Religious liberty is that special endowment we all have to freely serve God without the interference of tyrannies or world councils that coerce us into adopting anything contrary to Church Tradition. Such was the way of the saints who freely abandoned themselves to God with complete immunity to all things so that they were answerable only to God without respect to persons. (Ephesians 6:6) In so doing they manifested perfect obedience to their superiors and to all the rules and regulations laid down by the Church in keeping with the Lord’s instruction: “If you love Me, keep My Commandments.” (John 14:15)
“A sense of the dignity of the human person has been impressing itself more and more deeply on the consciousness of contemporary man, and the demand
is increasingly made that men should act on their own judgment.” (1) Again we read:
“God has regard for the dignity of the human person whom He Himself created and man is to be guided by his own judgment and he is to enjoy freedom.” (11)
Here we see the Council honoring man’s prerogative to be his own guide, which is contrary to the Creator. “For God will not except any man’s person, neither will He stand in awe of any man’s greatness: for He made the little and the great, and he has equally care for all.” (Wisdom 6:8) Man’s true dignity consists in his being made to the image of God, but this dignity is preserved by keeping one’s innocence and yielding his judgment up to God, so that he makes God’s judgment his own in matters of faith and morals. What God requires of us is a childlike submission to doctrine and Tradition as taught by the Savior Himself:
“Unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)
But according to the document, the Church may not infringe upon one’s personal rights by laying down the law as to what they must do to be saved. It affirms the natural rights of man in matters of religion (Masonic freedoms), which is contrary to the previous papal teachings which deny any such rights. Pius IX in his Encyclical “Quanta Cura”, Leo XIII in his Encyclicals “Libertas Praestantissimum” and “Immortale Dei” and Pius XII in his allocution “Ci Riesce” all affirm that there is no logical or scriptural basis for this humanist notion of human dignity, yet Vatican II seems to assert it as dogma.
The gist of the Religious Liberty document is to say that if a person’s “moral conscience” leads them to adopt this or that formula for life even if it means renouncing the Faith and adhering to another religion, then that is their religious liberty which no man may oppose. This argument is founded not on the laws of God but on the “sacred rights” of man which, according to the document, must be honored at all cost.
However, we have to make a clear distinction between moral conscience and temptation. Moral conscience, of course, will always compel one to fear God and keep his Commandments which are already engraved “in the fleshy tablets of the heart.” (2 Cor. 3:3) Whereas temptation will always lead one to depart the Commandments and follow his own will or sense of liberty where he doesn’t allow God to hold the reins in his life as a Divine Monarch. Such liberty offends God and chains us to the shackles of guilt, which is no liberty. (John 8:34) There is no such thing as “my moral conscience told me to sin and be a rebel” for such is the manifestation of a guilty conscience, not a moral conscience. When God speaks man must listen and take heed of the Commandments, for He has granted man no license to resist the ordinance from On High.
It is true that man has been given a free will to choose between good and evil which God does not interfere with, since our eternal friendship with God must be a free will offering which is grounded in charity and not coercion. However, the abuse of our free will to choose evil is not honored by God nor is it permitted in the Church, nor is it a form of religious liberty. Man is granted the right to do what is right so that he can be liberated from wrong, and in this consists his religious liberty.
We might consider, too, that when Christ spoke to the people of His day He never once respected human opinion or personal liberty but laid down the truth as the absolute rule
of life to follow if they wished to be saved. And whereas He did not force His doctrine upon the people and in fact allowed the people to oppose Him even unto His death on the cross, He nonetheless censured the people for their hypocrisy and never once pacified their defiled conscience by allowing them to feel right about what they were doing, since what they were doing was wrong. And He made sure they knew that! So this same sense of authority should be reflected by the Catholic hierarchy, since Christ has enjoined them with the office of the correction of others.
