The sixteen official documents, constitutions, decrees, and declarations, of the Second Vatican Council are now available from Liturgical Press in the most popular and widely used inclusive-language edition translated by Irish Dominican Austin Flannery. As the worldwide Church continues to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Council (1962-65), there is a great need in college classrooms and parish faith formation groups (as well as for individuals) to again have access to these documents in contemporary English. As Flannery wrote in his introduction to the 1996 edition, 'The translation of the texts of the Vatican documents in the present volume differs from that in the previous publication in two respects. It has been very considerably revised and, in place, corrected. It is also, to a very large extent, in inclusive language. I say 'to a very large extent,' because we have used inclusive language in passages about men and women but not, however, in passages about God, except where the use of the masculine pronoun was easily avoidable.'
Dignitatis humanae (Of the Dignity of the Human Person) is the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom. In the context of the Council's stated intention 'to develop the doctrine of recent popes on the inviolable rights of the human person and the constitutional order of society', Dignitatis humanae spells out the Church's support for the protection of religious liberty. More controversially, it set the ground rules by which the Church would relate to secular states, both pluralistic ones like the U.S., and officially Catholic nations like Malta and Costa Rica.
