thereby mars his whole purpose, which was to extend the meaning of the text to all secular powers, whether absent or present. Now the fact is, that so far from its being the doctrine of the Catholic Church, and so far from its being an enactment of universal approbation, it never was put in force against any other heretics besides the Albigenses, nor even against them, except in the departments of the three counts mentioned above, who encouraged the outrages of these enemiesof the human species. Its origin was owing to the crimes of those against whom it was specifically and exclusively enacted.

[note: he goes onto say the canon may be spurious anyway, and an addition of Frederick II, citing Platina, Bigordus, Gregory IX., Matthew Paris, Nanciarus, the monk Godfrey, and the Protestant scholar Collier]

and during the next day of the debate:
Archbishop John Hughes:

Let any man apply the doctrines of the Albigenses, simply on two points, viz. the tenet that the devil was the creator of the visible world ; and that, in order to avoid co-operation with the devil in continuing his work, the faithful should take measures by which the human race should come to an end ; and then say whether those errors were merely speculative. They were, on the contrary, pregnant with destruction to society. Was it persecution, or rather, was it not self-preservation, to arrest those errors? We shall see presently, however, that these men, like the Calvinists in France at a later period, took up the sword of sedition, and wielded it against the government under which they lived. We shall see, that long before the canon of Lateran was passed, their course was marked with plunder, rapine, bloodshed. And if so, it follows that their crimes against society springing from their doctrines, constitute the true reason of the severity of the enactment against them.

Their existence was known from the year 1022. If, then, the extermination of heretics had been a doctrine of the Catholic Church, why were they not exterminated from the first? If it was not a doctrine of the church in 1022, it was not a doctrine in 1215; for the gentleman himself admits and proclaims that our doctrines never change. Why then did not the Catholics exterminate them at once ? Is it that they were not able ? No : for at first the heresy had but few supporters. But why were they afterwards persecuted ? The reason is, that in the interval they had proceeded to sustain and propagate their infernal principles, by violence. They had placed themselves under the patronage of factious and rebellious barons, and had fought in pitched battles against their sovereigns. In the former controversy, the gentleman garbled the twenty-seventh canon of the third Council of Lateran, to show that these poor heretics were condemned to awful penalties, for nothing at all but protesting against the errors of the Church of Rome. This he did by quoting the beginning and conclusion of the canon, and, without indicating any omission, suppressing the crimes of these proto-martyrs of Calvinism. It was proved, by the very document from which he quoted, that these lambs of the Albigensian fold were “exercising such cruelty on the Christians, (ie. the Catholics) that they paid no respect to churches or monastaries, spared neither virgins nor widows, neither old nor young, neither sex nor age, but after the manner of pagans destroyed and desolated every thing.”

 

[dmar198]

Regarding Lateran III and IV (which both say the same thing about the same heretics) 19th century Archbishop of New York John Hughes explained why this particularly heresy justified strict punishments in a formal debate on religious liberty with a Protestant minister. The second quote is probably the most on point of the two as to why this heresy needed to be stamped out so harshly.

Thank you! If we can mark this thread “resolved,” then I would like it to be done. God bless!