Father Custodio Ballester serves a parish in the Archdiocese of Barcelona, Spain. / Credit: Courtesy of hazteoir.org
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.”
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Dainelys Soto, Genesis Contreras, and Daniel Soto, who arrived from Venezuela after crossing the U.S. border from Mexico, wait for dinner at a hotel provided by the Annunciation House on Sept. 22, 2022 in El Paso, Texas. / Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
CNA Staff, Sep 9, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Long a champion of immigrants, particularly those fleeing war-torn countries and impoverished regions, Pope Francis last month delivered some of the clearest words in his papacy yet in support of migrants — and in rebuke of those who turn away from them.
“It must be said clearly: There are those who work systematically and with every means possible to repel migrants,” the pope said during a weekly Angelus address. “And this, when done with awareness and responsibility, is a grave sin.”
“In the time of satellites and drones, there are migrant men, women, and children that no one must see,” the pope said. “They hide them. Only God sees them and hears their cry. This is a cruelty of our civilization.”
The pope has regularly spoken out in favor of immigrants. In June he called on the faithful to “unite in prayer for all those who have had to leave their land in search of dignified living conditions.” The Holy Father has called the protection of migrants a “moral imperative.” He has argued that migrants “[must] be received” and dealt with humanely.
Migrants aboard an inflatable vessel in the Mediterranean Sea approach the guided-missile destroyer USS Carney in 2013. Carney provided food and water to the migrants aboard the vessel before coordinating with a nearby merchant vessel to take them to safety. Credit: Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Catholic Church has long been an advocate and protector of immigrants. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) notes on its website that “a rich body of Church teaching, including papal encyclicals, bishops’ statements, and pastoral letters, has consistently reinforced our moral obligation to treat the stranger as we would treat Christ himself.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that prosperous nations “are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin.”
Popes throughout the years, meanwhile, have expressed sentiments on immigration similar to Francis’. Pope Pius XII in 1952, for instance, described the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt as “the archetype of every refugee family.”
The Church, Pius XII said, “has been especially careful to provide all possible spiritual care for pilgrims, aliens, exiles, and migrants of every kind.”
Meanwhile, “devout associations” throughout the centuries have spearheaded “innumerable hospices and hospitals” in part for immigrants, Pius XII said.
Implications and applications of Church teaching
Chad Pecknold, an associate professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America, noted that the catechism “teaches that nations have the right to borders and self-definition, so there is no sense in which Catholic teaching supports the progressive goal of ‘open borders.’”
“There is a ‘duty of care’ which is owed to those fleeing from danger,” he told CNA, “but citizenship is not owed to anyone who can make it across a national border, and illegal entry or asylum cannot be taken as a debt of citizenship.”
Paul Hunker, an immigration attorney who previously served as chief counsel of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Dallas, agreed.
“States have to have responsibility for their own communities, they have to look out for them,” he told CNA. “So immigration can be regulated so as to not harm the common good.”
Still, Hunker noted, Catholic advocates are not wrong in responding to immigration crises — like the ongoing irregular influx through the U.S. southern border — with aid and assistance.
Paul Hunker, an immigration attorney and former chief counsel of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Dallas, says Catholic advocates are not wrong in responding to immigration crises — like the ongoing irregular influx through the U.S. southern border — with aid and assistance. Credit: Photo courtesy of Paul Hunker
Many Catholic organizations offer shelter, food, and legal assistance to men, women, and children who cross into the country illegally; such groups have been overwhelmed in recent years with the crush of arriving migrants at the country’s southern border.
“It’s the responsibility of the federal government to take care of the border,” he said. “When the government has created a crisis at the U.S. border, Catholic dioceses are going to want to help people.”
“I completely support what the Catholic organizations are doing in Mexico and the United States to assist people who are there,” Hunker said. “The people responding are not responsible for these crises.”
Latest crisis and legal challenge
Not everyone feels similarly. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched an investigation of multiple Catholic nonprofits that serve illegal immigrants in the state. Paxton alleges that through the services it provides to migrants, El Paso-based Annunciation House has been facilitating illegal immigration and human trafficking.
