Back to home

Wednesday October 31, 2007

Baptist Church complains about judicial interference in internal affairs

Edelberto Behs, GOIANIA, Brasil, July 1, 2005

 The refusal of a Baptist pastor of this capital to celebrate a religious ceremony because Taxi Heathrow Airport the bride was pregnant motivated a debate about the interference of the Judicial Branch in the Church in a Lay state, like the Brazilian state, and generated a legal suit in the Goiania family court.

The case began last April when Pastor Guilherme Ávilla Giménez, of the First Baptist Church of Goiania refused to celebrate the marriage of a bride who was three months pregnant. The father of the bride, a member of the Church, turned to the courts to resolve the problem and received a favorable ruling. 

A manifest from the National Baptist Convention, signed by its president and executive director Fausto Aguiar Vasconcelos and Sócrates Oliveira de Souza, expressed solidarity with the First Baptist Church of Goiania “in defense of the spiritual vision of the purity of marriage, as is established in the Holy Bible, rule of faith and practice of the Baptists.

The National Baptist Convention emphasized that religious freedom is guaranteed by the Federal Constitution and grants “organizations of all creeds the authority to establish their faith dogmas… conscious that these should not contain elements that are discriminatory regarding the dignity of the human person.”

The Baptists maintain that it is the right of the Church to establish criteria that is compatible with the law in order to carry out their administrative and religious activities. They empathized that the faithful, when they become member of the Church, are informed that it has principles and they must confirm their acceptance and respect for those principles.

According to the Brazilian Baptist Convention, the Judicial Branch went beyond “the limits of its actions, when it deliberated about questions related to the religiosity of the faithful, ruling that a marriage should be held, contradicting what was established by the religious organizations.

The marriage was held April 23 and one month later, Baptist leaders visited the Superior Justice Tribunal in Brasilia to dialogue with the president Edson Vidigal, who guaranteed that the Constitution would be fulfilled.

Consulted by ALC, Pastor Guilherme de Amorim Ávilla Gimenez, of the First Baptist Church of Goiania, said that he could not comment on the case until the process is concluded in the superior court, because it is related to moral damages.