MONTREAL, March 11, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A woman fined by the city of Montreal for arranging a Catholic Mass in a municipality building was vindicated last week by a judge who ruled that no laws had been broken.
“I’m really, really happy that who I am — my faith, what I believe in, the centre of my life — is respected, and I can go and show that freely in a public place. It’s as simple as that,” said Paula Celani, the defendant, to reporters outside a Municipal courtroom on Wednesday.
Celani was fined $144 in 2009 after renting a public building for her group Fondation En Route to hold a celebration of faith and community that included Mass, a potluck lunch, hymn singing, and showing a religious video.
Despite Celani clearly informing a city employee prior to the event that there would be a religious ceremony in the building, the city nevertheless issued a ticket.
The ticket stated that Celani had broken a bylaw, because the building was not zoned for ‘religious use’. Furthermore, the ticked stated that the small print of the rental contract had excluded the building from religious use.
During the case, city prosecutor José Costa grilled Celani about whether she had read the fine print on the rental contract. He reportedly frequently cut her answers short, demanding if she had arranged religious ceremonies in other public places and if she had the right to do so.
But Judge Bernard Mandeville ruled that the city’s strict interpretation of the bylaw, if taken to the extreme, would prevent a group from praying grace before a meal in the building, reported the National Post.
Judge Mandeville acquitted Celani. He ruled that the city had misinterpreted its zoning rules, stating that the bylaw in question was intended to regulate buildings for the purpose of dedicated religious worship, not “occasional, short-lived” religious uses.
Celani’s lawyer Robert Reynolds said the judge’s decision had wider implications for secular Quebec which has a recent history of animosity toward religion.
“We’re in a society now where secularism is the new religion, so whenever something like this comes up, people become suspicious,” he said, adding that people should “be wise to relax a bit and remember that religious people still have rights.”
John Zucchi, a McGill University history professor who is also president of the En Route Foundation, called the ruling “one small step in bringing common sense back to our institutions and our society.”
“There’s nothing to fear with people simply expressing who they are, privately or publicly,” he said to the National Post.
Kelly McParland wrote in the National Post that Judge Mandeville “showed so much sense in ruling” that “it’s almost enough to revive your faith in the courts.”
“Thank heaven there are still a few folks like Judge Mandeville and Robert Reynolds,” he wrote.