Ann Arbor, Michigan, Mar 5, 2024 / 10:15 am (CNA).
A Spanish priest is facing up to three years in prison on “hate crime” charges for his heated words about Islam.
Last month, Father Custodio Ballester and two other individuals received a summons from a provincial court in Spain to answer charges of an alleged “hate crime” for criticizing Islamic extremism.
If convicted, Ballester could be forced to pay a fine of more than $1,600 and serve up to three years in prison. The charges date back to 2020, when the Court Prosecutor’s Office in Catalonia accused Ballester of a “hate crime” based on what he wrote in a 2016 article titled “The Impossible Dialogue with Islam.”
Four years later, Ballester is still awaiting trial on criminal charges for criticizing the faith that he says aims to “destroy” all those who refuse to recognize Mohammed as “the last and ultimate prophet of God.”
“I know Muslims who were not offended and understood perfectly well that I was not referring to them but to those who live Islam in a violent, radical way,” he told CNA.
Ballester, 59, serves a parish in Barcelona within the archdiocese led by Bishop Juan José Omella. He has long been known for his pro-life activism.
“In Spain, ‘hate crime’ was invented and is directed at any speech that directly or indirectly refers to discrimination, encouragement of hostility, or inducement to violence,” Ballester told CNA. Previously, he pointed out, the criminal code was directed at whether someone had actually done something.
Asked whether he is prepared to spend three years in prison should he be convicted on the hate crime charges, Ballester said: “It doesn’t seem right to be convicted for something I’ve said, but in Spain anything is possible. But if I am convicted, this will no longer be Spain but Pakistan, where you can be killed for blaspheming the Koran or Mohammed.”
“There is no longer any true right to free speech in Spain,” Ballester said.
Ballester has never been reluctant to speak out, even when it means challenging the perspective of his own bishop. The essay that earned him the hate crime charge was originally a response to a pastoral message from Omella titled “The Necessary Dialogue with Islam.”
In his controversial response, Ballester wrote: “This new reactivation of Christian-Muslim dialogue, paralyzed by the alleged ‘imprudences’ on the part of the late Pope Benedict XVI, is very far from becoming a reality. Islam does not allow dialogue. For Islam, either you believe, or you are an infidel who must be subdued one way or another.”
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
“He has long been known for his pro-life activism”. Reason for suspicion? Yes. There’s also networking between a nation’s judiciary and progressive clergy considering their mutual opposition to outspoken prolife clergy. Fr Ballester is being unjustly persecuted for speaking the plain truth about Islam. That can never be a moral nor a juridical offense. Pope Francis should intervene. Though for the benefit of progressives, not to worry. He predictably won’t.
Is the Spanish court trapped in an asymmetrical approach to two very different religions? As Fr. Ballester clearly sees, do Christianity (and the West) and Islam co-exist on two different planes altogether? Some background, something about symmetry, something about dialogue, and a Question…
That is, the CHRISTIAN faith (in Christ/LOGOS) sees all of creation as reasonable, even while the divine reason transcends human comprehension. The different religion of ISLAM is not incarnational (transcendent and immanent, both) and, instead, regards Allah as totally transcendent and inscrutable, and therefor totally arbitrary and fatalistic by any human standard. (The Mu’tazilite attempt to better interpret the Qu’ran was finally stifled in the 9th Century—Muslim year 225 after the Hijira—partly because this effort affirmed the reality of good and evil (!) as not fully congruent with the Qu’ran—which in Islam is the “dictated” and very essence of the Divinity. No room for any autonomy in competition with the autonomy of Allah: blasphemy.)
The SYMMETRICAL COMPARISON between Christianity and Islam is not between the two scriptures, but rather the categorical difference between “the Word made flesh” (Jn 1:14) and “the word made Book” (the Muslim expression).
The further difference between the Catholic Church and Islam is that the former is a “hierarchical communion” (the apostolic succession) while the latter self-identifies as a “congregational theocracy” which, unfortunately (and unlike the Magisterium) has no formal way to exclude terrorist zealots quoting random lines of the Qur’an. Therefore, instead of coherence, sequential “abrogation” (the Muslim term): “If we abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten, we will replace it with a better one or one similar. Did you not know that God has power over all things?” (Q 2:106).
DIALOGUE: With matter-of-fact insight into such existential considerations, POPE BENEDICT XVI penned the following with regard to interreligious DIALOGUE:
“Equality, which is a presupposition of interreligious dialogue, refers to the equal personal dignity of the parties in dialogue, not to doctrinal content, nor even less to the position of Jesus Christ—who is God himself made man—in relation to the founders of the other religions” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus [The Lord Jesus], 2000, n. 22).
AND, “[a] partisan image of God, which identifies the absoluteness of God with one’s own community or its interests, thereby elevating something empirical and relative to a state of absoluteness, dissolves law and morality [!] . . . We see this in the terrorists’ ideology of martyrdom, which of course in individual cases may also be the expression of despair at the lawlessness of the world. Sects in the Western world ALSO [caps added] provide examples of irrationality and a perversion of religion that show how dangerous religion becomes when it loses its orientation” (Pope Benedict XVI, “Values in a Time of Upheaval,” Ignatius Press, 2005, p. 109).
QUESTION: In the West, does the legitimate “hate crime” concern (and airbrush agenda?) reflect a lack of education in the Western elite? And, even an unwillingness to maintain curiosity about crucial distinctions? How might THE SPANISH COURT align itself with either of two bipolar remarks by two very different Muslims spokespersons?
FIRST, the Muslim el Akkad (1956): “It all comes down to knowing whether one should hold strictly to the fundamental religious values which were those of Abraham and Moses, on pain of falling into blasphemy—as the Muslims believe; or whether God has called men to approach him more closely, revealing to them little by little their fundamental condition as sinful men, and the forgiveness that transforms them and prepares them for the beatific vision—as Christian dogma teaches” (cited in Jean Guitton, “The Great Heresies and Church Councils,” 1965, p. 117).
OR, SECOND, “By means of your democracy we will invade you, by means of our religion we shall dominate you” (recalled by the archbishop of the Turkish Diocese of Smyrna; cited in Oriana Fallaci, “The Rage and the Pride,” New York: Rizzoli, 2001, p. 98).
Radical secularism, quo vadis?
Excellent analysis Peter Beaulieu! If your books were cheaper I’d buy some but that is the problem of writing for an academic audience. I once knew a professor specializing in French colonial history who knew a lot about Islam. He was of the opinion that with moslems coexistence was the most you could hope for. If we are vulnerable we can’t even hope for that. After 9/11 we had much criticism of radical Islam but as domestic terrorism began to target journalists and authors here and in Europe this began to fade until we began to hear about “islamophobia” ad nauseum. Secular media know that christians are overwhemingly harmless so we become “hate criminals”.