Reconciling Pius IX and JPII

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Okay, so I’ve been hearing off and on about how Vatican II/JPII/John XXIII’s teachings on human rights are incompatible with statements made by Pius IX. Can anyone reconcile or refute these claims?

I think the best explanation I’ve heard is, while error does not have rights, those who hold those errors still do.
 
You have to look at the greatly different times and circumstances. Pius IX lived in the Papal States, John Paul II lived his adult life under Communism.
 
JackVk said:
Okay, so I’ve been hearing off and on about how Vatican II/JPII/John XXIII’s teachings on human rights are incompatible with statements made by Pius IX. Can anyone reconcile or refute these claims?

I think the best explanation I’ve heard is, while error does not have rights, those who hold those errors still do.
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I think the Catechism has a helpful remark on this point: “CCC 2108 - The right to religious liberty is neither a moral license to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error, but rather a natural right of the human person to civil liberty, i.e., immunity, within just limits, from external constraint in religious matters by political authorities. This natural right ought to be acknowledged in the juridical order of society in such a way that it constitutes a civil right.”
 
dmar198 said:
I think the Catechism has a helpful remark on this point: “CCC 2108 - The right to religious liberty is neither a moral license to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error, but rather a natural right of the human person to civil liberty, i.e., immunity, within just limits, from external constraint in religious matters by political authorities. This natural right ought to be acknowledged in the juridical order of society in such a way that it constitutes a civil right.”
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This part is equally important–it even cites Bl. Pius IX’s encyclical Quanta Cura’s paragraph 3:

2109 The right to religious liberty can of itself be neither unlimited nor limited only by a “public order” conceived in a positivist or naturalist manner.39 The “due limits” which are inherent in it must be determined for each social situation by political prudence, according to the requirements of the common good, and ratified by the civil authority in accordance with "legal principles which are in conformity with the objective moral order."40
39 Cf. Pius VI, Quod aliquantum (1791) 10; Pius IX, Quanta cura 3.

Per the OP, the key is to understand what was actually being addressed in each time period, because often terms are used in different ways at different times.

Bl. Pius IX was condemning proposals for absolute, unlimited liberty in matter of religion based on a foundation of religious indifferentism and states declaring man’s conscience free from any duty to God, faith, or the Church, as well as state’s uprooting and destroying long established Catholic societies to further these false principles. See for more context, Bl. John Henry Newman’s letter to Gladstone, chapters 5, 6, and 7:
newmanreader.org/Works/anglicans/volume2/gladstone/index.html

St. John Paul II, echoing the Second Vatican Council, was dealing with the other side of the coin–the arbitrary suppression of all religious activity without any reference to truth or the common good or any respect for man’s religious duties–duties which must be carried out freely.

In sum, Bl. Pius IX was dealing those who said false religious activity could never be suppressed, even if harmful to the common good and with states who affirmed as a principle that all religions are equal because “reason” should be the only governing principle of man. St. John Paul II was dealing with those who argued that religion, true or false, should always be suppressed, even if it is not harmful to an authentic understanding of the common good and declaring that man must not acknowledge God at all, at least not in any public capacity.

It should also be noted the Church spent a lot of the 18th and 19th centuries fighting against false theories of human rights. But beginning with Leo XIII, and especially Pius XI, Pius XII, and St. John XXIII, the Church developed in a positive way an authentic doctrine of human rights to counter the false ones, rather than simply issuing condemnations.
 
As far as I understand, this is what Vatican II ultimately says:

Vatican II makes a retraction of the Church’s permission for the State to act as Her agent. The Church can give that permission again.

Vatican II also states that the State on its own cannot restrict religious liberty.
 
YoungTradCath said:
As far as I understand, this is what Vatican II ultimately says:

Vatican II makes a retraction of the Church’s permission for the State to act as Her agent. The Church can give that permission again.

Vatican II also states that the State on its own cannot restrict religious liberty.
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I don’t think this is quite right. Long before Vatican II the Church had ceased delegating its own coercive power to the state (the Church’s coercive power is affirm in the 1983 Code, Canons 1311 and 1312). Likewise, Vatican II still affirms the state has some power in this regard, by noting that the right to freedom from coercion by the state in religious matters has limits and that it belongs to the state to enforce these limits when they are harmful to just public order and the objective moral order. Since the act of faith must be free, man has a natural right to freedom in this regard, but since man is a social being, that freedom can be regulated or limited by public authority for a just cause.

The CCC uses a more conventional phrasing of this and ties the state’s authority to limit such freedom to the common good (see CCC 2109, quoted in my earlier post)–this is because public authority’s whole reason for being is the common good (see St. John XXIII, Pacem in Terris 54, CCC 1898). It also bears noting, the common good includes the spiritual well-being of the people in the society (see St. John XXIII, Pacem in Terris 57-59; CCC 1925).

The 19th century condemnations concern abstract propositions that deny the state any authority in this regard, that base religious freedom on religious indifferentism, naturalism, and rationalism , rather than on man’s duty toward truth and to have faith in God, a duty that must be fulfilled freely (such propositions also affirmed indifferentism and pluralism as the abstract ideal, rather than the unity of all in the true faith). The condemnations, especially those in the addresses and other documents cited in the Syllabus, also concern particular circumstances where the common good was being degraded by granting broad freedoms to the detriment of a society that was until then a cohesive unity bound together by the Catholic faith.

Vatican II is dealing with different issues entirely. It is dealing with the abstract propositions that the state can and should suppress all religious activity. Likewise, it is dealing with societies which no longer have that kind of unity and where the common good might best be advanced by juridically granting a broad liberty to all.
 
“Saint” John Paul II Exposed - mostholyfamilymonastery.com/catholicchurch/saint-john-paul-ii-exposed/

Please watch this video all the way through; for some of the most incredible and revealing quotations come in the middle and as you go along in the video; but the first part of the video provides an essential foundation to understand what’s covered later. This video demonstrates that what happened on Sunday, with the ‘canonization’ of Antipope John Paul II, was the world worshipping the Beast. The one whose veneration was just imposed upon alleged ‘Catholics’ by the Counter Church was the Antichrist.
 
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