Ecclesiastical court

A ecclesiastical court is, in canonical Droit, a court organized by the Eglise to judge businesses which concern its operation (discipline, sacraments,…).

Faithful basic hardly knows the ecclesiastical court but through its intervention in the requests for religious annulment of marriage.

Administrative operation of the Church

The administrative court is qualified to consider rules enacted by the Church to ensure its own operation: compliance with the operating rules of its various institutions, nominations, rules of decision making…

The ecclesiastical court also judges rules of management of the goods of the Church. For this reason, its competence can extend to acts of management ensured by thefaithful ones, but the assumption is rather theoretical: generally, in this case, the Church will pass by the judgment of the civil authorities, this would be only to ensure the executory character of the judgment and its possible sanctions.

Corrigendum:

In the Catholic church, only the apostolic Signature acts as administrative court. For this reason, she knows recourse against the illegal alleged particular administrative acts carried or approved by the dicastères of the Roman Curia; in this case and this case alone, it can also know, at the request of the applicant, the compensation for the damages caused by the illegal act; finally, she knows other administrative controversies which are submitted to him by the pope or the dicastères Roman Curia, as well as conflicts of competences between these dicastères (Pastor Bonus, Article 123). The administrative court of the apostolic Signature thus does not consider rules enacted by the Church. To affirm the opposite led to a confusion which would be likely to make believe that the apostolic Signature can receive recourse abstracted against from the legislative acts.

Corrigendum of Constantin Yatala

Marked sanctions

In the contentious field, a court says what is the right in the situation considered. The execution of the judgment is limited to make the situation in conformity with the judged right.

With regard to disciplinary matters, an ecclesiastical court can pronounce sorrows, which in the modern Canon law can be of three types:

of the censures , decisions intended to prevent the culprit from harming the other faithful ones;
of the expiatory sorrows , public measurements symbolically repairing the disorder undergone by the church;
of the penitences , sanctioning the person itself to make him become aware of the gravity of its act and avoid the repetition to him.

The most serious sorrow is the Excommunication, which is a censure, and causes to exclude the faithful one from the Church.

One sees well here the character necessarily limited of the canonical sanctions, since the worst of the sorrows - excommunication rejects the faithful one out of reach jurisdiction of the Church and returns it to the civil life, depriving it of all its rights, but also releasing it from all its duties.

In fact, these sanctions have direction only for people who want to live indeed in the Church, generally of the monks. It is in this direction that it is necessary to include/understand the sorrows of reclusion which could be in force in certain convents, to even be marked against the laic ones at the time of the Inquisition.

External For and for intern

In the responsibility for faithful compared to the religion, the tradition of the Catholic church distinguishes between what concerns the for intern , responsibility for each one vis-a-vis God in the secrecy of his conscience, and what raises of the external for , responsibility in front of the company and the Church. An ecclesiastical court is qualified only on the external for: with regard to for intern, the faithful one has to answer about it only in front of the Supreme Judge.

In particular, as regards Heresy, an ecclesiastical court can only condemn contrary acts to the discipline of the Church, or contrary speeches with its teaching. The opinion heretic of faithful is not the subject of a judgment, but must be the subject of a pastoral accompaniment.

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