(NOTE: This is a somewhat begun version of a talk)

more…

Freedom to practice your own religion is a fundamental right in the US. The Catholic Church also decrees that all nations should allow the free expression of religion.

Why should we follow this?

On the surface, all religion concerns itself with the finding of ultimate truth. By the very nature of truth, anything that is not ‘truth’ is by definition ‘false’; so anyone who feels that their religion is the full truth must also feel that anything opposed to their religion is false. How people and cultures deal with that which is felt to be false /errant /heretical /etc drives a suprising amount of our history.

This brings me to Pope Benedict XVI’s (B16, or the German Shepard are good nicknames) Christmas address, which can be found here. In there (well, the section that I’m referencing… it’s a longish talk), he discusses the mandate of Vatican II, which was to take the truth that the Church has had for all time, and presenting them in a way that is accessable to the modern era.

Basic decisions, therefore, continue to be well-grounded, whereas the way they are applied to new contexts can change. Thus, for example, if religious freedom were to be considered an expression of the human inability to discover the truth and thus become a canonization of relativism, then this social and historical necessity is raised inappropriately to the metaphysical level and thus stripped of its true meaning. Consequently, it cannot be accepted by those who believe that the human person is capable of knowing the truth about God and, on the basis of the inner dignity of the truth, is bound to this knowledge.It is quite different, on the other hand, to perceive religious freedom as a need that derives from human coexistence, or indeed, as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction.

I was intriqued by this thought. We allow religious freedom from a Catholic perspective because in the long run, the Church is enriched by the dialog offered by adherents of other religions. But how much has society been duped into implicitly believing what B16 offered as a FALSE example of why we allow religious freedom? How many believe that we CAN’T find any truth, and therefore, all pursuits are in vain?