Finally, in its document on religious liberty,^31 the Second Vatican Council
declared that the state must not impose religious beliefs, nor must it impede
individuals or groups from following their religious beliefs and practices in
private or in public. The church thus accepted the‘political notion’of religious
freedom, carefully avoiding confusion with religious indifferentism, the‘reli-
gious notion’.^32 Only the Catholic religion represents the full truth, outside of
which no one can be saved, but it is not the task of civil government to make
decisions about religious truth. Government should make religious life pos-
sible and further it, but remain impartial with regard to its supernatural tenets.
Only insofar as public order requires it may temporal powers regulate or
prohibit aspects of religious life. The church thus effectively renounced secular
power; to be precise, she must not use the‘secular arm of the state’for her
religious aims. The church has chosen her place incivil society. However, no
underlying notion of separation of state and religion is to be found inDignitatis
humanae. The state and society are expected to positively support the Christian
faith. Furthermore, the document was published in an historical period of
relatively uniform convictions on public morality. Speaking by contemporary
standards, European and Western states shared a common set of values that
conformed more or less to the church’s teaching on the natural law.
At the end of this section on the importance of the Second Vatican Council
for Christian humanism, we can refer to thefinal speech of Pope Paul VI with
which he concluded the Council’s sessions on 7 December 1965. He summed
up the intentions of the church assembly as the wish to create Christianity’s
‘own new type of humanism’, a humanism rooted in and bound to God.
The parable of the Good Samaritan had been the model of the spirituality of
the council, which inspired in it a feeling of boundless sympathy for human
needs.^33 It is difficult to express the Council’s contribution to Christian
humanism in clearer terms.
THE RELEVANCE OF THE SECOND VATICAN
COUNCIL FOR CHRISTIAN HUMANISMThe documents of the Second Vatican Council display great optimism regard-
ing the world and the secular sphere. This optimism is, on the one hand,(^31) DeclarationDignitatis humanae.
(^32) Cf. John Courtney Murray,Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles with Pluralism, ed. J. Leon
Hooper, SJ (1964; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993); Francesco Ruffini,La
libertà religiosa: storia dell’idea(Turin, 1901; repr. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1992).
(^33) http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/speeches/1965/documents/hf_p-vi_spe19651207
epilogo-concilio_en.html#top.
A Catholic Concept of Christian Humanism 207