Prepare for persecution, Catholics warned after conviction for prayer

Catholics must increasingly prepare themselves to fight against censorious, secular forces trying to prevent people of faith from expressing their beliefs in public, says Christian Elia, executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League of Canada.

Elia is one of several experts from both sides of the Atlantic who have deep concerns about the implications of the recent criminal conviction in Britain of a man for praying silently and peacefully in the vicinity of a British abortion clinic.

The conviction is the latest sign of growing intolerance in the Western world to even simple expressions of traditional Christian faith, such as praying silently. “It seems quite absurd to any rational person that someone doing something in silence could be convicted,” Mr. Elia said. “It’s rather chilling.”

People of goodwill who value freedom must always have the right to enter the public square in a non-violent way, he said. When there are attempts to take that right away, “We need to say ‘no.’ We need to let our leaders know.”

A British court found Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old father of two, guilty of breaching a buffer-zone law aimed at limiting “anti-social behaviour” around abortion clinics after authorities saw him standing silently, with his head bowed.

A court ruled last month that his silent prayer amounted to “disapproval of abortion” and thus had a detrimental effect on clients and staff of the clinic. The judge gave Smith-Connor a conditional discharge and ordered him to pay prosecution costs the equivalent of $16,000.

Upon learning of his conviction, Smith-Connor said, “Today, the court has decided that certain thoughts—silent thoughts—can be illegal in the United Kingdom. That cannot be right. All I did was pray to God, in the privacy of my own mind, and yet I stand convicted as a criminal?”

His lawyer, Jeremiah Igunnubole, said the conviction represents a massive legal turning point. “We can hardly sink any lower in our neglect of basic fundamental freedoms of speech and thought,” he said.

In 1989, Langley resident John Hof was among the first Canadians to suffer the consequences of similar anti-free-speech restrictions when he and other pro-life demonstrators breached a court injunction and protested outside of Everywoman’s Abortion Clinic in Vancouver. Six years later, the B.C. government passed the Access to Abortion Services Act which imposed permanent anti-protest bubble zones around abortion clinics.

Hof said in a recent interview that no government in Canada has yet to go to the rights-limiting extreme that Britain has, but “I wouldn’t be surprised to see this happening here,” he said.

The British legislation is tantamount to “opening a Pandora’s box of thought limitations,” Hof said. “It’s absurd. It’s pretty scary in where they are going.”

It was under B.C.’s bubble-zone law that Jim Demers of Nelson was arrested in 1996 and subsequently convicted and jailed for holding a sign quoting an international human-rights declaration reading in part, “Every human being has the inherent right to life.”

Demers declined to be interviewed by The B.C. Catholic for this story, but his arrest was cited as a precursor to the Smith-Connor case by Paul Coleman of Vienna-based ADF International, a legal advocacy organization dedicated to protecting fundamental freedoms and promoting human dignity. 

Also in Vienna, Anja Hoffmann, executive director of the Observatory on Intolerance Against Christians in Europe, said in an in-person interview with The B.C. Catholic that the case is yet another example in an extensive list of anti-Christian hate crimes and persecution that her organization continuously tracks.

Hoffmann, a 31-year-old Catholic and former political aide, said legal buffers around abortion clinics are just one form of state regulation “that has led to the criminalization of Christians for praying silently on the street.”

Earlier in October, she joined other religious freedom experts from Asia, America, and Europe at a conference in Berlin in which they warned of growing intolerance toward the simple expression of traditional religious tenets, such as the belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Hoffmann said the peaceful expression of such opinions has the potential to end a political career or employment. “This is a serious threat to religious freedom and leads to widespread self-censorship among traditional believers in the West,” she said in a statement released following that conference.

The CCRL’s Elia agreed and said he personally has to be careful in the way he expresses his Catholic beliefs. “The fear is real,” he said. “I work for two universities, and I am very afraid.”

In her interview with The B.C. Catholic, Hoffmann said new European Union legislation is proposing to crack down on “hate speech,” and she is concerned that the bill does not define the term, which means a government could employ it to crack down on speech it simply doesn’t like.

If this leads to further censorship of Christian beliefs, the negative impact will be felt among society as a whole, not just in religious communities.

“The Christian voice, in our pluralistic society, is really one that is absolutely needed,” Hoffmann said. “Silencing the Christian voice in the public square is extremely dangerous on many levels.” She said Christianity and the Christian worldview have been essential to the rise of Western civilization, and its elimination from the public square would threaten society’s foundations.

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