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“A More Human End”:
George Grant and Vatican II on Canadian Identity and Human Rights
By Brett Graham Fawcett
Newman Theological College
The paradox of Canadian identity is our demand that new citizens subscribe to it
before we have actually defined it for them. A case in point may be seen in Prime
Minister Harper’s insistence that immigrants who wear a niqab must remove it while
taking the oath of Canadian citizenship on the grounds that the niqab represents an “antiwoman” culture incompatible with Canadian values. 1 Presumably, these values are
broadly “liberal”, the paradox here being that liberal theory would seem to dictate that
citizens have the right to believe, wear, or do whatever they like, so long as they are not
materially harming another person. But this conundrum raises the question of whether, in
fact, Canada can be coherently understood as a “liberal” country, an issue which
necessarily compels us into the language of national essentialism.
Politicians such as former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff have defined the essence
of Canada as being expressed in the socially liberal values held by a supposed majority of
Canadians and given full expression in the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms2. These
values, perhaps, are the ones with which the niqab clashes. But not only does it seem
1
Joan Bryden, "Stephen Harper doubles down on niqab debate: ‘Rooted in a culture that is anti-women’",
National Post, March 11, 2015, accessed April 23, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/m3zyxq8.
2 Michael Ignatieff, “Michael Ignatieff: what I would do if I were the Prime Minister”, Maclean’s,
September 1, 2006, accessed April 23, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/kn6cptr.
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counter-intuitive to define a nation by a document written 114 years after its formal
beginning, this answer continually ensnares the debate in the same “paradox of
tolerance”. As an example, Trinity Western University’s law school is refused
accreditation for no other reason than that the school’s prohibition on homosexual
activity among its students is alleged to be incompatible with the human rights delineated
in the Charter. Yet this, as in so many other cases, seems to pit one set of rights, namely
the right to religious freedom, against another3; some tertium quid seems necessary to
settle this dispute, over and above the concept of “rights” themselves, and that third thing
would be a vision of what Canadian society ought to be. To define Canadians as believers
in rights, therefore, is to do worse than fail to answer the question.
In order to tackle the problem of the essence of Canada and its relationship to rights,
this paper will consider the thought of Michael Ignatieff’s uncle, a man commonly
considered “the father of Canadian nationalism”, philosopher of religion George Parkin
Grant (1918-1988). His description and defense of Canadian identity is found in his 1965
book Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, a self-described
“meditation” 4 on the 1963 federal victory of Lester Pearson’s Liberals over John
Diefenbaker’s Conservatives, who had previously held power. The major issue of that
election had been Diefenbaker’s refusal to allow President John F. Kennedy to station
nuclear warheads in Canada during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Pearson, upon becoming
Prime Minister, promptly acqueised to America’s demands. Grant saw the victory of
Pearson, the engineer of internationalism who had helped to found the United Nations
3
“At Trinity Western, how to decide when rights collide,” The Globe and Mail, December 20, 2013,
accessed April 23, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/k7h4z93.
4 George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal/Kingston: McGillQueens University Press, 2005), 4.
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and NATO, over Diefenbaker, the doggedly nationalist prairie lawyer, as a defeat of the
very possibility of Canadian independence by the American empire. But, more to the
point, he saw it as a defeat of conservatism by liberalism, which, to him, functionally
amounted to the same thing. Canada was only intelligible as a conservative society, and,
as he put it, “The impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of
Canada.”5 We will conclude by looking at the response of another basically conservative
institution—the Catholic Church—to modernity, and from there assess whether Grant’s
bleak prediction has any merit.
Grant frequently made the point that Canada was a project of Protestant English
Orangemen and reactionary French Catholics specifically to preserve their respective
civilizations from being swallowed up by the liberal Republicanism of the United States
of America. Canada, in other words, was founded specifically to preserve conservatism.
Grant admits that conservatism is difficult to define, since it is “not philosophically
explicit.” 6 He describes it as “an appeal to an ill-defined past…an inchoate desire to
build, in these cold and forbidding regions, a society with a greater sense of order and
restraint than freedom-loving republicanism would allow.”7 “The early leaders of British
North America identified lack of public and personal restraint with the democratic
Republic. Their conservatism was essentially the social doctrine that public order and
tradition, in contrast to freedom and experiment, were central to the good life.”8
5
Grant, Lament, 67. This was something Diefenbaker failed to appreciate: “Did not Diefenbaker know that
the existence of Canada depended on a clear definition of conservatism?” (25)
6
Grant, Lament, 34.
