Started before the Second Vatican Council opened and completed and published shortly before it closed, Peter and Caesar is more radical than the Council was or could be. In that respect it seems to weigh in on the liberal side. But it seems to weigh in on the ecclesiastical “conservative” side in its analysis of the work of John Courtney Murray, the once-silenced father of the Council’s Declaration of Religion Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae), and its fears that the much-needed clear recognition by the Church of the importance of religious freedom may easily be influenced so deeply by the rationalistic individualism that the redemptive mission of the Church is finally confined to the sphere of private, personal morality.
