Michael de Salvo

Background

About Michael de Salvo

I am a fourth year Theology Ph.D. Candidate at Ave Maria University with an interest in St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, the Greek Fathers, St. John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. My dissertation is titled “Thomism, Journet, and Dignitatis Humanae.” The work of the dissertation is to explicate Charles Cardinal Journet’s theory of the Church and state within his magnum opus on the theology of the Church, L’Église du Verbe incarné, in light of its Thomistic principles. The thesis of the dissertation is that privileging the Church in spiritual matters does not preclude a state from enacting a right to religious freedom and vice versa. My goal is to complete an initial draft by August 2022. The first part of the dissertation explicates Journet’s account of the analogicity of the Church and state inasmuch as necessary to account for the essential exigencies of the Church in relation to the state. The second explicates Journet’s account of the essential exigencies of the Church in relation to the state inasmuch as necessary to account for the possibility that privileging the Church in spiritual matters might not preclude a state from enacting a right to religious freedom and vice versa. The third explicates Journet’s defense of the possibility in se. The fourth explicates Journet’s account of the blurring of the temporal and spiritual orders that restricting citizenship to juridical Church members conversely involved. The ultimate goal of the dissertation is to contribute to the ongoing debate over Dignitatis Humanae by calling attention to the theological complexity inherent to the question of religious freedom such as Journet sees it. At the Second Vatican Council, the cardinal played an active role in Dignitatis Humanae’s passage.