A lawyer for the group called the allegations “utter nonsense,” though attorney Jerome Wesevich acknowledged that the nonprofit “serves undocumented persons as an expression of the Catholic faith and Jesus’ command to love one another, no exceptions.”
There are considerable numbers of Church teachings that underscore the need for a charitable response to immigrants. In his 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII argued that man “has the right to freedom of movement and of residence within the confines of his own state,” and further that “when there are just reasons in favor of it, he must be permitted to emigrate to other countries and take up residence there.”
In the encyclical Caritas in Veritate, meanwhile, Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 acknowledged that migration poses “dramatic challenges” for nations but that migrants “cannot be considered as a commodity or a mere workforce.”
“Every migrant is a human person who, as such, possesses fundamental, inalienable rights that must be respected by everyone and in every circumstance,” the late pope wrote.
Edward Feser, a professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College in California, noted that the Church “teaches that nations should be welcoming to immigrants, that they should be sensitive to the hardships that lead them to emigrate, that they ought not to scapegoat them for domestic problems, and so on.”
Catholic teaching does not advocate an ‘open borders’ policy
Yet Catholic teaching does not advocate an “open borders” policy, Feser said. He emphasized that the catechism says countries should accept immigrants “to the extent they are able,” and further that countries “may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions.”
There “is nothing per se in conflict with Catholic teaching when citizens and politicians call on the federal government to enforce its immigration laws,” Feser said. “On the contrary, the catechism backs them up on this.”
In addition, it is “perfectly legitimate,” Feser argued, for governments to consider both economic and cultural concerns when setting immigration policy. It is also “legitimate to deport those who enter a country illegally,” he said.
Still, he acknowledged, a country can issue exceptions to valid immigration laws when the moral situation demands it.
“Of course, there can be individual cases where a nation should forgo its right to deport those who enter it illegally, and cases where the manner in which deportations occur is associated with moral hazards, such as when doing so would break up families or return an immigrant to dangerous conditions back in his home country,” he said.
“Governments should take account of this when formulating and enforcing policy,” he said.
The tension between responding charitably to immigrants and ensuring a secure border was perhaps put most succinctly in 1986 by the late Father Theodore Hesburgh, who served as chairman of the U.S. Select Commission for Immigration and Refugee Policy that was created by the U.S. Congress in the early 1980s.
“It is not enough to sympathize with the aspirations and plight of illegal aliens. We must also consider the consequences of not controlling our borders,” said the late Father Theodore Hesburgh, who served as chairman of the U.S. Select Commission for Immigration and Refugee Policy that was created by the U.S. Congress in the early 1980s. Credit: Photo courtesy of University of Notre Dame
Writing several years after the commission, Hesburgh explained: “It is not enough to sympathize with the aspirations and plight of illegal aliens. We must also consider the consequences of not controlling our borders.”
“What about the aspirations of Americans who must compete for jobs and whose wages and work standards are depressed by the presence of large numbers of illegal aliens?” the legendary late president of the University of Notre Dame reflected. “What about aliens who are victimized by unscrupulous employers and who die in the desert at the hands of smugglers?”
“The nation needn’t wait until we are faced with a choice between immigration chaos and closing the borders,” Hesburgh stated nearly 40 years ago.
Boston, Mass., Dec 15, 2022 / 15:15 pm (CNA).
Bishop Daniel Thomas of Toledo, Ohio, said it is “outrageous” that Toledo’s City Council has proposed an ordinance that would redirect $100,000 in COVID-19 relief funds to… […]
Pope Francis ordains 10 men to the priesthood in St. Peter’s Basilica on May 7, 2017. / Daniel Ibáñez/CNA.
Rome, Italy, Nov 10, 2021 / 14:00 pm (CNA).
New data shows that in 2020, 8.3% of Italy’s diocesan and religious priests were not Italian, … […]
3 Comments
“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).
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”.
“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”.