Intervention of Cardinal Joseph
Cardijn, 20 September 1965
The schema on liberty pleases me greatly. Allow me to humbly share with
you the experience of nearly 60 years of priestly apostolate exercised in every
country at the service of young workers today.
The solemn and clear proclamation of the juridical religious liberty of
all people in all countries of the world seems to me to be an urgent need.
First Reason: Peaceful Unification of
a Pluralist World
The world today is tending more and more towards unity and conflicts
between nations and cultures must disappear progressively.
As John XXIII stated so admirably in Pacem in Terris, our great task is to unite ourselves with all men
of good will to build a more human world together based on "truth, justice, liberty and love". And
the fundamental condition for people to live together peacefully and to
collaborate fruitfully is a sincere respect for religious liberty.
The fact of not respecting the philosophical and religious convictions
of others is increasingly felt by them as a sign of mistrust in a matter
considered as sacred and personal to the highest degree. Such an attitude makes
mutual confidence impossible and without this there can be no true community
life and no effective collaboration.
On the other hand, if mutual confidence reigns, it creates the
possibility for very joyful collaboration not only on the scientific and
technical planes but also on the social, cultural, pedagogical and moral
levels.
If the Church can pronounce itself unambiguously in favour of religious
liberty, people everywhere will have confidence in her and recognise that she
wishes to participate in building a more human and more united world. If on the
other hand, this declaration should be rejected, great hopes will evaporate,
especially among young people.
Second Reason: Efficacity of
Apostolic, Missionary and Ecumenical Action
In a world on the path of unification, the presence of the Church among
people must necessarily take a new form which could be compared to the
dispersion of the people of Israel after the captivity of Babylon.
In the greater part of the world Christians are a small minority. In
order to fulfil its mission, the Church cannot base itself on temporal,
political, economic or cultural power as in the Middle Ages or under colonial
regimes. It can only count on the power of the word of God, evangelical
poverty, the purity of its witness, manifested in the authentically Christian
life of lay people, and also on the esteem of the peoples among whom the Church
wishes to live and witness to its faith. And this esteem of the people is
nothing other than what we have described as religious liberty. But how can the
Church hope to benefit from religious liberty in countries where it is a
minority if the Church itself fails to loudly proclaim or to practise religious
liberty in the countries where it is in the majority?
This proclamation of religious liberty is important not only for the
efficacity of apostolic and missionary action in general but it is also the
condition sine qua non of the
ecumenical movement.
We know that all our non-Catholic brothers consider this declaration as
a step which must be taken in order to arrive at a sincere and effective
ecumenism.
Third Reason: The Educational and
Pedagogic Value of Religious Liberty
The schema speaks of the right of the person and of
communities to religious liberty. This juridical liberty is not an end in
itself. It is a necessary means for education in liberty in its fullest sense,
which leads to interior liberty, or liberty of the soul by which a man becomes
an autonomous being, responsible before society and God, ready if necessary to
obey God rather than men.
This interior liberty, even if it exists in germ in every human
creature as a natural gift, requires a long education which can be summarised
in three ways: see, judge and act. If, thanks be to God, my sixty years of
apostolate have not been in vain, it is because I have never wanted young
people to live in shelter from dangers cut off from the milieu of their life
and work; rather I have shown confidence in their freedom in order to better
educate that freedom. I helped them to see, judge and act by themselves, by
undertaking social and cultural action themselves, freely obeying authorities
in order to become adult witnesses of Christ and the Gospel, conscious of being responsible for
their sisters and brothers in the whole world.
In our world in the process of unification, it is not possible to
educate young people in glass houses, cutting them off from the real world.
Many people lose the faith because they have been given a childish education.
It is only by means of a solid education of interior freedom that our young
people will be able to become adult Christians.
Objections
Some will object that freedom involves a number of dangers:
indifferentism, diffusion of errors, abuse of the ignorance of the masses and
of the passions. Here is my answer:
1. I am conscious of
these dangers. Some certainly will abuse religious liberty; but these risks are
lesser that those which arise from the suppression or the oppression of
religious freedom. "Absolutist regimes" - even those which claim to serve the
Church - where social pressure is substituted for personal formation, favor
anti-clericalism and in fact incite the masses to revolt against the faith and
the Church.
2. The dangers
inherent in a regime of freedom must be faced in a positive manner, for example
by a frank and sincere international agreement between civil and religious
authorities; but above all by the
formation and human, moral and religious education thanks to which young
people and adults become conscious of
their own responsibilities.
Conclusion
To conclude, I would like to propose the following :
This Vatican Council must conclude with a solemn and magnificent act by
Pope Paul VI in union with all the Fathers. This act should solemnly proclaim
religious liberty. It should request all confessions, all ideologies, all
authorities and institutions to unanimously maintain and protect religious liberty,
defining the requirements of public order in a correct and honest manner
as well as seeking to implement the means for effectively protecting religious
freedom.
I have finished. Thank you.
Joseph Card. Cardijn
