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.