I've discussed Thomistic and Catholic political thought on Thomistica several times in the past. The posts I can remember are here, here, here, and here.
For our readers who are interested in such discussions, in this post I offer not my own reflections again but information about a discussion at another website. The Regensburg Forum is hosting an exchange between Thomas Pink and Steven Wedgeworth on the relationship between the Vatican II declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis humanae, and past Church teaching. Here's the first paragraph of the editors' introduction to the exchange:
The editors of The Regensburg Forum are pleased to host an exchange between Dr. Thomas Pink and Pastor Steven Wedgeworth on the coherence and historical context of the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings on the state’s obligations to facilitate true religion, specifically as expressed in the most comprehensive and authoritative of its modern documents, Dignitatis Humanae. Wedgeworth recently wrote a series for the online forum The Calvinist International, in which he argued that Dignitatis Humanae, rather than crystallizing the Catholic Church’s teaching on religious freedom and coercion, exacerbates the problem of Roman interpretation and ultimately reveals a contradiction at the heart of Roman claims to unbroken doctrinal development. Dignitatis Humanae, on Wedgeworth’s account, contradicts historic Roman teaching on Church and state. Consequently, we ought not view the current conflicts between so-called progressive and conservative factions under Francis’ papacy as aberrant, but rather as another reflex caused by the inherent contradiction in Roman teaching on conscience, coercion, Church, and state.
I think this will prove to be an interesting exchange.
The Regensburg Forum went online a year ago. If you haven't heard of it, here's an excerpt from their "about" page:
The Regensburg Forum is a public online forum that exists to promote informed and scholarly dialogue between the Roman Catholic and Reformed Protestant traditions. Special attention is paid to the importance of the Augustinian legacy of Western Christianity, which both traditions inherit and develop. Recognizing that the proliferation of early and late medieval theology and the original protest of the Reformers relied heavily upon creative deployments of Augustinian thought in philosophy and theology, we take the Augustinian tradition to be a primary point of departure for study and research. We are convinced that careful research in an Augustinian key will help to bring Roman Catholic scholarship closer to the orthodox and scholastic heart of Reformed thought, while also allowing the discontinuities of Reformation thought with Roman Catholicism to be studied in light of remarkable and overarching continuities.
I encourage you to pay The Regensburg Forum a visit!
