15/01/2024
From El Mundo https://elmundo.es/espana/2024/01/10/659d8ca521efa0b32a8b45a6.html… (Google Translation)
"SPAIN New blow to the Jehovah's Witnesses: a judge says that their rules threaten "the mental health" and "destroy families" of former followers Justice acquits a former believer who accused the cult of having "hands stained with blood", keeping its followers in a "cage" and being a "company inclined to money", and condemns the confession to costs
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(Caption: Gabriel Pedrero, former Jehovah's Witness, photographed in front of the Carabanchel Kingdom Hall where he used to attend as a follower.)
The attitude of some of the rectors of the Jehovah's Witnesses "could incite hatred." It is "truthful" to call them a "sect." The "rigidity" of its norms "destroys families" and threatens "the mental health" of those who have abandoned the creed, through the so-called "social death," an "isolation" ordered by the leadership.
And classifying the cult as a "company only inclined to money," or saying that "they practice an ideology more typical of the Middle Ages," is again "truthful." Critics of this religion, which groups around 120,000 faithful in Spain, according to their own figures, do not say so.
This is said by the judge who has just condemned the confession, perfectly legal in Spain since 1973, to the costs of the proceedings that it itself opened against Gabriel Pedrero, a former faithful who, upon leaving the "sect," as he calls it, he publicly criticized it as "harmful" and "destructive."
The confession then denounced him for, supposedly, violating its right to honor, and the judge of the Court of First Instance 6 of Torrejón de Ardoz (Madrid) now asserts, in an appealable but historic decision because it addresses the limits of religious freedom, that in no way: the cult, Judge Raquel Chacón says, is a legal religion and recognized as having notorious roots in Spain, but also all the negative things that Pedrero attributes to it.
The former follower, 36, was denounced by the Witnesses after writing on his Facebook wall that it had taken him "five years" to "deprogram" his mind and rebuild his life outside the "cage" of Jehovah.
He also accused the religion of having "its hands stained with blood from different suicides: the collective ones for not allowing medical treatment with blood, and the suicides caused by stress, anxiety and depression caused by being locked in the Watchtower cage [in reference to the headquarters of the cult, located in New York, United States], the religious company that is behind the regulations and ideology of the Middle Ages that they are forced to follow," he noted.
He also asserted: “We cannot be influenced by a company that is only inclined to money. There are more and more millionaires and their followers are poorer in every sense. They cancel them as people without being able to think or decide freely."
The judge now says that this does not in any way violate its right to honor and that he is protected by the defendant's freedom of expression, and thus dismisses the requests for compensation made by the Witnesses themselves, who requested 15,000 euros in fines, and even the Prosecutor's Office itself, which also asked for a sentence for Pedrero, and to compensate for his alleged damage with 2,000 euros for the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Judge Chacón has taken almost a year to hand down the sentence, which EL MUNDO is reporting for the first time, practically the same time that she took to deliver her decision a month ago, in the same sense. Then, she protected the right of the Spanish Association of Victims of Jehovah's Witnesses to call itself such in the face of another lawsuit from the cult itself for alleged violation of its right to honor.
Both that procedure, in which the magistrate allowed critics to call the religion a "destructive sect," and that of Gabriel Pedrero, now also victorious against the confession, became true exposures of both positions, with a cascade of testimonies from both parties and the magistrate, at some moments, crying at the harshness of the statements.
Pedrero has always claimed to have suffered the worst stigmas of the cult's victims: s*xual abuse in childhood inflicted by one of his priests — for which there is a pending procedure — homos*xuality repressed institutionally within the confession, and social ostracism after his departure, with total loss of his family environment.
Now the judge assumes that homos*xual practices are grounds for expulsion in the cult, that apostates are called "mentally ill" with "mandatory guidelines," and even that Juan Ramón Ferreiro, the professor in Ecclesiastical Law who intervened in the declaration of "notorious roots" in 2006 as deputy director general of Religious Freedom of the Ministry of Justice, he would have done so "without taking into account the consequences of the expulsion" and also without even reading the book Shepherd the Flock of God, which dictates how the hierarchy of Jehovah's Witnesses should discipline their followers."
