Tag: conscience

The Mute Martyrs: Spain, Truth, and the Triumph of Conscience

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By the Archbishop of Selsey

When the Provincial Court of Málaga acquitted two Catholic priests and a journalist accused of “hate speech” for criticising radical Islam, it did more than correct a miscarriage of justice. It restored, if only momentarily, a flicker of sanity to a Europe increasingly afraid of its own Christian conscience.

The Crime of Speaking Clearly
Fr Custodio Ballester and Fr Jesús Calvo were not zealots of intolerance, but witnesses to truth. Their supposed crime was to say aloud what many silently know: that ideologies rooted in coercion and violence cannot be reconciled with divine charity or human freedom.¹ For this they were denounced by the Association of Muslims Against Islamophobia and dragged through the courts for nearly a decade.

The priests were accused of violating Article 510 of the Spanish Penal Code, which criminalises the incitement of hatred.² Yet their statements, though forthright, did not call for violence or discrimination; they called for repentance and discernment. To confuse the two is to make law itself a servant of error.

In his article The Impossible Dialogue with Islam, Ballester did not vilify Muslims; he questioned the ideology that inspires persecution of Christians in the Middle East and suppression of conscience in Europe.³ For this, he was first condemned by a lower court and only later vindicated by a higher one. How telling that in modern Spain, the plea for reasoned dialogue is branded “hate,” while genuine intolerance parades as virtue.

The Dictatorship of Relativism
The court’s ruling on 20 October 2025 rightly concluded that “not even intolerant or offensive speech loses protection if it does not promote hatred or violence.”⁴ This principle—so obvious in the light of natural law—has become controversial in a Europe that prizes sensitivity above truth. The acquittal is therefore not only legal but moral: it re-affirms the right to speak the truth even when the world calls it unkind.

We are witnessing what Pope Benedict XVI called a “dictatorship of relativism”⁵—an order where every conviction must apologise for existing, and every dogma must disguise itself as dialogue. Such relativism disarms the Church, replacing her bold confession with timid sentiment. When the priest is forbidden to name evil, society forgets how to distinguish it.

Freedom Ordered to Truth
True freedom of speech is not the liberty to wound, but the liberty to warn. Christian charity requires clarity; silence in the face of error is not compassion but complicity. The Málaga court, perhaps unwittingly, has upheld a profoundly Catholic truth: that freedom detached from truth is licence, but freedom exercised for truth is holiness.

Fr Ballester, speaking outside the courthouse, declared: “If proclaiming the Gospel in public becomes illegal, Spain will cease to be the land of martyrs and become the land of the mute.”⁶ His words recall the courage of St Vincent Ferrer and St John of Ávila, who also faced powers that feared the light of truth. The question before modern Europe is the same: shall we suffer to speak, or consent to be silent?

A Call to Christian Witness
The outcome in Málaga should strengthen every Christian who dares to defend faith and reason in public life. It proves that truth can still be spoken, even when costly. Yet the length and bitterness of the trial remind us that the battle is not legal but spiritual. What is on trial in our age is not merely expression—it is the Word Himself, “made flesh and dwelling among us.”⁷

When laws of “tolerance” are turned against the Gospel, Christians must respond not with resentment, but with steadfastness. Our answer must be witness. For Christ has told us: “The truth shall make you free.”⁸ But He did not say it would make us safe.

Nuntiatoria article for background

Footnotes
¹ “Freedom of speech and religion in play as Spanish priest prosecuted for denouncing radical Islam,” Catholic World Report, 3 Oct 2025.
² Código Penal de España, art. 510 (Incitación al odio).
³ Fr Custodio Ballester, El diálogo imposible con el Islam, 2017.
⁴ “Spanish court acquits priests and journalist accused of hate crime for criticising radical Islam,” Catholic Herald, 20 Oct 2025.
⁵ Pope Benedict XVI, Homily at the Pro Eligendo Pontifice Mass, 18 April 2005.
⁶ Abogados Cristianos press statement, Málaga, 20 Oct 2025.
⁷ John 1:14.
⁸ John 8:32.

The Westminster Declaration: Conscience or Compromise?

Published on by TheOldRomanLeave a comment

By the Archbishop of Selsey

The new Westminster Declaration has brought before us once again the perennial question of how Christians must witness to truth in a society increasingly hostile to the divine law. Conscience, rightly formed, is not a private instinct but the echo of God’s law written upon the heart. The Declaration rightly identifies threats to life, marriage, education, and freedom, but these concerns must be situated within the broader framework of Catholic doctrine, lest our testimony to Christ be reduced to mere cultural conservatism.

