Ecclesiastical Property Research Articles

Churches with Historical Monument Status in the Republic of Moldova: Between State Ownership and Ecclesiastical Property

The article examines the difficulties faced by religious communities under the Metropolis of Moldova (Russian Patriarchate) in their process of joining the Metropolis of Bessarabia (Romanian Patriarchate), within the context of Law no. 125/2007. The main obstacle is related to property rights over historical ecclesiastical buildings. An example is the 2003 case where the property rights of the community in Camencea were registered under the name of the Metropolis of Moldova. In 2002, the government in Chișinău adopted Decision no. 740 to prevent the legalization of the Metropolis of Bessarabia’s places of worship. The decision was challenged in the Constitutional Court, which suspended the examination of the constitutionality of the normative act.

Law and spiritual sanctions: asserting the stability of pro anima donation charters in late tenth- and eleventh-century central Italy

ABSTRACT This article examines the citation of legal texts in late tenth- and eleventh-century pro anima donation charters in favour of ecclesiastical institutions in central Italy. It argues that, in general, these texts were cited by notaries to insist on a general principle, derived from Lombard law, of the irrevocability of all donations and testamentary dispositions in favour of ecclesiastical institutions. It then discusses the spiritual sanctions that were likewise used in such charters, arguing that the prevalence of legal citations as well as spiritual sanctions relates to the same general heightened desire to stress the irrevocability of property donations in the face of ongoing tensions regarding ecclesiastical property. Finally, I point to some evidence that notaries, donors (and donees) were increasingly aware of alternatives to an irrevocable pro anima donation charter, namely the Roman law testament.

The Property Rights of the Church in the Roman Empire

The present paper deals with the legal capacity and especially the property rights of the growing Christian communities and church institutions within the Roman Empire from the beginning to the Justinianic era. In the beginning, the believers’ charitable donations became the property of the bishops. Later, when the local Christian communities became legal persons, the property of the bishops was separated from the property of the congregations. The local churches could already own real estate before 313. After 313, the legal capacity of the Catholic congregations was confirmed. Later, following the example of local churches, monasteries and finally charitable institutions also became legal entities. Charitable houses were also personal associations and not foundations; independent foundations – similarly to the rules of classical Roman law – did not exist in Justinianic law. The edicts of the Christian emperors greatly facilitated the acquisition of property by local churches, monasteries and charitable institutions. Furthermore, a number of legal rules were made for the special protection of ecclesiastical property.

The Juridical-Canonical Basis of the Management of Movable and Immovable Ecclesiastical Property

The Juridical-Canonical Basis of the Management of Movable and Immovable Ecclesiastical Property

Real Estate Rationalities: Managing Ecclesiastical Property at the end of the Middle Ages (14th-15th Centuries)

Résumé Cet article porte sur le patrimoine immobilier du chapitre de la basilique Saint-Pierre de Rome, étudié pour les XIVe-XVesiècles à partir des registres des censuali conservés à la Bibliothèque Apostolique Vaticane. Cette série documentaire permet de montrer comment un des plus puissants propriétaires ecclésiastiques de Rome gère les quelque 300 logements qu’il détient dans une ville qui connaît, au cours du XVesiècle, une très forte croissance démographique et économique. Les résultats de cette analyse mettent en lumière la pluralité des modalités de gestion de ce patrimoine immobilier hérité : si une petite fraction de cet ensemble de logements forme un « marché hors le marché », administré selon des logiques clientélaires ou charitables, le chapitre de Saint-Pierre se comporte pour le reste comme n’importe quel acteur privé du marché immobilier romain, visant à optimiser la rentabilité de son patrimoine, comme en témoignent l’inflation des loyers et les investissements spéculatifs qu’il pratique. Cette étude éclaire aussi les mécanismes de la formation des prix, en l’occurrence des loyers, qui apparaissent comme l’expression de l’interaction entre propriétaire et locataire et comme le fruit d’une négociation.

