Over the last several years, Catholics have carefully prepared and presented arguments in defense of religious liberty, but they have convinced few people. It may be that those who are trying to reduce the scope of religious liberty are being reprehensibly stubborn in their refusal to listen and respond, but it strikes me that no matter how comprehensive Catholic arguments may seem, there is a facet of the Church’s understanding of religious liberty that has been underdeveloped if not ignored, even by the USCCB.

They gloss over the Church’s complex historical relationship with religious liberty, and the fact that the Church has persecuted other faiths is undoubtedly the elephant in the room for many who scoff at the Church’s arguments. However, far from being proof of hypocrisy (one possible reason so many have hesitated to bring it up), a more complete understanding of our own history may provide us with insights that our adversaries will feel more compelled to consider.

The USCCB statement that kicked off the first Fortnight for Freedom, Our First, Most Cherished Liberty, paints Catholics generally as victims of religious persecution and American Catholics in particular as courageous pioneers and defenders of freedom of religion and of conscience. They invoke Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher as martyrs and heroes of conscience, and they praise colonial Maryland’s Act of Toleration and Cardinal Gibbon’s defense of religious liberty in Rome in 1887 as notable Catholic endorsements of civilly-enacted religious tolerance. They make no reference to religious persecutions perpetrated in the name of Catholicism, to Inquisitions or confessional states, or to figures like St. Augustine who make compelling cases for religious coercion in some circumstances.

It may seem counter-intuitive to say that we must deal with Thomas More’s prosecution of heretics when we discuss his eventual martyrdom, but doing so allows us to set up the Church’s relationship to religious liberty as a conversion story, and that conversion story—even if it is institutional rather than personal—is more attention-grabbing and compelling than the sunny and one-sided narrative the USCCB presents.

Catholicism has been both persecuted and persecutor, victim of the violators of conscience and violator of conscience itself, and the Church’s embrace of religious liberty must be understood and presented in light of its real history. For the Catholic Church today, religious liberty is neither the idealistic dream of a persecuted Church nor the disingenuous concession of an authoritarian institution to a society that finds religious coercion distasteful. It is the principled conclusion of a Church that has been on both sides of religious persecution.

The Church’s history gives us the opportunity to understand why well-meaning regimes might be tempted to try to abrogate the consciences of people of good will in order to eradicate a socially poisonous ideology or pathology, be it Donatism, Protestantism, racism, or homophobia. The Church’s history also gives us the opportunity to understand why these attempts so often fail. Attempts at coercion—at an end run around the difficulties of open debate—never fully eradicate the opposition, and, moreover, deepen the conviction and resolve of those whose perspectives are being repressed as well as the pity they can evoke from their neighbors.

Our opponents might not be much more receptive to being compared to Torquemada or Mary Tudor than they are to being compared (as many conservative writers have done) to Hitler, Stalin, or Robespierre. But spending more energy sympathizing with their motives and really understanding why they want to restrict religious liberty should help us to engage them more creatively, charitably, and fruitfully.