Religious freedom, Manzoni, Dostoevsky and the unfinished building site of Europe

On 7 December 1965, on the eve of the closing of Vatican II, the council hall approved one of the last texts of the Council, but perhaps the most explosive for modernity: the declaration ‘Dignitatis humanae’ on religious freedom. Today, 7 December 2025, as Europe goes through a season of wars, religious identitarianism and fatigued democracies, that page returns to speak to us with surprising force. It is a text that concerns not only believers, but anyone who thinks of democracy as a space for free consciences.

“Dignitatis humanae was not born easy. It was the subject of postponements, rewritings, conflicting votes: in the end there were still seventy votes against, an unusually high number for conciliar practice. It was not a technical detail, but a sign that the raw nerve of the relationship between Church, truth and freedom was being touched . The decisive step is this: from an abstract defence of the ‘rights of truth’ to the recognition that the subject entitled to the right to religious freedom is the concrete person, even before the path he or she takes towards truth. The right is not a prize for those “already inside” the fence of doctrine, but a condition for every conscience to be able to search without coercion.

In this sense, ‘Dignitatis Humanae’ is also a political breakthrough

The Church accepts the system of freedoms and guarantees typical of modern constitutionalism, recognises the State’s task – limited but essential – of guarantor of coexistence between different faiths, and renounces in principle the ancient dream of the ‘secular arm’. As John Courtney Murray, one of the main authors of the text, recalls, it is not a question of sacralising the world, but of recognising that the Gospel does not need legal privileges to be proclaimed.

To grasp the full significance of this anniversary, it is worth looking further back. TheUnification of Italy marks a twofold wound in modern Catholics: on the one hand, the sense of guilt linked to the need to “return to Caesar what is Caesar’s” (cf. Mt 22:21; Mk 12:17; Lk 20:25), accepting a secular State and the subversive laws that confiscated ecclesiastical property (R.D. 7 July 1866, no. 3036; Law 15 August 1867, no. 3848); on the other hand, the wound of an anticlerical modernity that dismantled schools, hospitals, libraries, and pious works, distributing assets among the elites and contributing to the creation of the ‘Southern Question’. “Dignitatis humanae” arrives at the bottom of this ordeal: it no longer asks to defend a system of confessional privileges, but invites us to inhabit the secular space of rights as believers, without ceasing to believe that the truth questions the conscience.

Alessandro Manzoni had intuited this path almost a century earlier

The author who defended Catholic morality against Sismondi ‘s simplifications and was the first to affirm (which is often forgotten) that Christ ‘revealed man to man’, is the same author who accepted the appointment as senator in 1860, in the midst of the conflict between the Unitarian State and the Holy See, and did not bend to Pius IX‘s ‘non expedit’. For Manzoni, faith is not a refuge from history, but a more demanding form of civic responsibility: grace does not cancel freedom, it elevates it, and politics must be judged starting from the dignity of the most fragile, not from the success of the strongest.

In counterpoint, the‘pre-Constantine ideal’ that Manzoni and Dostoevsky share helps to understand the relevance of ‘Dignitatis humanae’. Augustine had dismantled the theology of victory that exalted Constantine: the true ‘happy ones’ are not the victorious emperors, but the martyrs, the losers who remain faithful to conscience. Providence never identifies itself with a historical power; it works in weakness, in ‘peregrinatio in spe’. Manzoni translates this intuition by placing the poor and the humble at the centre of the novel; Dostoevsky descends with his characters into the prisons, into the slums of St Petersburg, into the guilt that becomes the invocation of meaning.

The Poem of the Grand Inquisitor is perhaps the most lucid parable of this evangelical distrust of any sacralisation of power. When the Inquisitor reproaches Christ for giving men too much freedom, he does not attack a particular confession, but any system – religious or political – that promises bread and security in exchange for conscience. For the Inquisitor, men ‘cannot stand’ freedom; for Dostoevsky, on the contrary, freedom of the heart is the only place where truth can be loved. Better a poor Church than a Church triumphant but unfaithful to the mystery of the person.

The Gospel of Rights in ‘Digitatis Humanae

“Dignitatis humanae” is thus not a mere disciplinary adjustment, but the official recognition by the Church of Rome that this ‘pre-Constantinian’ tradition is not a romantic residue, but the heart of the Gospel in the age of rights. The declaration affirms that the dignity of man created in the image of God is embodied in the rights and freedoms that enable him to seek the truth: first and foremost in religious freedom, understood as the inviolability of conscience. There is no opposition between truth and freedom: Christian truth demands that the State does not force anyone to believe and guarantees everyone the space to live and profess their convictions, as long as public order is not endangered.

This is where Alfonso Pascale and Mario Campli‘s book, ‘The Council and Democracy’ (2024), enters the scene with contemporary force. This volume recalls how Vatican II was not only an intra-ecclesial event, but a passage in which the Church took seriously the very categories of constitutional democracy: the distinction between the order of law and the order of moral duty, the ‘favor libertatis’ that must guide laws, the centrality of the personal conscience as the subject of rights. The Council – and ‘Dignitatis humanae’ in particular – did not invent democracy, but recognised it as a natural space of Christian witness, preferable to any confessional State model.

In the time of technicist humanism and anti-liberal democracies, this memory is anything but obvious

On the one hand, the temptation to merge religion and nation into a single political idol re-emerges – what was condemned as philetism in the Orthodox world and which today takes different forms elsewhere. On the other hand, in a certain European culture, religion is only tolerated if it remains invisible, reduced to a private sentiment, as if the public space should be neutral not only with respect to faiths, but with respect to any demand for truth. ‘Dignitatis humanae’ points to a third way: neither confessional state nor removal secularism, but a pluralist city in which different religious and humanistic traditions can speak, discuss, contribute to the common good.

If Europe wants to be more than a market or an identity fence, it will have to question itself again on this promise: there is no freedom without truth about man, and there is no truth about man that does not pass through the freedom of his conscience.