Religion in the Twenty-First Century

Religion in the Twenty-First Century

Ecclesiastical properties as common goods. A challenge for the cultural, social and economic development of local communities

SUMMARY: 1. Introduction - 2. The temporal goods of the Church and the principle of subsidiarity - 3. The notion of common goods in Italy - 4. Some practical cases of ecclesiastical heritage as common goods in Italy- 5. A comparative perspective with Belgium: the strategic plans for the future of churches in Flanders - 6. Future perspectives and conclusions.
 ABSTRACT: According to recent studies, there are about 600,000 places of worship and several thousands of monasteries and convents in Europe. The process of secularization, the decrease and displacement of the population, the reduction of vocations to the sacred life can be held responsible for the redundancy of the assets of the Catholic Church. These buildings represent an impressive heritage of faith, work and creativity of the communities which made them over the centuries. Most of them are considered as “cultural heritage” by the legislation of the European States, because of their historical, cultural and artistic values. Up to now, the main solution to this phenomenon has consisted in the alienation of these properties. However, the selling and the disposal of these goods by ecclesiastical bodies cannot always be the only and preferable solution. Drawing from the analysis of some case studies in Italy, this paper aims to investigate the role of civil society participation in the regeneration process and the possibility of applying “collaboration pacts” for the management of “common goods”. In the light of the European scope of the phenomenon, a comparison is proposed in line with the legal instrument of “strategic plans”, drawn up by the diocesan bishop and local authorities in Flanders (Belgium).

THE STATUS OF CHRISTIANS IN JERUSALEM AND BETHLEHEM IN THE SEVENTEENTH ACCORDING TO THE OTTOMAN SIJILLS OF THE SHARI'A COURT IN JERUSALEM-SIJILL NO. (119) AS A MODEL

This scientific paper is meant to shed light on part of the conditions of the Christian denominations in the Sunjuk of Jerusalem that included Bethlehem, which was then a small village during the Ottoman rule in the seventeenth century. The researcher followed the conditions of these denominations in general, and focused on one of the sijills of the seventeenth century, namely sijill no. (119), which consists of (562) pages, and covers the events of about (100) days - starting from the 13th of Dhu al-Hijjah 1041 AH Corresponding to July 1st, 1632 and ends on 19 Rabi` al-Awwal 1042 AH corresponding to October 4, 1632- Judge Muhammad Effendi Ibn Ismail reviewed it, and Muhammad Pasha was the Emir of the Sunjuk of Jerusalem at the time. This is based on the said sijill’s indexing of Professor Ibrahim Rabaia, to identify the relevant arguments and documents. This issue was addressed through this sijill (119) due to the abundance of information contained in it, through which it is possible to depict a clear picture of the nature of the relations among the Christian denominations in the Al-Quds Al-Sharif (Jerusalem) and the vicinity during that period, especially the conflict on ecclesiastical property and rituals in both Jerusalem and the village Bethlehem. The competition was also on the possession of the keys of the Church of the Nativity was mainly between the Greek Orthodox and the Franks at the time. It also showed the role of the Ottoman Empire, at the level of the Humayun Court (the Sublime Porte) in issuing rulings that obligate everyone to comply. However, there were a number of royal decrees that dealt with the disputes among Christians in Jerusalem during that period. Results and recommendations will be presented at the end of the paper. ‎ Key words: Sijill of the Sharia Court of Jerusalem, Christian denominations (Christians).

Welche Kongregation überwachte die Aktivitäten der apostolischen Visitatoren im 16. Jahrhundert?

The ecclesiastical fathers, who had gathered for the ecumenical council of Trent, provided bishops with precise disciplinary norms to regulate their relations with the Holy See, as well as the activities within their own dioceses. New congregations to control the application of reform decrees within the Curia and the local dioceses were established during the 1570s and 1580s. From the very beginning of the 1570s one of the most powerful and most active was the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, charged with the control of religious institutions on the Italian peninsula (including the Papal State), through the institution of the apostolic visitation. Carried out by the apostolic visitator appointed by the Congregation, with the faculties accorded by the Pontiff himself, the inspective work was not limited exclusively to the doctrinal field. Along with the control and the defence of orthodoxy within the diocese, issues concerning the organisation of religious life of Catholic clergy and lay persons were also subjected to investigation. The visitator’s authority and duties included inspections of churches, monasteries, abbeys, priories and ecclesiastical property regardless of their exemptions or privileges. The control was extended to the institutions of controversial jurisdiction like chapters and hospitals, pawnshops, confraternities, scholae, and pious places. This wide sector’s autonomy was vigorously defended by the civil society. By examining archival documentation copied in Registra Episcoporum, Positiones and Visita Apostolica kept in the Vatican Apostolic Archives, the paper reconstructs the early history of the Congregation for Bishops and Regulars and highlights the relations that its secretary and the prefect had with the apostolic visitators sent to Dubrovnik, Dalmatia and Istria – Giovanni Francesco Sormani, Agostino Valier, Cesare de Nores. Activities of Pietro Cedulini and Boniface Darkolica, who were sent to visit Christian communities in Constantinople and southern Hungary, are herewith also analysed.

