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In the twentieth century, Christians, especially Catholics, seemed to believe that their theology and anthropology would marry easily with liberal constitutionalism. Dignitatis Humanae (1965) drew on the theory and practice of liberal constitutions to advocate for a rounder protection of religious freedom; John Paul II and US American thinkers such as Michael Novak echoed each other when they emphasized the reconcilability of Western capitalism and Western democracy with the Catholic Weltanschauung; Christian Democratic parties led or participated in government coalitions in several liberal democracies. If Christians failed in lobbying for the inclusion of Christianity in the Constitution of the European Union, the Lautsi (2011) case in the European Court of Human Rights allowed the continued display of the crucifix in Italian public schools.
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Who Decides What a Baptismal Register Is For? Church Autonomy and EU Data Protection Law
By Francisca Pérez-Madrid
On 1 October 2026, Advocate General (AG) Laila Medina of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered her opinion in the Diocese of Ghent (Bisdom Ghent) (C-12/25). The opinion addresses whether individuals who leave the Catholic Church can rely on the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in requesting removal of their names from a baptismal register. In keeping with CJEU procedure, the opinion precedes and can inform the Court’s final judgment on the matter. The AG opinion does not recognize an automatic right to erasure, and it discusses respect for church autonomy. Nevertheless, in my view, the opinion is concerning because it leaves to the discretion of each national court a decision that rightly belongs to the religious community itself.
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The Case for Tolerance as a European Value
By Renáta Uitz
The minimum conditions of belonging to the European Union (EU) were recently spelled out by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the values judgment (Case C-769/22, European Commission v. Hungary (21 April 2026)). Responding to the rule of law crisis, CJEU case law to date has focused on values set out expressly in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) such as the rule of law and respect for fundamental rights. Other contenders for EU values emerging on the heels of the migration crisis include solidarity in the face of religious diversity (based on TEU Article 2) and animal welfare as a rationale for limitations on ritual slaughter (based on Article 13 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) and Article 37 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EUCFR)). Christianity (as the defining feature of European culture) is also a prominent contender, with discussions focusing on the EU’s role in protecting Christianity, Christian values, and Christian civilization.
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From Exception to Norm: Rethinking Religious Freedom Through the Law of Diversity
By Eugenia Relaño Pastor
The theme chosen for this Symposium, “Building an Infrastructure for Freedom of Religion or Belief,” is deliberately architectural. An infrastructure is not a single wall or a single right; it is a system of interdependent supports—legal, institutional, social, and cultural—without which no single structure can stand for long. My argument relative to this theme is that the classical infrastructure we have built around freedom of religion or belief, however monumental, has load-bearing weaknesses that we can no longer ignore. Those weaknesses appear at two levels: first, in the doctrinal architecture of freedom of religion itself; second, in the poorly integrated architecture built for the protection of religious minorities. I will argue that both weaknesses stem from a common, deeper cause: a jurisprudential and normative trend that continues to treat religious diversity as an exception to be managed rather than as the ordinary condition of contemporary societies. …
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