The Constitutional Court has issued a ruling that closes the door to many religious congregations concerned to prohibit or limit the entry of women into their ranks. The second chamber of the court ruled in favor of a woman who had been asking for almost five years to be part of the royal and venerable pontifical association of slavery of Santísimo Cristo de La Laguna, in the Canary Islands, on the understanding that this congregation holds a position of real domination over a specific sect and which cannot discriminate against women.
The sentence, as judicial sources confirmed to elDiario.es, was pronounced with four votes for and two against by two magistrates who will vote against.
The woman who filed a complaint before the Constitutional Court was fighting to join this association which, as she explains on her website, “has been part of the history of the Church and the city of San Cristóbal de La since more than three centuries. “Lagoon”. As Canarias Now explains, since 2018, several Catholics have filed complaints against this slavery, one of the most important in the Canary Islands, for its veto on women.
A court ruled in favor of this woman in 2020 and granted the application in its entirety, a decision which was later upheld by the Provincial Court. Among other arguments, the judges of the Canary Islands pointed out that even the Bishopric of Tenerife had asked Slavery to allow the entry of women into its ranks, and they understood that the term “gentleman” which appeared in the statutes of the The association did not exclude, even less literally, women from this slavery. “No party excludes women as candidates for membership other than the word ‘gentlemen,’” the Court said.
The Supreme Court reversed the situation and ruled in favor of slavery. The judges of the Civil Chamber explained that the right of association also included the right of the religious congregation itself to “create its own organization” and that it did not hold what is called a “dominant or exclusive position » since, they declared in its judgment, “its activities and objectives are strictly and exclusively religious” and “therefore removed from any economic, professional or work connotation”.
This religious association, concluded the Supreme Court, does not hold any monopoly on worship in the Canary Islands and is not obliged to admit women, reasoned the Supreme Court, citing several examples: when in 2001, it obliged a fishing community of Valencia to accept women as an economic activity, or when in 2008 it ruled in the opposite direction in the case of a religious celebration in Irun which relegated women to the background.
The second chamber of the Constitutional Court, as this newspaper learned, concluded that if a religious association or congregation occupies a dominant position which, in practice, obliges a believer to be in its ranks to develop his beliefs, it cannot cannot set limits. which, as in this case, prevent women’s access. It therefore does not concern all religious congregations but only those which have this monopoly on a specific area of worship.
In the case of this congregation in the Canary Islands, the Constitutional Court understood, it effectively occupied this dominant position and its statutes cannot establish this prohibition. The fact that the appeal was successful, indicate these same sources, affects around thirty women in total.