7
Grant, Lament, 69.
8
Grant, Lament, 68.
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Notice that the merit of conservatism, in Grant’s sense, rests in its appeal to classical
definitions of virtue and the good. These concepts are important to Grant, who identified
himself as a Christian Platonist.9 He held that the good life required a form of political
loyalty, because the “love of one’s own”, as he liked to put it, was the first act of being
pulled out of oneself towards a good, and thus the first step towards loving the Good.10 In
contrast to this is what Grant calls liberalism, enshrined in the principles of the American
Republic, which he defines thusly: “I mean by liberalism a set of beliefs which proceed
from the central assumption that man’s essence is his freedom and therefore that what
chiefly concerns man in this life is to shape the world as we want it.” 11 There is much to
be unpacked in this definition of liberalism, from its notion of self-ownership instead of
loyalty, to the implicit sovereignty of the individual rather than the community, to its
emphasis on the primacy of will and the fulfillment of desire, rather than on restraint and
duty.
The reason why Grant believed that conservatism, and therefore Canada, had become
impossible in the modern age was because of the fact that we had entered the
technological era. Grant’s definition of technology is taken from Jacques Ellul’s treatise,
The Technological Society: Technology, or, as he preferred to call it, technique is “the
totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage
of development) in every field of human activity.”12 Technology is entirely in the service
of changing the material world in accordance with the will of the individual; there is
9
George Grant, “Five Lectures on Christianity,” in Athens and Jerusalem: George Grant’s Theology,
Philosophy, and Politics, ed. by Ron Dart et. al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 227.
10
George Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” in Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi
Press Ltd., 1969), 76-77.
11
Grant, Empire, 114.
12
Grant, Empire, 113.
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something about technology that necessarily encourages will-to-power. This is why
technology, for Grant, is so intimately tied in to liberalism 13; technology changes the
world from something to be responded to with wonder and reverence into an object to be
conquered and put at the service of our desires. Thus “[c]onservatism must languish as
technology increases.”14 For Grant, who openly admits the influence of Heidegger on his
thought, technology is an ontology.15 Those who understand technology as being simply
neutral tools to be used one way or another, like one poor computer scientist Grant
spends a whole essay berating for claiming that “the computer does not impose on us the
way it should be used”, are simply naïve.16
Grant goes on to tie capitalism, which, to him, is nearly synonymous with greed, to
liberalism in the sense defined above: “Corporation capitalism and liberalism go together
by the nature of things.” 17
Capitalism is incompatible with nationalism: “When
everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved,
including that aspect of virtue known as love of country.”18 Before capitalism, all that is
solid may dissolve into air, but it is important to note that it is technological liberalism
which operates as the solvent.
With its merciless disregard for any boundaries, including national ones, technology
is inherently imperialistic, and therefore inherently violent in its tendency to remove all
allegiances that interfere with it. Sometimes this violence manifests itself nakedly in
outward expansion, as in the case of the war in Vietnam, which Grant was an early and
13
George Grant, English-Speaking Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi Press Ltd., 1974), 93.
Grant, Lament, 73
15 Grant, Lament, lxxii.
16 George Grant, “Thinking About Technology,” in Technology and Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi
Press Ltd., 1986), 19-31.
17 Grant, Lament, 65
18 Grant, Lament, 46-7
14
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well-known opponent of. 19 But it is also culturally imperialistic within its own
boundaries. As he points out, “liberalism in its most unequivocal form (that is, untinged
by memories of past traditions) includes not only the idea of universalism but also that of
homogeneity. The high rhetoric of democracy was used when the Doukhobors were
‘victimized’ under a French-Canadian Prime Minister.” 20 The homogenizing effect of
liberalism, seen in the disenfranchisement of the pacifist Russian Doukhobor sect
multiple times in Canadian history, may well be what is on display in the backlash
against the niqab, and for Grant all cultural loyalties higher than the unfettered freedom
of the self would be obviated by liberalism. The end product of this technological
devastation would be a Huxleyan tyraany that Grant, following Strauss, called the
“universal homogenous superstate”21.
