RNS: Court puts limits on German church’s ability to fire workers

Posted by Kendall Harmon

The European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday (Sept. 23) that a church organist's employment rights were ignored when he was fired by a Catholic church for remarrying outside the church.

The court said German churches have some latitude in firing staff who violate the faith's moral tenets, but said it must be weighed against the prominence of the job and the worker's own rights.

The case involved Bernhard Schuth, the longtime organist at St. Lambert parish in Essent, who separated from his wife in 1994 and started a relationship with another woman in 1995.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • * International News & Commentary • Europe • Germany

7 Comments
Posted September 27, 2010 at 12:33 pm [Printer Friendly] [Print w/ comments]



1. Ephraim Radner wrote:

Here we go…  we had better be ready for this kind of thing.

September 27, 1:51 pm | [comment link]
2. deaconmark wrote:

Who is “we?”

September 27, 2:30 pm | [comment link]
3. Archer_of_the_Forest wrote:

Well, the Catholic church in Germany gets tax money via forced tithing. If you take Caesar’s coin, you have to dance to Caesar’s tune.

September 27, 3:08 pm | [comment link]
4. phil swain wrote:

#3, apparently the German courts ruled in favor of the Church.  It was the EU court of Human Rights that ruled against the Church.

I don’t think our American courts will see a significant distinction between taking tax money and a perferred tax status when it becomes politically expedient for the courts to enforce their ideological agenda.

September 27, 5:01 pm | [comment link]
5. robroy wrote:

Saw this which is relevant to #4:

‘Pulpit Freedom Sunday’: Pastors Defy IRS by Talking Politics

Why is it that courts don’t intervene in clear contract violations so as to avoid the “wilderness”, but they think that the IRS can distinguish religious versus political speech in the pulpit (say with regards to the issue of abortion)?

September 27, 10:25 pm | [comment link]
6. Ephraim Radner wrote:

“We”:  any Christian church in a country driven by a legal ideology of sexual rights and sexually-related non-discrimination.  Lawsuits on these kinds of matters have already happened in the US, and “we” can assume that the courts will gradually be less vigorous in protecting churches from their reach.  If, for instance, churches do not recognize the civil “marriages” of gay couples, and seek to bar such persons from employment on that basis, I can easily imagine lawsuits, and the churches losing.  This may be a European issue now;  it will soon be an American one.

September 28, 3:19 pm | [comment link]
7. Sarah wrote:

I agree that this is precisely what the Integrity Episcopal activists long for—they, along with the other revisionist activists in the US, are working for it as hard as they can.

September 29, 8:21 am | [comment link]
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