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This essay explores the impact of the ancient principle of the freedom of the Church—identified by the Second Vatican Council as “the fundamental principle” governing “the relations between the Church and governments and the whole civil order”—on both Western civilization and the development of modern Catholic social thought. Arguing that this principle requires the articulation and institutionalization of a new understanding of society and government, it contends this principle revolutionized the structure of Western political life and helped lay the groundwork for Western liberty. At the same time, it maintains that the development in contemporary Catholic social teaching that crystallizes in Dignitatis Humanae must be seen in the context of the ongoing effort of Catholic thought to understand the nature and role of the state towards which the idea of the freedom of the Church points. The equation of the state’s claim on men with the sacred claim of the divine will for the world was cut in two by the . . . teaching of Jesus. This called into question the whole concept of the state in antiquity, and it is quite understandable that the GrecoRoman state saw in this denial of its totalitarian claims an attack on its very foundations which it avenged with the death penalty. If Jesus’ teaching was true, then the Roman state could not go on as it had hitherto existed.—Joseph Ratzinger 1

The Freedom of the Church and the Taming of Leviathan: The Christian Revolution, Dignitatis Humanae, and Western Liberty