The only way for Canada to resist liberal homogenity and preserve its own
nationhood was to try to restrain technology by national control of the economy. “After
1940, nationalism had to go hand in hand with some measure of socialism.” 22 The
Conservative Party had been willing to do this in the past, and Grant often pointed to an
“older Canadian conservatism, which had used the public power to achieve national
purposes. The Conservative party had, after all, created Ontario Hydro, the CNR, the
Bank of Canada, and the CBC.” 23 In other words, the preservation of Canada was
incompatible with a strict Lockean understanding of property rights; Grant saw the sort of
“conservatism” which only spoke of property rights as being decadent, at best.
19
In
There are numerous statements about Vietnam in his work, but see especially The George Grant Reader
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press Inc., 1998), 84-94.
20 Grant, Lament, 84
21 George Grant, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Technology and Empire, 87.
22 Grant, Lament, 16
23 Grant, Lament, 15
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capitulating to business interests, however, the Conservatives had failed to protect
Canada from the corrosive influences of capitalism. As Canada became more
technologized it would be less distinct from America and eventually cease to
recognizable exist as a distinct entity, even if, as Grant stressed, its formal political
existence would not end quickly.24
Many on the left took this eulogy for Canadian nationalism as a summons to
resuscitate it in the former of fiscal and policy independence from the United States.25
The misguided echoes of this movement can be heard in those who proudly flaunt
Canadians’ social progressivism as the great marker of our difference from Americans.
But this was to not only misunderstand Grant, but also, from his perspective, to
misunderstand Canada, which was not primarily its national boundaries or its individual
political decisions but a commitment to preserving community and the commonweal
against liberal homogenity. All the attempts to defend Canadian nationalism because of
Canada’s potential as a beacon of liberal and universalist values are, in fact, proof of the
demise and the impossibility of Canada; Grant’s so-called “Red Toryism”, which will be
elucidated shortly, is an “ironic”26 but melancholy act of memory for what Canada truly
was and could have been.
The Canadian socialist Gad Horowitz coined the term “Red Tory” to describe those
Conservatives who believed both traditional societal values and in the use of state
24
25
Grant, Lament, 85.
A quintessential example would Mel Hurtig, one of the founders of the Committee for an Independent
Canada and one-time leader of the National Party of Canada, who discusses Grant’s influence on his
political work in “One Last Chance: The Legacy of Lament for a Nation”; ed. Peter C. Emberley, On
Loving Our Own: George Grant and the Legacy of Lament for a Nation (Ottawa: Carleton University
Press, 1990), 43-58.
26 Grant, Lament, lxxiii.
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economic power to preserve those values and to aid the poor, in contrast to the marketoriented Blue Conservatism characterized by the Conservatives in Ottawa today.
Horowitz cited George Grant as a prime example of Red Toryism27. To intellectually
situate Grant’s political philosophy, some biographical information about Grant is in
order. He had been a pacifist during World War II and served as an air raid warden in
London. His post suffered a direct hit during a bombing raid in 1941, and he witnessed
three hundred people, including several friends, brutally torn to pieces, an experience
which left him psychologically shattered and nearly despairing of the possibility of
goodness.
His faith was restored in a curious experience he would later relate to
interviewers: After dismounting his bicycle one morning to open a gate, he was gripped
by the sudden revelation that, as he put it, “I am not my own,” and by the time he
returned to the bicycle he had “accepted God.”28 This religious experience led him to
become a high-church Anglican and shaped the vision of the good life that would inform
all his subsequent writing, especially his opposition to liberalism, which began with the
premise that I am my own and belong to none other, especially not to a nation.
In its curious abruptness, Grant’s anecdote reminds the hearer of the conversion of
C.S. Lewis, who describes getting into the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle as an
unbeliever and coming out of it a believer.29 Interestingly, while Grant was earning his
doctorate at Oxford, he was a member of Lewis’ Socratic Club, where he met his future
27
Gad Horowitz, "Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation,” Canadian
Journal of Political Science 32 (1966): 158-159. It should be mentioned that Grant himself did not much
care for the label “Red Tory”.
