The «Growth» of Human Rights in the Catholic Doctrine. The Right to Religious Freedom: «Preliminaries», Importance and Limitations of Conciliar Turn

The text offers an evaluation of the difficult path of the issue of religious freedom at Second Vatican II, underlining both the various problems remained unresolved in the final conciliar declaration on religious liberty "Dignitatis humanae" as its historical significance. Its abandonment of the traditional perspective of the "rights of truth" and its affirmation, instead, that the individual subject was the sole bearer of the right to religious freedom, as well as its confirmation of the illegitimacy of arbitrary transitions from the sphere of the individual's relation to the State to that of the individual's relation to God, certainly represent a fundamental shift.