The transfer of accounting technologies within a religious order: the case of the Monastery of Silos (Spain) in the nineteenth century

ABSTRACT After a long period of abandonment due to the confiscation of its ecclesiastical properties in 1835, life at the Monastery of Silos recommenced in 1880, with the arrival of a group of Benedictine monks from France. This study focuses on the accounting system that the French monks brought with them to illustrate how accounting technology was transferred between two monasteries of the same religious order located in two different countries. The archives of the Monastery of Silos shed light on the differences between the accounting practices implemented at the end of the nineteenth century compared with those that had existed up until 1835. Our findings suggest that the French monks acted as agents for the transfer of technology by importing the accounting practices used at the Monastery of Ligugé (France) to the Monastery of Silos (Spain). The accounting approach used in Ligugé was notably less sophisticated than the one used for centuries at Silos. However, these new accounting practices fitted well with the needs of the Monastery of Silos at a time of scant economic resources, primarily focused on the reconstruction of the monastery’s buildings, activity which extended from the end of 1880 up until January 1883.

Ipotesi di processo di riuso adattivo e valorizzazione sociale degli immobili ecclesiastici

Abandoned or disused ecclesiastical buildings located in Italy, in particular religious houses, are destined to increase in number in the near future. Pope Francis promoted events and texts suggesting ways and perspectives of reuse. By analysing two cases of social real estate enhancement of religious houses – the community of families Il chiostro in the Capuchin convent of Cerro Maggiore (Milan) and the project FOQUS at the institute Montecalvario in Naples – we have been able to formulate a hypothesis of adaptive reuse process in respect of the ecclesiastical goods. The two religious houses object of this study are to this day ecclesiastical property. They are being managed by non-profit organizations with purposes similar to those of the property. The adaptive reuse respects criteria of architectural, social and economic sustainability, to which are added those of ecclesial type. The adaptive reuse of religious houses should follow the principles of circular economy and ecological conversion while being environmentally friendly. It should also follow the principles of social justice invoked by the pontifical magisterium, in particular with the encyclical Laudato si’. The social real estate enhancement of religious houses should be a sustainable process that follows the intrinsic values of the ecclesiastical heritage, the doctrine of the Church, and the common good.

Inscriptions in the Artistic Structure of the Items of Medieval Silversmiths. Works of Church Art from Tikhvin in the State Russian Museum

The article presents the results of studying inscribed and dated objects of applied art of the 16th–17th century from the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. The subject of the research is the set of church plates from the monasteries of the Dormition of Our Lady and the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple in Tikhvin and the precious tsata from the Tikhvin icon of the Mother of God (Stockholmskaya) from the Tikhvin Cathedral of the Transfiguration. In 1928, the items were given to the State Russian Museum from the department of ecclesiastical property of the State Museum fund. The majority of these items were made in the Moscow workshops. The study provided an opportunity to identify the items fabricated by Tikhvin silversmiths. The authors analyze the iconography, style, structural and technical features of a number of art works including liturgical vessels, a church lamp and several altar Gospels. The study substantiates new attributions of the chalice and the church lamp from the Cathedral of Dormition of Our Lady. Attention is given to the inscriptions on the items. The authors examine the specifics of the forms of inscriptions and cite new data on the donors such as Ivan Nikitich Romanov, Ivan Ivanovich Shuiskii and the Mikhalkov family.