28
George Grant, Collected Works of George Grant, Volume I: 1933-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2000), xxii-xxiii.
29
Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers,
2013), 152.
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wife, Sheila Grant, who had studied under J.R.R Tolkien.30 Much of Grant’s thought can
be seen as an application of the Inklings’ thought to the historical situation of Canada, as
well as being a reaction to the grotesque horrors of technological optimism he witnessed
during the War.31 It is in this context that Grant’s “Red Toryism” must be understood.
It was largely because of Grant’s traditionalist convictions that, despite his early
involvement with the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation, which would later
become the New Democratic Party, Grant withheld his support from the NDP because of
their failure to oppose abortion or euthanasia.
These, to his thinking, constituted
egregious examples of the violence of the technological society in the service of
unbridled freedom. 32 The economic controls he advocated were in the service of
preserving a traditional, virtue-driven, and primarily religious society, and only the
Conservatives provided any prospect of protecting this social vision. Hence, in 1988, the
year of his death, Grant cast the final ballot of his life for Brian Mulroney’s
Conservatives, despite their policy of free trade, because he considered them the last, best
hope for ending abortion in Canada.33
30
Sheila, it should be noted, was constantly dialoguing with her husband about the issues he concerned
himself with, and he called her “co-author of my writing” (Grant, Technology and Justice, 10). If Grant is
the father of Canadian nationalism, it would seem that she ought to receive more credit for being its
mother.
31
Certain sections of his writings show the clear influence of Lewis. For example, Technology and Justice
contains an anecdote about Vilhjalmur Stefansson rebuking him for using allegedly “subjective” language
such as “beautiful” to describe the natural terrain of Canada (39-40). The way Grant recounts this is
undoubtedly inspired by C.S. Lewis’ refutation of a textbook asserting that a waterfall could not
“objectively” be called “sublime” (The Abolition of Man, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943, 2-4). Ron
Dart has called Grant “the C.S. Lewis of Canada”.
32
Grant at different points in his life supported each of the major parties in Canada depending on the
circumstances; see William Christian, “Was George Grant a Red Tory?”, in Dart, Athens and Jerusalem,
39-61.
33
As related by Mel Watkins in a panel discussion about Grant on TVOntario. “Still Lamenting for a
Nation?” YouTube video, 33:59-34:11.
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All of this brings us back to the question of rights and how rights-language relates to
Canadian nationalism. Perhaps surprisingly, Grant did not reject rights-language out of
hand as part of liberalism, as some thinkers, especially from non-Western contexts, have
done.34 But he did point out the inherent contradiction of beginning an account of justice
with rights, as liberalism did in, for example, in the case of abortion; in discussing Roe v
Wade, he points out that liberal thought puts “right before good”. 35 English-Speaking
Justice deals extensively with the contractarian and utilitarian theories of justice favoured
by thinkers from Kant down to Rawls and rejects all of them as an adequate basis for
human rights; once again, it is their acceptance of abortion which exposes their failure.
He elaborates on this in the last essay of Technology and Justice, entitled “Abortion and
Rights”, where he brings forward the latent contradiction in using rights-language to
defend abortion-on-demand: The alleged rights of the woman over her body is opposed to
the fetus’ right to life. To deny the unborn child’s right to life is thus to “unwittingly
undermin[e] the very basis of rights,” something he views as unequivocally a bad thing,
despite the abuses of rights language that he identified. Grant identified the formal denial
of “the doctrine of rights” as the precursor to oppression. He predicted that, in our quest
to re-shape the world according to our desires, technology would eventually be turned
against the human person in the form of widespread cybernetics 36 , and wonders
somberly: “Will abortion simply become an instrument of cybernetics?”37 Thus, human
rights that affirm the value of human beings as “children of God” are, in the final
34
He even wrote an essay praising the human rights advocacy of Amnesty International: “Torture,” The
George Grant Reader, 456-459.
