Dec. 7 marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most pivotal documents in the Catholic Church’s 2,000-year history: Dignitatis Humanae, or “On the Dignity of the Human Person.” Issued at the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the work stated the 
church’s belief “that the human person has a right to religious freedom.”
This declaration was at once revolutionary and reaffirming of Catholic tradition—and its significance has only increased as attacks on religious freedom have proliferated in the intervening years.
In many ways, the Catholic Church’s affirmation of religious liberty echoes the American tradition of religious freedom, articulated so forcefully in the writings of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and given constitutional enumeration in the First Amendment.
It is no secret the Founding Fathers were, almost to a person, distrustful and even hostile to Catholicism. Yet by building a system of government grounded in the dignity of the human person and the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence put it—they drew upon the same intellectual tradition that infuses Catholic social teaching.
American Catholics have long recognized this. At a gathering of bishops in 1884, Archbishop James Gibbons of Baltimore expressed his peers’ understanding of the American experiment in self-government: The Founders built “better than they knew.” ...
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