A Catholic association cannot dismiss an employee solely because she has left the Catholic Church, ruled the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in case C-258/24 on Tuesday 17 March.
In its judgment, summarised in a press release, the Court of Justice explains how it is necessary “to ensure a fair balance between the right of autonomy of churches and other organisations whose ethos is based on religion or belief, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the right of workers [...] not to be discriminated against on grounds of religion or belief”.
EU law gives each Member State a margin of discretion in this balancing exercise. While national courts must, in principle, refrain from assessing the legitimacy of the ethics of the church or organisation concerned, “it is [...] ultimately for a national court, and not for the church or organisation concerned, to assess whether the occupational requirement laid down by the church or organisation at issue is, on account of the nature of the activities concerned or the context in which they are exercised, genuine, legitimate and justified having regard to that ethos”.
Katholische Schwangerschaftsberatung is an association within the German Catholic Church that advises pregnant women. It requires all its employees to respect the Catholic Church’s guidelines, which state that all pregnancy counselling is intended to protect the life of the unborn child and must therefore be inspired by a concern to encourage the pregnant woman to continue the pregnancy and accept her child.
When one of its counsellors, a member of the Catholic Church, left the church, Katholische Schwangerschaftsberatung dismissed her for that reason. Indeed, according to applicable canon law, leaving the Catholic Church is considered a serious breach of the duty of loyalty, the Court points out.
The counsellor had justified her leaving by the fact that, in addition to church tax, the Diocese of Limburg levied an additional church levy on Catholics married, like her, to a spouse with a high income.
This association also employed, in the same department, employees who did not belong to the Catholic Church and were therefore not subject to the same requirement of loyalty and not exposed to the risk of being dismissed for the same reason. The counsellor then challenged her dismissal before the German courts, which had asked the CJEU to interpret EU rules on equal treatment regarding religion and suspected an unjustified difference of treatment.
In this case, the Court held that a Catholic association such as the one in question could not, in principle, dismiss a Catholic employee solely because she has left the Catholic Church, especially since the association employs non-Catholics for the same work.
“In [such] a situation, it does not appear that the mere fact that JB has left the Catholic Church [...] is sufficient to establish [...] the risk alleged by the Association that its ethos or its right of autonomy will be undermined”, especially since this organisation employs other people to perform the same functions as those of the employee in question, without requiring that they be members of the same church, and that this employee does not engage in activities hostile to the church concerned.
Link to the judgment: https://aeur.eu/f/l7o (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)