35 Grant, English-Speaking Justice, 71-74.
36
“In the words of Heidegger, the sciences are now organized around cybernetics—the technology of the
helmsman. To state part of what is given in that thought: technology organizes a system which requires a
massive apparatus of artisans concerned with the control of human beings.” (Grant, English-Speaking, 9)
37
Grant, Technology and Justice, 130.
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analysis, opposed to technological thinking, which reduces the human person, in her
psyche and her physicality, to mere objects.38
Having established that some notion of rights is necessary to oppose technology
and uphold a classical account of justice, Grant raises another interesting point about the
notion of rights underpinning Confederation.
“[Diefenbaker] appealed to one united Canada, in which individuals would have
equal rights irrespective of race and religion; there would be no first- and secondclass citizens. As far as civil rights of individuals are concerned, this is obviously
an acceptable doctrine.
Nevertheless, the rights of an individual do not
encompass the rights of nations, liberal doctrine to the contrary. The French
Canadians had entered Confederation not to protect the rights of the individual but
the rights of a nation…[Diefenbaker’s] interpretation of federalism is basically
American.
It could not encompass those who were concerned with being a
nation, only with those who wanted to preserve charming residual customs…One
distinction between Canada and the United States was the belief that Canada was
predicated on the rights of nations as well as on the rights of individuals… In so
far as he did not distinguish between the rights of individuals and the rights of
nations, Diefenbaker showed himself to be a liberal rather than a conservative.”39
38
“A technological vision of man or woman as an object means that we can apply our ‘improvements’ to
them as objects with increasing efficiency. Once we deny justice to any human life, then we are well on
the road to the kind of thinking that impels a fascist dictatorship to the horrors of the death camp and the
purge” (Technology and Justice, 119).
39 Grant, Lament, 21-23.
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It is hard not to see a certain relevance here to issues like the niqab: The reason for
group rights or national rights is so that people can preserve their loyalties and therefore
remain committed to virtue rather than being swallowed up in the universal homogenous
state.
This leads to the question of whether religious assemblies, in advocating self-denial
and devotion to the family, to the community, and to the Divine, are capable of
withstanding technological liberalism and thus enabling the sort of loyalty necessary for
the good life and for the continued existence of Canada. Grant, it must be said, was
utterly unconvinced that Christianity, at least in its Western variety, had any ability to
repel liberalism. In his essay “Religion and the State,” included in Technology and
Empire, he discusses the then-controversial question of state-sponsored religious
education in Ontario, and mournfully admits that, while he believes religion is necessary
for the health of a society, “the right of a particular religion to public status (within the
conservative account of the matter) is a right of tradition, that is, a right based on the
dominant ethos of a particular society,” and since the technologized moderns were
coming to value efficiency over loyalty, the ethos was becoming increasingly unfriendly
to traditional religions.40 In the introduction to that essay, he admits that since writing it,
he had come to believe in “the futility of conservatism as a theoretical standpoint in our
era” and that “we were living at the end of western Christianity”. He saw it as a “fact”
that “the only interpretation of Christianity that technological liberalism would allow to
survive publicly would be that part of it (e.g. the thought of Teilhard) which played the
40
Grant, Empire, 56.
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role of flatterer to modernity.” 41 Certainly he saw his church as utterly conquered by
technological liberalism; the very first page of his Lament mentions that his own
Anglican parish had a prayer implicitly calling for Pearson’s victory the Sunday before
the 1963 election.42
If Grant thought Anglicanism was hopeless, he maintained a faint glimmer of hope
for the Catholic Church. Grant had great esteem for Catholicism, which he called “a
religion with an ancient doctrine of virtue”, both from his wife’s background and from
his own youthful experience spending his summer at a parish rectory in Saint-Basile-leGrand. 43 As he put it, “To Catholics who remain Catholics, whatever their level of
sophistication, virtue must be prior to freedom. They will therefore build a society in
which the right of the common good restrains the freedom of the individual.”44 Quebec,
“which more than any other in the West held high a vision of the eternal”, served as a
synecdoche for the possibility of Catholic civilization to withstand liberalization in a
technological world. As he put it:
“Indeed, a wider question arises here: What is the status of Catholicism in the age of
progress? Will a liberalized Catholicism accept industrialism and still be able to
shape it to a more human end?... Accepting the age of progress, the Church will give
leadership to a more humane industrialism than has arisen elsewhere in North
America…The possibility of such a Catholicism in Quebec cannot be discussed apart
from the relation of Catholicism to technology throughout the world…Suffice it to
41
Grant, Empire, 43-44.
