Again, though, the problem is that “reading in context” is very difficult for the average person, being ill-formed in theology, to do.
My favorite go-to example is Dignitatis Humanae because it confuses so many people. Much of what Dignitatis Humanae said was, simply, that a policy of religious toleration was a proper prudential response to the (suboptimal) circumstances of the present age, i.e., because the common good demands a different response now than was objectively appropriate in, say, the mid-16th century. But most people read “right to religious liberty” as, well, an endorsement of indifferentism, disestablishment, etc., because that’s how the term has historically been used by liberals, progressives, constitutionalists, etc. Much of the confusion here could’ve been cleared up if Dignitatis Humanae had simply endorsed “religious toleration” rather than a “right to religious liberty,” and framed it in the terms I put above. It declined to do this, I think, because in its zeal to speak to modern man, it co-opted modern man’s language, which is liberalism. Unfortunately, liberalism, being incompatible with Catholicism, produced the resulting confusion, as is to be expected when you attempt to express a philosophy in the language of a different, incompatible philosophy.
I agree in principle that, very carefully read, there is nothing wrong with the way Dignitatis Humanae describes the “right to religious liberty.” I’m actually writing a long essay on this very topic for publication somewhere. To understand it properly though, you have to understand that the Church uses “right” in a different way than liberalism does. For the Church, duties are ethically prior to rights, so to say that Protestants have a right to religious liberty is simply to say that Catholics must not coerce them unduly (“unduly” being both relevant and a much stricter criterion than most progressives would be happy with – for instance, a proper reading of Dignitatis Humanae would forbid a hypothetical King SW85 from throwing Lutherans in jail merely for being Lutherans, but he would be perfectly within his rights to throw them in jail for agitating for divorce). In other words, it’s not a right on their part as much as it is a duty on ours. Liberalism treats rights as ethically prior and duties simply as obligations to respect rights, so the “right to religious freedom” becomes a moral imperative on the part of all individual persons.
The problem, again, is that most people are incapable of very carefully reading theological documents because they do not have much theological formation and have nowhere to get it from reliably (this problem was worse in the 60s when even many clergymen were complicit in the active misrepresentation of Vatican II’s teachings). The problem is phrasing, always phrasing.
So we have a strange situation in that things like Dignitatis Humanae read one way to their intended audience (the theologically literate) and another way to their unintended audience. Was this done on purpose? If so, it would seem to be an example of a Straussian text. (Leo) Strauss argued that such texts are written because the writers typically have a gun to their head.
This statement evidences one of the more disconcerting tendencies endemic to the modern age, that views the Holy Spirit according to some kind of Calvinistic fideism that utterly absorbs and annihilates the free will of men regardless of their internal disposition. I don’t see much to support this view and it seems largely alien to the Church’s historical understanding of itself and its relation to the Holy Spirit, according to which the latter acted mainly in a prophylactic way, shielding the Church from outright catastrophe and error and otherwise only assisting it with grace when it genuinely and earnestly requested it. This view manifests most readily in the claim that the Holy Spirit picks the Pope (!!!), which I hear all the time. Maybe I’m missing something, though.
I agree 100% that the Holy Spirit protected the Church from theological (dogmatic or doctrinal) error. That’s a dogma of the faith. But the ideas you express are not the same thing as how you express your ideas. Ideas are dogmas or doctrines, but the expressions given to ideas are not: they are prudential matters, which is why the Church was free to change them (the expressions of the ideas, not the ideas themselves) in Vatican II in the first place. If the main purpose of Vatican II was, as some have argued, to re-express old ideas in new ways and not to promulgate new doctrines or dogmas, then there is no protection the Holy Spirit can give. Hence a Catholic can say, in good faith, that maybe this way of talking about the faith is not very fruitful and that we should abandon it.
I don’t get the objection to litanies of anathemas. Knowing what you’re expected to believe is a matter of salvation, which is why the Church’s Magisterium is protected from error under the right circumstances. Therefore it is very, very, very good for people to know exactly what they must believe and, correspondingly, what they absolutely are not permitted to believe. Thus, anathemas are a very, very, very good thing, which is maybe why the faith was thriving when they were in greater use.
**