The declaration on religious freedom issued by the Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae claimed: «the human person has a right to religious freedom» (no. 2). Nevertheless, some think the modern declaration of Vatican II contradicts prior Catholic magisterial teaching on religious liberty. I evaluate whether the Magisterium is proposing an inconsistent set of propositions. I argue that a careful reading of the relevant magisterial propositions from classical papal encyclicals, namely, those that apparently opposed religious freedom, reveals they do not contradict any of the propositions concerning religious freedom in the declaration of Vatican II. While proving the absence of a contradiction does not prove that the teaching is true or plausible, there is value in doing so because it allows Catholic theologians to focus on demonstrating that the propositions proposed by the Magisterium are jointly plausible and to propose consistent explanations in which both sets of propositions figure.

The declaration on religious freedom issued by the Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae forthrightly claimed: «the human person has a right to religious freedom» (no. 2). Despite actually having signed the declaration while a participant at Vatican II, Marcel Lefebvre later famously claimed: «The phrase of the schema quoted in the intervention [ibid.] is monstrous, and it is odious to credit the Catholic Church with this claim». When Marcel Lefebvre embarked on his schismatic path in ordaining bishops without papal mandate, his justification, in great part, rested on the claim that there was a contradiction between the teaching proposed at Vatican II and that proposed in classical papal encyclicals. Lefebvre held that earlier Catholic teaching on the duties of States and freedom of religion were directly opposed to this claim in Dignitatis Humanae and, in fact, formally contradicted it. This view that there exists a contradiction between this more recent declaration of Vatican II and the prior teaching has recently resurfaced among some Catholics, although mostly in popular media rather than scholarly contexts.

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