Grant, Lament, 1.
43
T.F. Rigelhof, George Grant (Quebec: XYZ Publishing, 2001), 31.
44 Grant, Lament, 78.
42
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say that, although the recent statements of the Papacy seem optimistic about the
Church’s ability to live with our age, it is still an open question whether Catholicism
will be able to humanize mass Western society or be swept into the catacombs.”45
Yet Grant mournfully observed that “the ability to sustain a continuing FrancoAmerican civilization appears dubious”. Contemporary with his Lament was the Second
Vatican Council, whence the “optimistic” claims about the Church’s relationship to
modernity; Grant considered the Council to be the liberalization of the Papacy and a
harbinger of the failure of Catholicism in general.46 Traditional Quebecois society may
have been the prospect of a Catholic society in the modern world, but, for Grant, the
situation of Catholicism in the United States under Cushing and Spellman was a much
more likely picture of the destiny of Catholicism in the modern world. The fact that it
was a Catholic president who wanted to force nuclear weapons on Canada is something
Grant wants us to meditate upon. “The Church in America does not question the
assumption of the society that permits it, except in the most generalized way.”47 His
prime example of this was the work of Father John Courtney Murray, which strove to
prove the compatibility (indeed, the identity) of the vision of the American Founding
Fathers with the system of St. Thomas Aquinas and thus legitimize the American
experiment from a Catholic perspective.48 For Grant, Murray, like Teilhard de Chardin,
was the only kind of religious voice that would be recognized in the homogenous
superstate: One that pronounced a religious blessing on technological liberalism rather
45
Grant, Lament, 81.
Grant, Lament, 66.
47 Grant, Lament, 82.
48 Grant, Lament, 60.
46
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than challenging it. Grant’s conclusion is that religion, like nationhood, would helplessly
fold before the leviathan of technology, and his consolation is his own religious
conviction that necessity is different than goodness, as Good Friday demonstrates, and an
escape into the Gnostic spirituality and theological hopes of Simone Weil, leaving the
historical order with all its temporal hopes to slide into darkness and the oblivion of
eternity.49
Grant rightly saw Vatican II as a move to reconcile the Church with the modern
world without compromising Herself, and he was correct in interpreting the Council as
believing in the possibility that technology could be put in the service of human rights
and human communities rather than necessarily eroding them. Nor was Grant the only
one to think that the Council was actually the Church’s capitulation to modernism. A
major aspect of the Second Vatican Council was its thoroughgoing acceptance of the
language of human rights, including an inalienable human right to religious liberty, a
claim so scandalous that Archbishop Lefebvre went into schism in reaction to it.
Moreover, one of the primary drafters of the Declaration on Religious Liberty was
Grant’s despised Fr. Murray.
Yet, if it can be shown that the Church in no way
compromised herself in accepting rights language, then we have legitimate hope that
technology and community are not necessarily incompatible, and Canada is still a
legitimate temporal hope.
It is commonly claimed that the Catholic Church rejected the language of human
rights until the social encyclicals of the late 19th century. This is not quite the case. It is
49
Grant, The George Grant Reader, 238-266. See also Harris Athanasiadis, “Waiting at the Foot of the
Cross: The Spirituality of George Grant”, Athens and Jerusalem, 256-269.
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true that Pius VI condemned the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man (Caritas, April
13, 1791) and referred to the “monstrous law” that resulted from the idea of religious
liberty (Quod Aliqantum, March 10, 1791), while Gregory XVI denied freedom of
religion or of the press (Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832). Yet none of these documents ever
denied the reality of human rights per se; rather, the emphasis is on the error of
“indifferentism”, or the idea that any or all religions are equally salvific. In fact, far from
denying the existence of rights, these encyclicals all consistently and repeatedly affirm
the rights of the Church to operate free of the meddling of the civic authorities. Pius XI
went further: In re-affirming the correctness of Gregory’s denial of a certain kind of right
to religious liberty, he goes so far as to state that “where religion has been removed from
civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine
notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost” (Quanta Cura, December 8,
1864, paragraph 4; emphasis added). Thus, not only did the Church vigorously assert her
own rights, but acknowledged that there were such things as legitimate human rights
which were obscured by the specious equivalents of “rights” promulgated by the
aggressively secular French state, and in the encyclicals of Leo XIII on the rights of the
workers we begin to see an elaboration on what precisely constitutes legitimate human
rights, though he continued to reject the prospect of a religiously neutral state.
