Of all the documents that came out of the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Liberty) was, says Omar F.A. Gutierrez, the most revised, debated, and controversial. But as Gutierrez argues, it also represented a development, rather than a reversal of Catholic teaching:

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Over at Crisis Magazine, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg has an analysis of a recent, and little noticed, article that Pope Benedict XVI published on, among other things, “the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions.” Gregg writes:

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Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom is just as timely today as it was fifty years ago, argues Joanna Bogle:

Religious freedom is the issue of the hour: in America, in Europe, in what we (used to?) think of as “the West”. But what is particularly interesting is that this comes just as we are marking the 50^th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council – the Council in which the Church explored the whole question of religious freedom and gave the world a valuable document which established the Church’s approach to this subject for the new millennium.

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(HT: Catholic Culture) Note: One in six patients receives care in a Catholic hospital in the United States.

February 26, 2012

What are you going to give up this Lent?

By Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.

Read more on Cardinal George: No Catholic hospitals in two years unless HHS mandate rescinded…