The Truth about the Second Vatican Council and the Decline of the Catholic Church – #part 4

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This brings us to another crucial point, which is religious freedom. One of the most confusing documents of the Second Vatican Council, "Dignitatis Humanae," deals precisely with this. While the Council, on the one hand, appears to defend the public freedom to propagate errors and heresies, on the other hand, it emphasizes the moral duty to seek the truth. And this is a salad of conceptions that when analyzed rigorously, prove irreconcilable.


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Pope Pius IX at the First Vatican Council - Image Source


The decree states that religious freedom proceeds from human dignity and that "no one should be forced to act in a manner contrary to his or her own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits." It is correct that no one can be forced to betray their conscience and feel obliged to believe in something by mere imposition. So, as for man's right to be protected from coercion, everything is under tradition.


However, immediately afterward, the text of the Council says the following: "No one should be prevented from acting by his conscience, especially in religious matters." If, with this, the Council wanted to insinuate that the individual has the freedom to propagate error, then this teaching would be totally irreconcilable with the Catholic tradition, which states that man does not have the natural right to adhere to error but only the free will to do so it.


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Pope Pius XII by Peter McIntyre - Image Source


If the Council is saying that the individual has only a civil and not a moral right to publicly profess error, then even this can, with some difficulty, be reconciled with tradition. The state can tolerate error to promote the common good to fulfill its purpose. But, once again, this is a bit problematic because the Council goes beyond previous teaching, which never elevated tolerance of error to a civil right.


Finally, we could mention other errors in the Council's documents, such as referring to heretical sects as churches, although there is only one church. We also see positive evaluations of false religions such as Judaism, Islam, and even pagan beliefs. We also find the promotion of the Protestant notion that the Old Testament scriptures explain the New Testament when, in reality, it is just the opposite. For Catholics, it is the New Testament that explains the Old.


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Second Vatican Council - Image Source


The church took a very unnecessary risk with the Second Vatican Council, which ended up causing a lot of confusion in Catholic circles. On one side, we have radical traditionalists saying that the current church is apostate. At the opposite extreme, we see the defenders of the Council saying that the church is better than ever, which is also very far from being true.


The most sensible opinion in this case should be somewhere in the middle. And although this issue causes me some distress from time to time, I don't lose nights of sleep because of it. It's because? Because Christ is in charge of his church, and in the same way, he allowed a heretic like Martin Luther to emerge, for example, and with that, it was a Council of Trent and a Counter-Reformation, which were a blessing that reinvigorated the Catholic Church after the tragedy of the Protestant revolt, I also think that it is precisely in this current crisis that we end up realizing more and more the importance of tradition and moral rigor in the life of the church.

And, anyway, I am still determining where this is going, but I believe in divine providence.

Thanks for reading!

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