Religious Liberty (Continuity or Contradiction?)

<p class=ql-align-justify>Among the problems posed by <em>Dignitatis Humanæ</em> there are the following: is its principal teaching infallible or merely the simply authentic Magisterium? May a Catholic suspend assent to this teaching or even refuse it and if so under what conditions? And more importantly does the Council's definition of religious liberty contradict the Church's former magisterium? As Alan Fimister puts it:  </p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>If the faithful and their pastors for over a thousand years held (and they surely did) that the Church had the right to employ coercion and even lethal force to correct erring members of the faithful and they were in fact wrong then this claim is completely empty and with it Christ's teaching that the Church is a city set upon a hill that cannot be hidden and His promise to remain with her until the end of time (Matt 5:14; 28:20).</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>If the teaching of the ordinary and universal or the extraordinary magisterium can and has contradicted itself then this does not mean that the new teaching is true or that the Church has foundered but that Catholicism was never true and we are of all men most to be pitied. </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>The task of reconciling the declaration </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Dignitatis Humanæ </em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>and the previous definitions and tradition of the Church is therefore no trifling matter. Upon it hinges the credibility of Catholicism itself.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>In this compelling study Fr. Bernard Lucien along with a commentary by Fr. Antoine-Marie de Araujo FSVF seek to argue without doing violence to the text for a correct interpretation of the central teaching of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Dignitatis Humanæ</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> as well as for a correction of its deficiencies. The ongoing debates within the Church about Tradition and the secularist aim to make Christianity politically irrelevant confirm the timeliness of this study. </span></p>