The title of this article is deliberately provocative: what meaning can be attached to a concept which lacks all the classic jurisprudential marks of authority, by those who concern themselves with the legal aspects of Anglican churches? Conversely, what lessons can be learned by them from the very persistence of such a concept over so very many years?

The right of patronage has for many centuries played a most significant role in the life of the English Church. In many ways it is a remarkable concept. What could be more spiritual than the right to present a clerk who is to have the care of the souls of a parish to the bishop for admission and institution? Yet from around the twelfth century this right has been regarded in England as a piece of secular property, and disputes concerning this right cognisable in the common-law courts. Coke tells us that it is an ‘incorporeall inheritance’, or, to use a more modern term, an ‘incorporeal hereditament’, which is real property capable of devolving to heirs on intestacy and yet takes no tangible form: an invisible right which gives substantial power to those who possess it.

During the earlier part of 1993 a paper of mine was published in the Ecclesiastical Law Journal. Entitled ‘What of the Church in Wales?’, it endeavoured to suggest why the disestablished Church in Wales still maintained the characteristics of an established Church. The paper seems to have aroused much interest within certain circles of the Church of England, especially among synod members, at a time when the question of disestablishment was once more being publicly aired. The point was made to me repeatedly that disestablishment would need to be accompanied by dis-endowment, although the only reason for this assertion appears to have been the historical precedents of the Irish and Welsh disestablishments. I am not competent to write about the former, but with regard to the latter I feel that a historical examination of the events which led to the disestablishment of the Church in Wales might raise some question marks against this assertion.

The Church of England and the Church of Sweden have been in communion with one another since the early 1920s and have much in common. Both maintain the historic episcopate, both place great emphasis on liturgy, and since the Reformation both have long been ‘by law established’—a process which began in Sweden when Gustavus Vasa took the throne in 1523 after the successful war of liberation against Denmark, was confirmed by the Riksdag of Västerås in 1544 and, after some vicissitudes, was finally settled by the Pact of Succession of 1604.

One hears frequently of missionaries and often about the Roman Catholic Church's missionary effort. But seldom does one find in English a survey of the canon law of Roman Catholic missionary prelates. This may be because the canon law of missions was perfected only in this century and because to this day it remains only partly codified. In any case, for reasons which will later become apparent, this body of canon law has special application in the Commonwealth.

Though the first nation state of the Council of Europe to ratify the European Convention on Human Rights on 18th March 1951, and though permitting individual petition to the European Court in Strasbourg since 1966, the United Kingdom declined to give effect to the Convention in its domestic law until the government recently passed the Human Rights Act 1998. The Act received the Royal Assent in November 1998 and will come into force on 2nd October 2000.

Two main functions are performed by the consistory court. The first is the discipline of clergy which is presently the subject of a wholesale review by General Synod following the recommendations of the Hawker Report and has been the subject of much comment, not least in the pages of this Journal. At the time of writing, a draft Measure is still awaited. The second main function is the exercise of the faculty jurisdiction in relation to church buildings, their contents and their surroundings. Central to the effective exercise of this jurisdiction is the ecclesiastical exemption—a pragmatic ‘stand-off’ between central government and certain Christian denominations whereby listed church buildings are not subject to the secular sytem of listed building consent or conservation area control by local authorities. This too has been the subject of recent review. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of the consistory court in faculty matters and to contribute to the debate which the Newman Report will doubtless engender. The views expressed are, of course, my own and not those of the Ecclesiastical Law Society or any other body.

The trial of Bishop Edward King (1829–1910) and the judgment which issued from it proved a landmark in the history of the Victorian Church of England. The judgment was also a turning point in the history of the Catholic Revival, and the bitter series of ritual disputes to which it gave rise. Edward Norman categorised the trial as ‘One of the most important, as well as one of the most extraordinary episodes in the religious history of the nineteenth century.’ R. W. Church, Dean of St Paul's, hailed the judgment as ‘The most courageous thing that has come out of Lambeth for the last 200 years.’ Others, inevitably, given the passions roused by the ritualist controversy, took a more jaundiced view; but few serious Church people were indifferent to the result.

For many years it has been assumed that all parishioners legally qualified to intermarry have a legal right to be married in their parish church. In Blunt's The Book of Church Law it is expressed thus:

‘Every person within the parish in which a church is situate has a common-law right to the use of it in time of Divine Service. … Much more have they a right to the use of the church whenever they are to be present for the performance of any offices as regards themselves. Hence the incumbent's control over all access to the church is limited by the rights of the parishioners to its use at such times as he may appoint to the celebration of any of the offices contained in the Book of Common Prayer: whether those of public worship…; or whether those of a personal kind,… such as marriage.’

