Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

freedom of association, the freedom to choose a profession and a place of work, and the protection
of private property. Since people of different religions and philosophies of life live
together in modern society, particular importance attaches to the problem of toleration, not
only in religion, but also in education, training, science, and other realms of cultural life. Setting
out from the principle that no one should be forced to sacrifice his or her principles,
Christian social teaching advocates respect for toleration in both the public and the social
realms. If, for example, in an ideologically pluralistic society the state were to carry out genuinely
educational tasks through its public authorities, religious and ideological oppression
would be inevitable. Georg Heppes would indeed like to attribute to the state the right „to
provide education in its own realm with its own resources.“ But when Heppes then explains
that education is to serve „the true, the good, the beautiful, the noble, and the holy“, one will
have to ask in amazement by what norms the state is to determine in a pluralistic society what
is true, good, beautiful, noble, and holy. 67 For the assumption that there is an education and
training transcending all religious confessions and world views is a belated phenomenon from
the period of National Liberalism.
Toleration is probably less threatened today by the state than by certain forces and currents
within society such as those trends which see the so-called value-free, positivistic science as
the highest norm binding on all other realms of spiritual life and which more or less openly
hold to the thesis that a scholar who accepts philosophical and religious truths does not belong
in a university chair. Apart from the fact that every science rests on philosophical presuppositions
(e.g., on epistemological ones), the catchword ‘religious dogmatism’ must be designated
as insulting and defamatory.
Further, the tendency to limit toleration to the individual conscience and to refuse it to communities
and their institutions such as Catholic kindergartens or hospitals is not without its
danger. In a pluralistic society, a community must also have the right to live according to its
beliefs and to create institutions that correspond to these beliefs (enterprises with specific
commitments).
2. Even if Holy Scripture designates governmental authority as ‘ordered by God’, every state
and every government will nevertheless bear within itself the insufficiency of everything
earthly and created. With greater or less justification, one will find one thing or another to
criticize in all laws and in all governmental measures. More alarming is the fact that states and
governments exhibit not only one defect or another, as experience teaches, but can degenerate
altogether into criminal tyrannies. Since Aristotle, it has been customary to distinguish two
kinds of tyrants: the usurper or invader who has unlawfully arrogated the governmental authority
to himself, but then perhaps rules properly, and the tyrannus regiminis who abuses his
rule - even if he has entered upon it rightfully - for the destruction of the common good by
enslaving consciences, by murdering at home or - through the instigation of wars - abroad,
and by plundering and by piling crime upon crime. Here it is usually a question, not of individual
tyrants, as in Antiquity, but of movements or parties which establish a tyrannical régime
with fear and terror. Every conscientious citizen will suffer under such a system, and not
only when he or she is immediately affected, but because he or she must witness the injustice
that is inflicted on others, above all on people of other nations, in the name of the state to
which he or she belongs. In such a situation, Christian social teaching distinguishes between
two kinds of behavior:
a) The most obvious and, without a doubt, morally unobjectionable means of defense is passive
resistance: one does not carry out criminal laws , but acts expressly against the tendency
of unjust governmental measures. One refuses obedience to criminal commands by, to take a
non-fictional example, refusing to shoot Jewish children and is ready to assume the conse-
67 G. Heppes, Die Grenzen des Elternrechts (Darmstadt, 1955), 101ff.
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