There is a danger, in our present moment, of multiplying words where a few burning words of witness would suffice. The first Westminster Declaration had the ring of prophecy: it spoke of conscience and truth, life and marriage, with the clarity of martyrs. The new Declaration, though well-intentioned, reads more like a petition to Parliament than a trumpet blast to the nation. By citing statutes, rulings, and commissions, it risks grounding Christian witness in the shifting sands of policy rather than the rock of divine law. Yet one cannot deny that the issues of education, gender, and technology now cry out for attention. The challenge is whether Christians will stand as witnesses, or merely as lobbyists.

The Church has always taught that man’s first and fundamental right is the right to know, love, and serve God. Pope Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei (1885), made clear that the foundation of civil society rests upon the recognition of God as supreme Lawgiver and Judge, and that rulers are bound to govern according to His eternal law.¹ Likewise, Pius XI in Quas Primas (1925) reminded the world that true peace and justice cannot be secured except under the Kingship of Christ.² These encyclicals, and others like Libertas Praestantissimum (1888), affirm that liberty has meaning only when ordered to truth and virtue.³ Freedom of conscience cannot mean license to error; rather, it means freedom from coercion in obeying the law of God.

It is precisely here that we must contrast the perennial doctrine with the ambiguities introduced by Dignitatis Humanae (1965). While the Council insisted that it “leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine” (§1), it nevertheless advanced the novel claim that every person has a natural right not to be restrained from publicly professing even erroneous religious belief (§2). This formulation, vague and unqualified, was a rupture with the consistent teaching of the popes from Gregory XVI (Mirari Vos, 1832) to Pius XII, who maintained that although error may at times be tolerated for the sake of public peace, it can never be clothed with a natural right.⁴

This ambiguity has borne bitter fruit. What was once prudential toleration has been transformed into a supposed liberty to promote error, even in public institutions. In the decades since Vatican II, secular governments, often citing “religious liberty” in conciliar language, have come to treat the true religion and false religions as juridically equal. Worse still, they have turned this principle inward, using it to deny Christians the very right to profess truth, because truth is redefined as one “opinion” among many. The irony is stark: in the name of religious liberty, Christians are increasingly coerced into silence, while ideologies opposed to the natural law are granted legal protection and cultural dominance.

Contemporary Catholic critics foresaw this danger. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre argued that Dignitatis Humanae “turns its back on the doctrine of Gregory XVI and Pius IX,” and that by equating liberty with the right to profess error, it would produce “apostasy in practice.”⁵ Romano Amerio, in Iota Unum, noted that Vatican II’s declaration “changes the concept of tolerance into a right of error, which is absurd and destructive of truth itself.”⁶ Michael Davies, writing in Religious Liberty and the Second Vatican Council, warned that the document’s ambiguity was “the Trojan horse through which liberalism would capture the Church.”⁷

The martyrs of England bore witness to a different vision. They resisted unjust laws not with elaborate petitions to Parliament, but with the silent eloquence of their sacrifice. St Thomas More affirmed before his execution that he died “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” In this he exemplified the Catholic understanding of religious liberty: obedience to lawful authority, but never at the expense of divine law. Their blood confirms the truth that rights are not created by the State, nor grounded in shifting social compacts, but flow from the sovereignty of Christ the King.

The Westminster Declaration of 2025 addresses many urgent matters: gender ideology, parental rights in education, and the moral challenges of artificial intelligence. Yet we must be clear that our defence of life, marriage, and conscience is not simply a matter of civic freedom or cultural heritage. It is rooted in the sovereignty of Christ the King, the unchanging law of God, and the mission of the Church to sanctify the world. To forget this is to reduce Christian witness to political advocacy.

As Pius XII once warned, “A people that separates itself from God becomes enslaved to error and passion.”⁸ Our task is not only to preserve the remnants of Christian conscience in law, but to proclaim anew the social Kingship of Christ, upon which the true rights and dignity of man depend. Only then will any declaration bearing the name of Westminster avoid becoming a political manifesto, and instead recover the prophetic power of a Christian witness rooted in the Cross.

For a more indepth presentation visit Nuntiatoria.org

  1. Pius XII, Address to the International Union of Catholic Women’s Leagues (29 September 1957).
  2. Leo XIII, Immortale Dei (1 November 1885), §§3–6.
  3. Pius XI, Quas Primas (11 December 1925), §§18–19.
  4. Leo XIII, Libertas Praestantissimum (20 June 1888), §§16–17.
  5. Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos (1832); Pius IX, Quanta Cura (1864); Pius XII, Allocution Ci Riesce to the Roman Forum (1953).
  6. Marcel Lefebvre, Open Letter to Confused Catholics (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1986), pp. 39–41.
  7. Romano Amerio, Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century (Kansas City: Sarto House, 1996), §210.
  8. Michael Davies, Religious Liberty and the Second Vatican Council (TAN Books, 1992), pp. 117–119.