Benedict today:

Religious freedom is not only the individual right of each person to profess and display one’s faith, but it is also the collective right of families, groups and the Church itself, and engages civil power to “create conditions favourable to the fostering of religious life, so that citizens are truly able to exercise their religious rights and fulfil their respective duties.”  The cordial meeting between the Pope and the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, gave occasion to Benedict XVI to reinforce the concept of religious freedom and to reaffirm the respect due to it by States, as occurs in Italy and other countries.

In his speech, the Pope also affirmed that the Church “is not and does not intend to be a political agent”, but “has a profound interest in the good of the political community” and that it is up to Catholic laypeople to affirm in society the principles that inspire them.

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“It would however be reductive,” the Pope went on to say, “to consider that the right of religious freedom is sufficiently guaranteed based on the absence of violence against or interference in personal convictions or when it is limited to respecting manifestations of faith that occur in the ambit of places of worship.  Not to be forgotten in fact is that ‘the  social nature of man itself requires that he should give external expression to his internal acts of religion: that he should share with others in matters religious; that he should profess his religion in community’ (ibid).  Thus religious freedom is not only a right of the individual but also of the family, of religious groups and of the Church herself (cf Dignitatis humanae, 4-5.13) and the exercise of this right has an influence on the multiple ambits and situations in which the believer finds himself and operates.  An adequate respect for the right to religious freedom implicates, therefore, the engagement of civil power to “create conditions favourable to the fostering of religious life, in order that the people may be truly enabled to exercise their religious rights and to fulfill their religious duties, and also in order that society itself may profit by the moral qualities of justice and peace which have their origin in men’s faithfulness to God and to His holy will’ (Dignitatis humanae, 6).”