Vatican
City, 16 January 2013
(VIS) - Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, secretary for the Holy See's
Relations with States, was interviewed by Vatican Radio on the
decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in several cases
relating to freedom of conscience and religion.
"On
15 January, the European Court of Human Rights published its
judgements on four cases relating to the freedom of conscience and
religion of employees in the United Kingdom. Two of these cases
concern employees’ freedom to wear a small cross around their neck
in the workplace, while the other two concern the freedom to object
in conscience to the celebration of a civil union between persons of
the same sex and to conjugal counselling for couples of the same
sex."
Some
time ago, the Holy See’s Mission to the Council of Europe published
a Note on the Church’s freedom and institutional autonomy. The
archbishop explained the context of the Note as "the issue of
the Church’s freedom in her relations with civil authorities,"
which "is at present being examined by the European Court of
Human Rights in two cases involving the Orthodox Church of Romania
and the Catholic Church. These are the Sindacatul 'Pastorul cel Bun'
v. Romania and Fernandez Martinez v. Spain cases. On this occasion,
the Permanent Representation of the Holy See to the Council of Europe
drew up a synthetic note explaining the Magisterium [official Church
teaching] on the freedom and institutional autonomy of the Catholic
Church."
"In
these cases," the archbishop said, "the European Court must
decide whether the civil power respected the European Convention on
Human Rights in refusing to recognize a trade union of priests [in
the Romanian case] and in refusing to appoint a teacher of religion
who publicly professes positions contrary to the teaching of the
Church [in the Spanish case]. In both cases, the rights to freedom of
association and freedom of expression were invoked in order to
constrain religious communities to act in a manner contrary to their
canonical status and the Magisterium. Thus, these cases call into
question the Church’s freedom to function according to her own
rules and not to be subject to civil rules other than those necessary
to ensure that the common good and just public order are respected.
The Church has always had to defend herself in order to preserve her
autonomy with regard to the civil power and ideologies. Today, an
important issue in Western countries is to determine how the dominant
culture, strongly marked by materialist individualism and relativism,
can understand and respect the nature of the Church, which is a
community founded on faith and reason."
Faced
with this situation, "the Church is aware of the difficulty of
determining the relations between the civil authorities and the
different religious communities in a pluralist society with regard to
the requirements of social cohesion and the common good. In this
context, the Holy See draws attention to the necessity of maintaining
religious freedom in its collective and social dimension. This
dimension corresponds to the essentially social nature both of the
person and of the religious fact in general. The Church does not ask
that religious communities be lawless zones but that they be
recognized as spaces for freedom, by virtue of the right to religious
freedom, while respecting just public order. This teaching is not
reserved to the Catholic Church; the criteria derived from it are
founded in justice and are therefore of general application."
"Furthermore,
the juridical principle of the institutional autonomy of religious
communities is widely recognized by States that respect religious
freedom, as well as by international law. The European Court of Human
Rights itself has regularly stated this principle in several
important judgements. Other institutions have also affirmed this
principle. This is notably the case with the OSCE [Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe] and also with the United Nations
Committee for Human Rights in, respectively, the 'Final Document' of
the Vienna Conference of 19 January 1989 and 'General Observation no.
22 on the Right to Freedom of Thought, Conscience and Religion' of 30
July 1993. It is nevertheless useful to recall and defend this
principle of the autonomy of the Church and the civil power"
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