Maritain is one of the authors who realized that the church’s public role in a
differentiated secular society was and is civil society. He therefore called for a
new culture inspired by Christian values that would strengthen the secular
faith in‘practical points of convergence’, such as human rights, freedom,
equal dignity, democracy, and so on. In saying that‘the leaven of the Gospel
quickens the depths of temporal life’^18 and awakens the‘naturally Christian
potentialities of common secular consciousness’,^19 he proved that he had
grasped the essential core of the Catholic notion of Christian humanism and
Christian secularity, while at the same time comprehending the rationale of
liberal democracy.^20 There is a fundamental unity between God and man,
grace and nature, brought together in the incarnation and redemption of
Christ and communicable to the secular world:‘[A] new age will aim at
rehabilitating man in God and through God, not apart from God, and will
be an age of sanctification of secular life.’^21
THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL 1962– 5Having received the reflections of Jacques Maritain and also of Pietro Pavan^22
in his encyclicalPacem in terris,^23 Pope John XXIII opened the path for the
Constitutions and Declarations of the Second Vatican Council that positioned
the church in the then modern world as it wasfifty years ago.^24 The Second
Vatican Council was decisive, and it is still relevant for the Catholic perspec-
tive on Christian humanism.
In this essay, it is impossible to describe all the antecedents, developments,
and tensions in Catholic teaching that accompanied and emerged from the
great church assembly that happened from 1962 to 1965. Thus far we have
been following two lines of enquiry:first, the formation of the Catholic
concept of Christian secularism; second, the role of faith in society as con-
ceived by Catholic social teaching. Both are decisive for Christian humanism.
(^18) Maritain,Man and the State, 146. (^19) Maritain,Man and the State, 103.
(^20) One cannot say the same of Emmanuel Mounier, even though he wants an‘integral
humanism’composed of civilization, culture, and spirituality. HisA Personalist Manifesto,
trans. Monks of St John’s Abbey (London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co.,
1938), is a critique of liberalism. The means he proposes are statist. Mounier’s version of a
Christian humanism cannot be a valid foundation for a new form of humanism nowadays.
(^21) Maritain,Man and the State, 146.
(^22) Pietro Pavan,La democrazia e le sue ragioni, Edizioni Studium (Rome, 1958; repr. 2003).
(^23) The Latin original was published in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 55 (1963), 257–304.
(^24) See the excellent essay by Russell Hittinger,‘Introduction to Modern Catholicism’, in John
Witte Jr and Frank S. Alexander (eds),The Teachings of Modern Roman Catholicism on Law,
Politics, and Human Nature(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1–38.
204 Martin Schlag