Yet the document forbids that the Church should enforce a universal rule of law upon its people as if Almighty God had no right to regulate the conduct of men within his own household! According to the document, mere man has the liberty to follow his ‘moral conscience’ but the Almighty has no liberty to govern His Church. What is fostered is the typical protestant argument that says “I can think for myself, I don’t need a Church telling me what to do, I don’t have to confess to a priest, I can find my own way directly to God, etc.” This is the mentality that has separated a great many from the friendship of God through which they were banished to the fires of eternity, yet this is the very attitude defended in the Religious Liberty document of the Second Vatican Council.
With every liberal proposal of the document(s) there is an apparent conservatism (ambiguous double meaning) to cover its tracks so that under the pretext of honoring the rights of every human to freely adore his Creator, the document actually advocates that man has the liberty to follow his own licentious will:
“In all his activity a man is bound to follow his conscience... It follows that he is not to be forced to act in manner contrary to his conscience. Nor, on the other
hand, is he to be restrained from acting in accordance with his conscience, especially in matters religious. The reason is that the exercise of religion, of its very nature, consists before all else in those internal, voluntary and free acts whereby man sets the course of his life directly to God.” [3]
Here conscience is used interchangeably with self will so that on the surface it looks very honorable and says the truth that no man or religious authority may infringe upon the God given rights of men to direct themselves to God. But what the document is really saying is that the Church must honor the judgment of man to choose and decide for himself what course he is going to take, even if it means denying Christ. We might almost see the document as a pro-choice document, since what is honored is not the right choice but the “right” or “freedom” to choose, so that whatever choice is made is automatically honored by the Council.
For baptized Catholics their religious liberty consists in following the format that has already been laid out and chosen for them by the Church so that their only recourse as
Catholics is to either embrace or reject it. The faithful are not given the liberty to introduce their own format to the Church or to adopt their own ideas, practices, doctrine or styles of dress (immodest) they may want to follow, unless it be derived from the Church. But according to Vatican II, the Church may not infringe upon their “moral conscience” to practice this religious liberty.
What is absurd is how the document cites our “human dignity” as the justification for this religious liberty. “The declaration of this Vatican Council on the right of man to religious freedom has its foundation in the dignity of the person, whose exigencies have come to be fully known to human reason through centuries of experience.” (9) Since when is man’s ‘dignity’ flaunted before the throne of God? What the Church issues in the way of documents or decrees must always have its foundation in the laws of God, not in the dignity of man.
The same applies for government. In any true Christian government the basic laws of God must always have bearing upon its judicial and legislative decisions which the people in turn must follow. Yet the Vatican II document states:
“It follows that a wrong is done when government imposes upon its people, by force or fear or other means, the profession or repudiation of any religion.” (6)
Government indeed cannot force its people to profess a certain denomination, but it most certainly can profess Christianity to be the law of the land where the people at least are required to profess it in action through their compliance. But according to the Council, the U.S. Supreme Court did wrong in 1892 by declaring the United States to be
“A Christian nation” in which
“Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind.” The U.S. traditionally imposes the rule of Christianity as the law of the land to be obeyed by its citizens, namely,
thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not rape, fornicate or abuse little children, etc., yet the Council seems to regard this mandatory compliance as ‘coercion.’ Does government not have a right and duty to enforce law and order?
According to the document religious zealots and terrorists should be free from such government coercion. “The freedom or immunity from coercion in matters religious which is the endowment of persons as individuals is also to be recognized as 15 their right.” (4) Since when do people have a right to offend? If a person’s religion dictates that he can murder Christians for Allah and crash his jet into the local skyscraper shall he now be immune from government censure or coercion? God forbid!
The fact that someone has a religious conviction doesn’t make it right. With great liberty and conviction the Jews condemned Jesus to death in the name of “God their father”, but Jesus told them who their father was, the devil, just as the devil is the father of those who suggest we may break the laws of God in view of religious liberty.
The great scandal bewitching modern man is this issue of human rights through which a major segment of humanity is now on the path to perdition. Unfortunately, the Religious Liberty document of Vatican II was a major foundation block for this new licentious
order that has all but replaced the rule of Christianity that was once the hallmark of our society. Slowly but surely, the curse of human rights and relativism has overtaken the western psyche where people today strut about in their arrogance declaring their so-called “rights” to offend and to engage in lewd or alternative lifestyles, with much of this today being tolerated and even promoted by the Church! We see women today going up to Communion half naked with their indecency exposed, and in some cases even tattooed, yet not a word is uttered against this because it violates their “religious liberty.”
