By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture - Rather I wish to point out that the Vatican II Declaration upholds religious liberty with respect to civil government, that is, in what we now refer to as “the State”. But religious liberty has very different implications in the context of other kinds of “societies”, such as the society of the Church or of a school or of the family itself. The most serious abuses of religious liberty properly understood seem to me currently to occur not only in the State but in the Church, the former through what we might call positive overreach, the latter through negative underreach.