A Seventh-day Baptist woman had claimed the display of the statue violated her freedom of religion. Catholics announce a national protest.
by Massimo Introvigne
On February 3, the reasons for a decision of the Constitutional Court of Colombia dated December 1, 2023 on a case of separation of church and state were published. “Ana Josefina Lastra Colobon v. Dirección de Tránsito y Transporte de Floridablanca (Santander)” was a difficult case opposing two different notions of freedom of religion or belief.
The Virgin of Carmel for Catholics is the patron of bus and train drivers. In Colombia, a predominantly Catholic country, the secular Day of Bus and Train Drivers was made to coincide with the religious feast of Our Lady of Carmel. From several decades, in the city of Floridablanca, in the department of Santander, the Direction of Transit and Transportation had celebrated a Mass on that day, to which assistance by the personnel was not mandatory. Twenty-five years ago, several employees raised money to buy a statue of the Virgin of Carmel, which remained their property but was placed in a corner of the offices of the Direction of Transit and Transportation.
In 2020, the Direction hired as an employee Ana Josefina Lastra Colobon. She is a Seventh-day Baptist, regarding as holy day Saturday rather than Sunday, and asked to be exempted from work on Saturday, when the offices of the Direction stay open. Her request was granted.
In 2022, she asked the Direction to stop inviting the employees to a Mass for the Virgin of Carmel day and remove the statue. She claimed that as an Evangelical she could not tolerate the presence of the statue as being against the Bible, blasphemous, and idolatrous. The Direction refused and she sued.
On January 26, 2023, the Third Section of the Court of Floridablanca ruled against Lastra, concluding that she was not compelled to attend the Mass nor to pay her respects to the statue. She appealed and on March 6, 2023, the Circuit Court of Bucaramanga ordered the Direction to stop inviting the employees to the Mass and to include the religious ceremony in the official program of its social activities. However, the Circuit Court regarded the placement of the statue in the offices as legitimate, as it was an initiative of the employees rather than of the Direction and the collocation was not ostentatious.
Lastra filed a further recourse to the Constitutional Court, which confirmed the appeal ruling about the Mass but also ordered the removal of the statue, without prejudice to the possibility for the Direction or the employees to place it in an area where it would not be visible to the general public visiting the offices.
The Court noted that all the employees except Lastra wanted the statue to stay, yet decided that her freedom of religion should be protected. The argument by the Direction that the statue was a “cultural” and not only a religious symbol was not accepted.
Comments by netizens were mostly negative and critical of a decision that made the feelings of one single employee prevail on the unanimous opinion of all the others. Several Catholic organizations announced a national march of protest on February 9 in Floridablanca.
In the well-known case “Lautsi v. Italy” of 2011, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) came to the opposite conclusion in a similar case. Only one parent against all the others wanted crucifixes removed from a public school’s classrooms. The ECHR ruled that the crucifix is a “passive symbol,” does not serve a purpose of indoctrination, and is part of Italy’s cultural traditions, thus allowing it to stay.