As in other countries on the Continent, there have been a considerable number of Anglican chaplaincies and churches in Germany. They were established—loosely speaking, not in the sense of churches as ‘by law established’—either by merchants or by people of means who toured the Continent, and settled occasionally in fashionable spas or other similar places. These chaplaincies may be grouped—from a legal point of view—according to their status under German law which may be different with regard to the German system of law governing the relationships between the state and the churches.

It is by no means uncommon in the present day for proposals to be put forward for the re-ordering of a church in order to enable part of the building to be used for what might be described as secular purposes. In some instances this might mean the nave having all fixed furniture removed so that it could be used as a hall, or as part of the church when required. Sometimes rooms are created in part of the building, perhaps in the tower or close to the entrance. Sometimes a great deal of space can be found in a crypt.

It has become almost a commonplace of textbooks that English public ecclesiastical law has no application to the colonies. Halsbury states this baldly and without qualification, relying chiefly on the judgment of the Privy Council in Re Lord Bishop of Natal, a case of unquestioned significance for the development of the family of churches in the English Prayer Book tradition. But both from historical interest and with an eye to those colonies still in being, the issue is one which deserves a second glance. This article will argue that whether or not the Natal decision was right on its facts, the Judicial Committee in that case made an important distinction which later textbook generalisations—and indeed the Crown's advisers at the time—appear to have overlooked; and that other decisions, relied upon in support of such generalisations, can be supported neither from principle nor from earlier practice.

On 30 April and 1 May 1999, the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas in Rome (the Angelicum) hosted a Colloquium on the subject of the Comparative Law of Church Property, organised in collaboration with the Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff Law School. It was attended by Anglican and Roman Catholic canonists and a representative of the Eastern Catholic Church. It is believed that this was the first meeting of its type since the Reformation and was a unique opportunity for canon lawyers to engage in ecumenical dialogue. It represented a response by canonists to the welcome given by the Anglican Communion at the Lambeth Conference in 1998 to the encyclical letter of Pope John Paul II Ut Unum Sint. Such a meeting would have been unimaginable ten years ago but the substantial common interest which the subject raises coupled with strong friendships forged during the Colloquium has revealed a great potential for events such as these. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who is to chair (jointly with Cardinal Cassidy) a major consultation in Canada in May 2000 reviewing Anglican/Roman Catholic relationships, had expressed his support for the Colloquium and the further initiatives which it might herald. The President of Ireland also sent a personal message of support for the event.

The history of the office of dean rural, like that of the office of the archdeacon, is shrouded in the mists of ancient Church history. It is however clear that since the rural dean, by whatever name he was called, stood in a relationship to the parochial clergy beyond the immediate episcopal environment, the history of the rural dean's office is directly related to the development of the parochial system. The development of this system is vastly different in the various corners of Christendom, and the appearance of the dean rural, or his equivalent, varies by nearly four centuries from place to place.

The Church was not founded at Pentecost, as is sometimes said, but by Christ during the course of his ministry in Galilee and Judea. It was he who appointed the twelve to become what today, perhaps, would be called teaching officers, and who commissioned the seventy as a corps of evangelistic missioners. In the ancient world religious knowledge was sometimes committed to sacred writings, sometimes to a school of ideas, sometimes to a priestly caste or an assemblage of cultic observances, and sometimes it emerged episodically through the translations of oracles. Christ, in contrast, revealed his truth to a living company of people—‘the People of God—who, after his corporeal departure, became his body on earth. Precisely because the message was thus conveyed organically it remained permanently new: able to adapt to changing intellectual modes and social filtration, capable of bringing forward fresh insights in the successive cultural shifts of a progressive humanity. Written texts do not transmit truth of themselves: they require re-interpretation, over long periods of time, if they are to achieve durable meaning. Priestly castes have the disadvantage of imploding into small coteries of exclusivity; they frequently become a mere adjunct of ruling elites. Philosophical systems tend to die when the surrounding culture to which they originally related transforms itself or disintegrates. But a living body of people, at the centre of whose religious insights is not a set of ideas but a person, has the verifiable capability of enduring through the centuries, forever changing yet forever the same.