It was Fr. Murray who helpfully exegeted Leo’s writings to show that his
condemnation of “separation of church and state” was a repudiation of the religious
suppression of the French state rather than a denial of any and all civil laws ensuring
religious liberty, and it was Fr. Murray who was one initial drafters of Dignitas humanae,
the Council’s statement on Religious Liberty.
In his drafts, the document’s
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understanding of rights was primarily negative: The state lacks the competence to
regulate the religious practice of its citizens. There is a distinctively American note to
this, and the young bishop Karol Wojtyla, someday to be known as Pope St. John Paul II,
deemed it inadequate, too close to the indifferentism feared by previous Popes. Wojtyla
proposed instead a more Thomistic understanding of freedom as being a freedom for
truth, rooted not in the incompetence of the state but in the orientations of human nature
itself. When Fr. Murray had to bow out of the drafting process due to a collapsed lung,
the document gradually evolved into a statement much more in line with Wojtyla’s vision
than with his; for example, it went from claiming that the government’s norms should be
governed by concerned for the “public order” to asserting that it should be rooted in the
“objective moral order.” 50 Thus, Dignitatis humanae’s insistence upon rights only
because the good precedes rights and makes them possible in orientation towards itself.
It grounds the right to religious liberty both in the general and natural vocation of all
human beings and in the specific and explicit mandate of the Church.
One of the striking features about the Council is how closely it links the mission
of the Church to the situation of humanity in general. This is apparent right from the first
line of the final Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes, probably the most “optimistic” of
the Magisterial statements of modernity that Grant was thinking of: “The joys and the
hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or
in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers
of Christ.” Lumen Gentium had already declared that while the Church subsists within
Catholicism, elements of it may be found outside of its visible boundaries (LG 8),
50
For a detailed history of this development, see David L. Schindler, “Freedom, Truth, and Human
Dignity: An Interpretation of Dignitatis humanae on the Right to Religious Liberty,” Communio 40 (2013),
215-244.
+JMJ+
throwing the gates open for the prerogatives claimed by the Church in the 19th century to
be assigned to all human community. This becomes especially important in Gaudium et
Spes 20, which, like Grant, acknowledged the propensity towards what it called
“atheism” inherent in technological thinking: “Favoring this doctrine can be the sense of
power which modern technical progress generates in man.” GeS 21 answers that the
witness of Christ’s faithful, especially the martyrs, as well as the proper presentation of
the Church’s teaching, serves as a “remedy” to atheism, and “calls for the active liberty
of believers to build up in this world God's temple”, a project which “is in harmony with
the most secret desires of the human heart” (another remark which ties the vocation and
rights of the Church to the human race at large). As GeS 22 explains, “building the
temple” requires a self-denial that is conformed to the Paschal mystery, and, with a
ringing echo from Lumen Gentium, declares: “All this holds true not only for Christians,
but for all men of good will in whose hearts grace works in an unseen way.”
This hope in the activity of grace in the world is what fuels the document’s
optimism about the possibility of the preservation of the characters of nations and peoples
(GeS 74) to its belief in the rights of workers to control industry rather than be passively
subject to “economic laws” (68-69). The Church herself is the promise that a society is
capable of combining the language of rights, the language of freedom, and the language
of justice, and, moreover, that human rights are capable of surmounting the technological
civilization, as seen in the work of Catholic social thinkers whose work has given us
glimpses of a world where technique serves humanity rather than vice versa; E.F.
Schumacher and his “appropriate technology” are an excellent case in point.
The
possibility of Vatican II is the possibility of Canada; Catholic social thought is the
+JMJ+
prospect of Red Toryism. The reality of grace is the possibility of new life, even for the
nation we have buried and mourned.
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