I seem to have a recollection of being told in a class that the Church of England has some, well, legal “powers” that other churches don’t have.
What exactly are these powers? Is it primarily limited to a guaranteed budget from public funds, or does the CoE have actual governmental legislative, judicial, or executive powers? For example, does a priest have the status of an LEO or can the Archbishop of Canterbury sign a degree creating a substantive criminal offense that specifies that walking past the altar at a CoE church without bowing is a class 2 misdemeanor punishable by up to 6 months in jail, up to a 5000 pound fine, and lifetime registration as a sex offender? Can you sue someone else in Ecclesiastical Court and expect that a judgment signed by a bishop is as good as one as signed by a secular civil court judge?
I’m from the US and the thought that any religious group could be granted civil authority is about as anti-American as it gets, and history teachers here tell you about all the horrible things that were done in England in the past with Catholics being rounded up and slaughtered one year and then Protestants being slaughtered the next, all based on who was currently in power, and I don’t have a good feel about what Establishment of Religion truly means today.
The Establishment is just the Bishops in the House of Lords and the government appointing bishops, these days, and I think the government might have even stopped appointing bishops. The church have no egal authority, no powerful courts, no access to public funds, and so on. Also, we don’t have misdemeanours, there’s no formal separation between felonies and other crimes.
The Church of England is not funded by the state and doesn’t have any special legal powers. Well, OK, a few bishops still get to sit in the House of Lords, but the House of Lords is fairly powerless and I don’t think the small number of “Lords Spiritual” get too involved in whatever politics does go on there.
It does have special legal status, in that it is the established church and in a sense part of the state. But it is not above or outside of the law of the land.
the good old C of E has a special place in Britain but no power. It’s sort of like the Royal family. We also differ from America in that if a politician crowed about his church activities it would loose them votes. So its an ornament and has beautiful and very old branches in every town and village, but if a Church officer suggested much beyond a fete they would be laughed out of town.
The CofE doesn’t receive anything from public funds for the day-to-day business of religioning, although there might be some money for the upkeep of national monuments I guess. Bear in mind that the CofE is a very large landowner, and derives much income from that. The fact that QEII is nominally the Supreme Governor of the CofE has no real relevance. It’s the Archbishop of Canterbury who is in charge, with the other Archbishopric of York having some influence in ecumenical matters. Heh. They fight like ferrets.
There is a system of Ecclesiastical courts, as there are in many other countries/doctrines, but their scope is limited to internal church stuff, and it has no precedence over the regular law of the land.
Politically, there are the 26 Lords Spiritual in the House of Lords, out of a House with 760 or so seats. They are all bishops of the CofE (and maybe Wales, I hope someone can help clarify this). The Church of Scotland isn’t organised in the same way, and Northern Ireland is a whole different thing, but the Chief Rabbi has recently also been offered a seat in the Lords, if he wants it.
Wasn’t there a law in England till just a couple years ago which required all weddings to be held in a church or a place of worship?
Was that due to (remanants of ) Church of England legal powers?
The church does have at least one legal obligation that other churches don’t have. Any British citizen with no former spouse living is legally entitled to be married in his or her parish church.
How many is a couple? England has had civil marriages since 1836.
No. There was a legal requirement to either get married in a church (not only CofE, BTW) OR an official registry office. The law you refer to changed, sometime back, late 1990s?, which allowed other venues to apply for a license to hold weddings. Hotels, castles, that kind if thing.
The Church of England does have its own judicial system. This is completely separate to Statute Law, and are probably best seen as a form of Civil Law.
There was a case not too long ago that I can’t properly recall that did make it’s way into mainstream news, might have been child abuse or something like that, and it was felt that this should have been dealt with through the criminal system.
The uses of the terms “statute” and “civil” here make no sense to me, particularly in the context of a common law country like the United Kingdom. “Civil” means “not criminal” and a statute may be either criminal or civil.
I believe that several centuries ago, say between Bloody Mary and the election of Cromwell, every inhabitant of a parish was legally obligated to attend church in that parish. And Jews were not allowed to live in England. Cromwell changed all that.
I’m fairly sure he means Civil Law as in a legal system based, ultimately, on Roman law. The Scots legal system is an example of such (but heavily influenced by the English common law), and so is that of Louisiana.
The Jews were expelled by Edward I, and readmitted during the Protectorate. A series of laws continued to be passed in the late 17th c. punishing Popish recusants, (who continued to hear Mass and harbour priests) and Occasional Conformers (who did the minimum necessary to avoid punishment for not attending Church of England services). It was not until the late 19th c. that all the remaining barriers to Jews holding public office and being elected to Parliament were finally removed, long after Catholic emancipation. Macaulay’s essay Civil Disabilities of the Jews (1829) presents some of the arguments Online Library of Liberty
Statute law is that laid down in Acts of Parliament, clearly Ecclesiastical Law does not fall into statute law.
Civil Law concerns disputes between organisations and individuals where the State does not have a direct interest and this is where Ecclesiastical Law resembles Civl Law the most - you cannot be put in prison for a Civil Dispute
From what I’ve read, it sounds like church courts at one time had a wide de jure jurisdiction to issue legally binding judgments.
Nowadays in the US, several religions have their own court systems, but cases and judgments are enforced by social pressure, contract law, and employment law rather than legally binding judgments from the bench. E.g. if a priest seriously violates a rule, a church court can issue a punishment and tell him that if he does not accept the punishment, he will be formally fired from his job as a priest for misconduct and that it will request that members in good standing shun him socially. A church court cannot order someone jailed against their will. If they did, the church officials who carried out the imprisonment would be guilty of kidnapping. Likewise, a church court cannot grant a secularly-recognized divorce, order a person’s property forfeited unless that person previously signed a contract pledging the property, or legally change a person’s name. In essence, church courts are sort of like Judge Judy in terms of their inherent legal powers. People follow their judgments because they previously signed a contract indicating that they would follow rulings (and where failure to follow them could lead to a lawsuit for breach of contract in a real, secular court), or because their belief in the religion or the social pressure of the leadership bears down on them and influences them to conform their behavior to the judgement of the church court.
Do CoE ecclesiastical courts have any remaining jurisdiction with regards to the common person on the street? Can you escape a CoE court and extinguish its jurisdiction over you by converting to another faith?
Well then the comment makes even less sense, because in a civil law country, all law is statutory (“code” ). I can’t figure out what the distinction between “statute” and “civil” is supposed to mean.
