Catholics & Tolerance

One of the steadily seething arguments within the Roman Catholic Church is over the question of tolerance. Is the Spanish church right, for instance, in insisting on curtailing the freedom of Protestants for missionary work and public worship?

Last week the pot boiled up again for all to see. Spain's stiff-necked Archbishop of Seville, Cardinal Segura, had last year issued one of his pastoral letters protesting even the rudimentary privileges the Franco government gives to Protestantism. This had set off a riffle of objections from U.S. Roman Catholics, who insist that Segura's views are typically Spanish and anachronistic. But one of Rome's top experts in ecclesiastical law, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, had more recently made a speech backing up Segura's strong views on the suppression of Protestantism, and last week the New York Times reported that this had the complete approval of the Holy See.

To those who acted surprised, Vatican officials were surprised right back. Cardinal Ottaviani's speech was "unexceptionable," a Vatican official said, and there was certainly nothing new in it.

"The church," the Cardinal had said, "recognizes the necessity with which rulers in some Catholic countries may be faced of granting--because of grave reasons--a degree of tolerance to the other cults. But tolerance is not a synonym for freedom of propaganda which foments religious discord and alters the secure and unanimous possession of truth and of religious practice in countries such as Italy, Spain and others."

The Duty of Rulers. In a record of his views published in the American Ecclesiastical Review, Cardinal Ottaviani was more explicit. "Now if there is any certain and indisputable truth to be found among the general principles of public ecclesiastical law," he wrote, "it is the truth that the rulers in a state composed almost entirely of Catholics, and consequently and consistently governed by Catholics, have the duty to influence the legislation of that state in a Catholic sense . . . [and] to protect . . . the religious unity of a people who unanimously know themselves to be in secure possession of religious truth."

The reasoning behind Ottaviani's view is an old and deeply rutted road in Catholic polity. God. the reasoning holds, gave mankind the truth once and for all in Jesus Christ; the Roman Catholic Church was established by Christ as the single possessor of that complete truth. It is wrong, then, for the possessor of the truth, whether an individual or a group, to foster the promulgation of error, or to permit it, except for strong reasons, when it has the clear power to prevent it. Any non-Catholic religion, it argues, is error. Therefore a Catholic government of a predominantly Catholic country is morally bound to limit the freedom of such a religion.

More Harm than Good. Some Catholic apologists for the "liberal" view, such as Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray, professor of theology at Woodstock (Md.) College, maintain that this antique tradition of the church presupposes an antique form of government. They point to the frequency with which their opponents use the word "ruler" in referring to the state, and hold that in a modern democracy the religious functions pertinent to an absolutist government are unworkable. Other Catholic liberals fall back on the strong human argument that, whatever the letter of church doctrine may say, even if Catholics become the overwhelmingly predominant group in the U.S., their American principles run too deep to let them interfere with the liberties of their non-Catholic compatriots to preach what and where they would. Many Catholics feel that the old Catholic custom of alliance between church and state has in the long run done the church more harm than good, leading to the anticlericalism of such countries as France, Mexico and Communist-ridden Italy.

Commented Father Murray on Ottaviani's words last week: "His statement was neither an official nor a semi-official utterance ... It is still entirely possible and legitimate for Catholics to doubt or dispute whether Cardinal Ottaviani's discourse represents the full, adequate and balanced doctrine of the church."

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