Expansive Freedom: The Subversive Potential of the Declaration on Religious Freedom for the Dogma and Law of the Church

Abstract

This article argues that the Second Vatican Council, under the paradigm of religious freedom, integrated key rational structures of “normative modernity” (Thomas Gutmann) into catholic teaching. By dogmatically affirming religious freedom, the council thus adopted certain normative concepts—subjective rights, personal dignity, and individual autonomy—whose dynamic continues to shape and at times destabilize catholic legal and doctrinal thought. With the shift from the “right of truth” to the “right of the person”, catholic legal reasoning gained autonomy from morality and recognized freedom as a condition of religious truth. Conscience becomes the locus of the personal seeking of truth and moral self-determination. In doing so, Catholicism—whether consciously or unconsciously—anticipates a logic of discursive justification that relativizes ecclesial authority and urges greater freedom and democratic participation.