Advertise in this spot on CatholicCulture.org. View all ads.

Catholic World News News Feature

Blasphemy free for all October 26, 2001

The Supreme Court in Ireland has ruled that it cannot decide what constitutes the crime of blasphemous libel. The decision effectively suspends enforcement of Irish laws against the offense of blasphemy, although that offense is still prohibited by the country's Constitution.

The case stems from a cartoon which appeared in Ireland’s largest Sunday newspaper, The Sunday Independent, in the aftermath of the 1995 referendum that introduced divorce into Ireland. The cartoon featured a plump and comic caricature of a priest, holding a host in his right hand and a chalice in his left hand. He appears to be offering the host to three prominent politicians, who are turning away and waving goodbye. There is a caption which reads: "Hello progress--Bye-bye Father?"

John Corway, a carpenter from Dublin, made the decision to institute proceedings against the paper, under the provisions of the 1961 Defamation Act, which explicitly deals with the crime of blasphemous libel. He maintained that the cartoon and caption appeared calculated to insult the feelings and religious convictions of readers, by treating the sacrament of the Eucharist and its administration as objects of scorn and derision.

The High court rejected his application, so he appealed to the Supreme Court. However the Supreme Court decided that while the crime of blasphemy does exist under Irish law, no statutory definition of the offense exists either in legislation or in the Constitution. Hence the court argued: "In this state of the law, and in the absence of any legislative definition of the constitutional offence of blasphemy, it is impossible to say of what the offense of blasphemy consists."

The outcome received immediate criticism, with the Irish Catholic newspaper noting that the judgment was reminiscent of an earlier decision, in 1995, in which the court had said it could not decide what the "natural law" was--a decision which thoroughly vitiated all references to the authority of natural law. Were the same logic applied to other areas of the law, the Irish Catholic reasoned, the Supreme Court would find itself with very little to do.

Another social commentator, Joe McCarroll, remarked on the irony of their court's decision in contrast to the justices' recent record of "creative" judgments in other fields. As he put it:

Creating a new right to abortion--no problem. Creating a legal rationalization for starving an irreversibly brain-damaged woman to death--no problem. But define blasphemy--impossible!

NOT "HATE CRIME" LEGISLATION?

The 22-page judgment delivered by the court revealed surprising inadequacies and internal incoherence. It begins with a summary of the common-law cases, both in Britain and in Ireland, that have developed the jurisprudence on blasphemy over the years. The recent developments have been such that, in order to qualify as blasphemy, an attack on the fundamentals of Christianity would have to be couched in scurrilous language. And while courts have gradually narrowed the scope of what might be considered blasphemous, they have simultaneously widened the range of religious beliefs that might be protected from such attacks. At first blasphemy laws were applicable only to attacks on the established church; more recently they were applied to faith in Christianity as a whole; and in 1979 the British house of Lords extended the law there to include the religious beliefs and sensibilities of non-Christians. At that time Lord Scarman defended the existence of laws banning blasphemy, saying:

In an increasingly plural society such as that of modern Britain it is necessary not only to respect the differing religious beliefs, feelings, and practices of all but also to protect them from scurrility, vilification, ridicule, and contempt ... I will not lend my voice to a view of the law relating to blasphemous libel which would render it a dead letter, or diminish its efficacy to protect religious feelings from outrage and insult.

However, the Supreme Court in Ireland decided to discount that judgment, and the prior history of case law on the topic, as it envisaged a problem with adapting those precedents to "the circumstances of a modern State." This left a constitutional offense-- mentioned in two separate acts of legislation--without any statutory definition, so the court decided that it was impossible to say what the offense of blasphemous libel is.

Oddly enough, the court's decision actually cites a definition of blasphemy, taken from Murdoch's Dictionary of Irish Law (published in 1988), as "the crime which consists of indecent and offensive attacks on Christianity, or the scriptures, or sacred persons or objects calculated to outrage the feelings of the community." The decision then takes no further notice of that definition. And although the justices report that they do not know what blasphemy is, they nevertheless manage to decide: "the Court, having studied the cartoon,... is convinced that no insult to the Blessed Sacrament was intended and that no jury could reasonably conclude that such insult existed or was intended to exist."

The judgment also includes an argument about equality before the law. The court acknowledges that Christianity is protected from insult, and Judaism appears to be protected; but, the decision asks, what about Islam or Hinduism or other religions? The justices then decide that in order to uphold equality, they cannot protect one person’s religion and not another’s, so they decide to remove protection even from the few that are protected.

There is no doubt that blasphemy law is a difficult area of the law. But it is not beyond human ingenuity to tease out the necessary distinctions. One commentator, Father Brendan Purcell, a philosophy lecturer at University College Dublin, asked why the law cannot protect the most deeply held beliefs of all believers in a way at least equivalent to the way that racial and other minorities are protected from hate crimes. "Is it because the ruling establishment in this republic is too profoundly tribal, too obsessed with its own secularist sectarianism, to even glimpse what a genuine democracy requires?" he asked. He concluded that the Supreme Court decision "is indicative of its, and perhaps the ruling elite's, intolerance of Catholic belief at its most sacred core."

Another chapter closes in the ongoing Kulturkampf in Ireland.

- Paraic Maher