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The Catholic Church was within its rights not to renew the teaching contract of a Spanish married priest, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.
In a nine to eight vote decision, the court ruled the decision not to renew Jose Antonio Fernandez Martínez’s contract “was legitimate and proportionate”.
Fernandez Martínez was ordained in 1961 and applied for a dispensation from celibacy 23 years later.
He did not receive a response and married a year later, going on to teach Catholic religion in a high school in the Murcia region.
In 1997, the local bishop declined to renew his contract.
The previous year, the Murcia newspaper La Verdad published an article about the “Movement for Optional Celibacy” of priests (MOCEOP) of which Fernandez Martínez was an active member.
The article included comments from several people disagreeing with the Church’s position on abortion, divorce, sexuality and contraception.
It was illustrated by a picture of Fernandez Martínez with his family.
The following year, he was granted dispensation from his clerical duties, but was told that his contract would not be renewed unless a bishop agreed.
After several hearings in Spanish courts, the case was appealed to the ECHR.
The ECHR held it is not unreasonable for the Church to expect particular loyalty of religious education teachers, since they could be regarded as its representatives.
When one of the Church’s teachers challenges its teaching, it raises a credibility problem, the ruling noted.
Fernandez Martínez had been voluntarily part of a circle of people bound by a duty of loyalty to the Church, it added.
Being seen as part of a movement campaigning against that teaching clearly ran counter to that duty, the ruling continued.
In a dissenting opinion, Russian Judge Dmitry Dedov said Europe’s human rights convention “does not entitle religious organisations, even in the name of autonomy, to persecute their members for exercising their fundamental human rights”.
He said the discipline of priestly celibacy “contradicts the idea of fundamental rights and freedoms”.
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