With its pacifist theme, Vatican II compares to the French Revolution in that it too instructed the elders of the people to “let them eat cake” and to have their “religious liberty” instead of bringing them the spiritual meat and potatoes that is needed for their salvation. The end result has been a new order of spiritual anarchy where “the people” have taken the law into their own hands and have overrun the sanctuary with all manner of sham religious activity that has left the Church today in shambles.
Perhaps the most passionate opponent of the Religious Liberty document was Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre who warned of its detrimental consequences for the future, citing that it advocated “the right to cause scandal.” He warned that with this document “a civil society endowed with Catholic legislation shall no longer exist” and said it would bring about “the disappearance in the Church of the missionary spirit for the conversion of souls.” (Bernard Tissiers,
The Biography of Marcel Lefebvre)
On June 29, 1976, the Archbishop also had this to say: “This right to religious freedom is blasphemous, for it attributes to God purposes that destroy His Majesty, His Glory, His Kingship. This right implies freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, and all the Masonic freedoms.”
According to Lefebvre, the most incriminating evidence against the Religious Liberty of Vatican II was the enthusiastic support it received from the synagogue of satan. Consider the following from the Archbishop:
“This very year (1965), Yves Marsaudon, the Freemason, has published the book L’ oecumenisme vu par un franc-macon de tradition (Ecumenism as Seen by a
Traditional Freemason). In it the author expresses the hope of Freemasons that our Council will solemnly proclaim religious liberty... What further evidence do we need?”
We can understand why Pope Paul VI declared that “from some fissure the smoke of satan entered into the temple of God.” It is Lucifer who promotes the breaking of God’s
Commandments and it was his agents who gained control of the drafting apparatus at the Council which enabled them to draft up the blueprint for this new religious order. The document on Religious Liberty was like a battery to charge up the spirit of liberty at the Council and to encourage the endorsement of other religions (see following chapter), for which reason several of the cardinals did not want to sign it at its conclusion. But unfortunately, their true moral conscience was violated when they were told by the Council elite that if they didn’t sign it they would not go on record as having participated at the Second Vatican Council.
It is also for reason that Paul VI stated the following in his speech at the end of Vatican II: “Profane and secular humanism has revealed itself in its terrible, anticlerical stature, and in one sense has defied the Council. The religion of God made man has met the religion of man who makes himself God.” (December 7, 1965)
The pope here speaks of revolution in the Church. Cardinal Ratzinger actually admitted back in the '80s that the Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes (in conjunction with the documents on Religious Liberty and Ecumenism), was intended to counteract the
Syllabus of Errors by Pius IX and to set in motion the licentious principles of the French Revolution of 1789. “We might say that it is a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a kind of counter-syllabus... Let us be content to say that the text serves as a counter-syllabus and, as such, represents, on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789.” (Cardinal Ratzinger,
Principles of Catholic theology, pp. 381-382, Ignatius Press, 1987)
To think that the precepts of the French Revolution should be adopted by the Vatican Council! Is it any wonder why the Church has revolted from its past? What we see today is a new order of spiritual bondage where the people are forced to labor for this Masonic pyramid bearing the inscription
Novus Ordo Seclorum. As they say, “we’re building community; we’re building up the temple of God.” Forty years of modernist oppression has kept the people in chains and has violated their Religious Liberty to sacrifice freely to God, only because these Pharaos of innovation have imposed these liturgical shackles and have sought to make the faithful immune to the laws of the Most High.
In conclusion, Religious Liberty is our exclusive right as Roman Catholics to continue in the Tradition of the Faith without being tainted with any stigma of modern reform, since our baptism gives us that right and duty to remain clean from elements foreign to the Faith. It is therefore incumbent upon the clergy to ensure that these sacred rights from God are not infringed upon by those who seek to depart the laws of God under the pretext of moral conscience.
