The Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the Church’s relationship to the state.

Did Vatican II Endorse Separation 

of Church and State?

By Joseph G. Trabbic

This year, 2015, marks fifty years since the close of the Second Vatican Council. Yet the “battle” for the Council, the battle for its authentic meaning, which began even before the bishops concluded their deliberations in 1965, continues still today.

A particular area of controversy is the Council’s teaching on the Church’s relationship to the state. Not a few people (and they span the spectrum between “progressive” and “conservative”) maintain that the Council fathers in some sense gave their blessing to the separation of Church and state and that in doing so departed from traditional Catholic teaching.

One prominent shaper of Catholic opinion (at least American Catholic opinion) who interprets the Council in this way is Michael Sean Winters. Winters recently expressed this interpretation of Vatican II while commenting on last October’s synod on the family in Rome. In Winters’s view, with the current question about the reception of communion by certain divorced and remarried Catholics, the Church finds herself faced with a decision about whether to change one of her teachings. Winters sees a parallel between this situation and the situation the Church faced during the Council in reflecting on her proper relationship to the state. He believes that those who are resisting change now—he mentions Cardinals Pell, Burke, and Napier—are taking the position that they do because they oppose any development in Church teaching. But they may find that their adversaries will triumph in the end, as John Courtney Murray eventually (and allegedly) did against opponents of his views on Church and state. Thus Winters:

Having never met +Pell or +Burke or +Napier, I have never had the chance to ask them: So, if doctrine never changes, what is the Church’s teaching on slavery today and was it always thus? In the 1950s, Fr. Murray was silenced for suggesting that the Church could endorse the separation of Church and State and in the 1960s the Second Vatican Council agreed with Murray, not with those who silenced him. If that was not a change in Church teaching, what was it?

Winters’s polemic against Pell et al. is surely misguided (not to mention a red herring), for no educated Catholic opposes development of doctrine on principle (as Winters appears to think Pell & Co. do), only developments that would conflict with scripture and tradition. But, of course, it is what Winters says about Vatican II’s teaching on Church and state that interests me in this essay, not his polemic against these “intransigent” cardinals. Winters’s above remarks on this teaching are consistent with what he has said about it on other occasions. Writing several years ago in Slate about the parts of Vatican II rejected by the Society of St. Pius X, Winters observes that the Council’s declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis humanae, “recognized the separation of church and state as a valid form of constitutional arrangement.” And in a 1999 book review for The New Republic Winters explains to his readers that Fr. Murray “argued successfully” at the Council “that the Church should embrace the separation of Church and State.”

So, what should we make of Winters’s reading of Vatican II’s teaching on Church and state? There would seem to be a couple different ways to interpret him. He could be saying either (a) that the Council admits that in certain circumstances the Church can regard such a separation as acceptable, even good, but not necessarily ideal, or (b) that the Council holds up the separation of Church and state as the ideal. We could call the former the “weak” version of Winters’s claim and the latter the “strong” version. In either case Winters would add that we are talking about a break with past teaching.

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