European Court of Human Rights Backs Catholic Critic

The European Court of Human Rights ruled this week that a French historian fined for calling the Catholic Church anti-Semitic and partly responsible for the Holocaust had been deprived of his right to free speech.

The court overturned a French court’s 1998 ruling that Paul Giniewski had defamed the Church by saying that it harboured a deep-rooted anti-Semitism that had “readied the ground where the idea and realisation of Auschwitz sprouted”. He was originally convicted of defamation after a group run by a former far-right politician sued him for publishing what it said were “racially defamatory statements against the Christian community”.

The Strasbourg-based European court, the final appeals body in European rights cases, said Mr Giniewski himself admitted his attack might shock or offend some people. “The Court reiterated that such views did not in themselves preclude the enjoyment of freedom of expression,” it said.

Mr Giniewski made the comments in a newspaper article analysing “The Splendour of Truth”, a 1993 encyclical by the former pope, discussing the foundations of Christian morality. He said many Christians thought a Church doctrine that Christianity had replaced Judaism’s covenant with God had led to anti-Semitism in Church scriptures and, indirectly, to Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz. “In 1993, they don’t take any notice of this at the Holy See,” he wrote in the Quotidien de Paris newspaper. “To proclaim the splendour of truth, they remain in the obscurity of error.”

The court noted that the previous pope had apologised for Christian anti-Semitism and injustices inflicted against Jews and he and successor Ratzinger had both discussed this issue publicly.