Give me liberty and give me faith.

"Do not seek the truth of life in fallacious and apparently novel ideologies," Pope John Paul II told an estimated 1 million worshipers at Mass during his January visit to Mexico City. His listeners knew that the pope was referring to Pentecostalism, the evangelical Protestant movement that is winning Catholic souls by the hundreds of thousands annually in Latin America.

In Crossing the Threshold of Hope (Knopf, 1994), John Paul's phenomenal best-seller (any book written by a pope that becomes a best-seller is ipso facto "phenomenal"), the pontiff had equally strong words for interfaith dialogue: Happy Catholics, in their eagerness to embrace Muslims as fellow theists and children of the one God, were glossing over profound differences between Islam and Christianity.

Jesus, the savior of humankind, is not to be compared to Muhammad, the pope warned Catholic evangelists. In the otherwise laudable effort to advance interreligious harmony, he continued, Catholics must not abandon their most startling and distinctive claim. "The church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation," as the Second Vatican Council put it. "They could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter into it, or to remain in it" (Lumen gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church).

Forty years ago--the blink of an eye in the lifetime of the church--Catholics would have needed no such reminders of their religious superiority over other Christians, not to mention Muslims, Jews, and countless other "non-Christians." Forty years ago, Catholics continued to believe theirs to be "the One, True Church."

By 1959 suburban, middle-class, assimilating Catholics had learned not to flaunt their insider's status with God--it would not do to alienate their Protestant co-workers--but the Church Triumphant still retained its powerful hold on the Catholic imagination. On earth, where sin distorted perception and clouded understanding, the Church Militant suffered discrimination and struggled against "indifferentism"--the all-too-common failure to recognize the unique, necessary, and absolute correlation between the orthodox practice of Roman Catholicism and personal salvation. But in heaven, populated by saints whose glorified being proclaimed the eternal efficacy of "keeping the faith," the Church Triumphant reigned in uncontested splendor. Catholics knew that they won in the end.

But that was before the Catholic Church officially accepted the modern separation of church and state, and admitted that every man, woman, and child, regardless of race or religion, possesses inalienable rights merely by virtue of being a creature of God. Foremost among these rights rooted in human dignity, the bishops of Vatican II proclaimed, is the freedom to choose one's religion. No state--or church--could usurp that right. This "development of doctrine" was promulgated on December 7,1965, in Dignitatis humanae, the council's Declaration on Religious Freedom.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of this event, which amounted to a highly un-Catholic admission that the church could change its teaching when that teaching was no longer seen to uphold cardinal principles of the apostolic faith. From at least the 13th century until December 7, 1965, Roman Catholicism had formally denied civil and other human rights to non-Catholics by teaching, in effect, that "theological error has no rights" in a properly governed (i.e., Roman Catholic) state. Now a new era had apparently dawned, one in which the church aligned itself not with the state but with civil society and people striving everywhere for liberty.

The roots of "the revolution of 1965" were planted during the 19th century. Faced with a popular uprising in Rome and the papal states, the newly elected Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846 as pope) furiously rejected calls for elected assemblies and lay-dominated councils of state. In the encyclical Mirari vos (1832), he denounced the liberal ideas associated with the French priest Felicite de Lamennais and his newspaper L'Avenir. Lamennais and his growing company of supporters championed freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, and separation of church and state.

For Lamennais, "the common consent of all humanity" was a norm of truth. Catholicism, properly interpreted, had always defended the principles underlying democracy. Indeed, Lamennais suggested, the church would thrive in the open marketplace of ideas and should therefore welcome the new republican trend.

Gregory XVI, not one to mince words, pronounced Lamennais a "deranged madman." Had the new hero of liberal Catholicism failed to notice what the political triumph of "republican ideas" in the French Revolution had done to the church? (Far from thriving, many of the clergy had lost their heads.)

Pope Gregory, like most bishops shaped by 19th-century neo-scholastic ecclesiology (theory of the church), believed that God had intended both the church and the state to be hierarchical and monarchical in structure. Truth, furthermore, was one, and the One, True Church was entrusted with proclaiming, preserving, and enforcing it. Authentic "liberty" meant making the political order safe for and supportive of Catholic teaching, worship, and practice. It definitely did not mean allowing people to choose to believe whatever their reason or emotions led them to believe--that path led to theological error, atheism, and social anarchy.

Accordingly, Gregory supported the European kings against the new democratic movements sweeping across Europe. He also declared that the divine origin of the papacy meant that the pope should retain his political sovereignty over the papal states--the region we now call central Italy (the pope having lost the argument).

Subsequent popes followed Gregory's lead. In Quanta cura (1864) Pius IX repeated Gregory XVI's attack on "the madness that freedom of conscience and of worship is the proper right of every human being and ought to be proclaimed by law and maintained in every rightly constituted society." In 1885 Pope Leo XIII reaffirmed the rejection of religious liberty in Immortale Dei, an encyclical explicitly focused upon "the Christian constitution of states."

The Catholic Church had little patience with the human rights reforms and democratic regimes of the later 19th and early 20th centuries. It acquiesced in the authoritative regimes and policies that governed the European, Latin American, and African nations where Catholicism was strong.

In liberal democracies, as a result, anti-Catholics had little trouble turning the church's own political philosophy against it. As recently as the 1950s, Protestant and secular elites in the United States, for example, were once again joining forces to oppose what one prominent critic of Catholicism called "an organization that is not only a church but a state within a state, and a state above a state."

On the question of religious liberty, it may be said that the Catholic Church caught up with the 18th century only in the middle of the 20th. In 1948 John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit professor of theology at Woodstock seminary in Maryland, presented a paper at a gathering of Catholic theologians titled "Governmental Repression of Heresy," in which he contended that it was not the duty of a good Catholic state to repress heresy even when it was practicable to do so. The internal debate that Murray thereby generated took many twists and turns over the next 17 years--Murray himself was silenced for a number of years by his Vatican opponents--but it led eventually to the stunning reversal of Catholic teaching in 1965.

Almost overnight, the Roman Catholic Church aligned itself not with states but with peoples, and became the world's foremost champion of human rights and religious freedom. Pope John Paul II, the bane of the former Soviet Union, atheistic communism, and godless consumerism alike, has been the catalyst of that development. At the same time, however, befitting his discriminating intelligence and spiritual toughness, the pope has warned Catholics repeatedly against assuming that the church's new openness to human autonomy, political and religious self-determination, and ecumenical cooperation has undermined its claim to be "necessary for salvation."

The Church Triumphant of happy memory apparently still has a few arrows in its quiver, and they seem to be aimed at what the pope has called a "creeping relativism."

By R. Scott Appleby, a professor of history and director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.