‘Saving our order’: Thomas Becket and the law

ABSTRACT The Becket controversy has traditionally been misrepresented as simply a conflict between a universal ideal of the rule of law and the demand of a particular group for certain kinds of immunity. The issue was not only about the secular court’s right to judge delinquent clerks, but about rights of appeal and the control of ecclesiastical property for purposes not determined by lay authority. But Becket’s belief that such resistance required a doctrine of the freedom of the clergy from lay courts in respect to all their actions (with ecclesiastical courts free to impose penalties aimed at penance and restoration) carries its own problems and helps to shape a clerical culture whose dangerous long-term effects can be seen in the recent child abuse scandals.

Ecclesiastical Property From “Goods” to “Values”: A Novelty in Italian Practice

The new Manual of General Accountability (from 2019) for the Institutes for Clergy Support in Italy abandons the concept of “good” while adopting that of the “value” regarding the so-called patrimony of I.D.S.C. Concretely, the former patrimonial conceptualization in ecclesiastic economical matters has been abandoned in favour of one based on income. This fact is of doctrinal and theoretical importance related to the concept of the “stable patrimony” that might thereby be found to be radically compromised.

Property and ‘publicness’: bishops and lay‐founded churches in post‐Roman Hispania

Accounts of how the church fits into broader narratives of socio‐economic change have been confused by two different issues: an unsystematic application of the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ to various phenomena, and a separate tendency to elide the ‘public’ with the state. Visigothic thought on lay‐founded churches shows that the legal regime around ecclesiastical properties did not aim at simply enhancing episcopal power. Laypeople had important responsibilities and powers, especially in resisting bishops’ capacities for ‘private’ appropriation of donated property. There existed a sense of communal concern for church property, which was thought of as ‘public’ without reference to the state.

Requirements, Qualities and Solutions

After the Second World War the ecclesiastical property was drastically reduced in Hungary. However, Vatican II gave an intense motivation and impulse to the spiritual-psychical revival for the communities and by this time, the preservation of the religious heritage got some statal, professional attention too. The restoration or reconstruction works were often linked with the acute interior transformations according to Vatican II. Although the Hungarian publication and interpretation of the reforms were relatively slow, still a few essential informative discussions were born. The Venice Charter (1964) also had a significant effect on the monument preservation methodology in this period. Analysing the theoretical approach of the Vatican II Constitution and Instruction a close parallelism can be identified with the architectural aspects of the Venice Charter: respect the old parts with the obviously distinguishable, new supplements, and create modern artworks with high artistic quality. The end of the paper cites some brief case studies to present the practical implementation of the directives.

The Church as a Governance Actor in a Period of Post-Imperial Transition: Delegation of Fiscal Rights and Legal Change in 10th-century Churraetia

Taking the Alpine region of Churraetia as a case study, this paper investigates processes of fiscal delegation, their preconditions, their legal construction, and their consequences. As Churraetia maintained many features of Roman provincial administration and statehood well into the Carolingian period, the article’s first part traces how fiscal revenues and rights came to be delegated to the episcopal church of Chur via royal privilege from the mid-9th century until 960. The delegation of fiscal rights usually happened in special situations when kings and grantees agreed on a closer cooperation in the future. In the course of this process, which in the case of Churraetia eventually turned a former Roman province into an ecclesiastical principality, the episcopal church became a governance actor that would play a crucial rule in exercising public functions such as tax collection, jurisdiction and military recruitment. Ecclesiastical property (often deriving from royal munificence) and fiscal income became indispensable means for performing these functions. The article’s second part focuses on the situation of 912 when the newly elected East Frankish king Conrad I, the first ruler of non-Carolingian stock, conferred two special privileges on the episcopal church of Chur: Conrad’s grant of the right to conduct inquisition procedure by compulsory witness in order to protect ecclesiastical property effectively meant that procedural law typical for the »public sphere« now came into the hands of the bishop of Chur. Conrad’s second stipulation, that the thirty-year period of proscription should not to be applied against the interest of the bishop of Chur, has to be seen against the background of legal pluralism in this region, in which several legal traditions were in conflict: while Roman law allowed a slave to rid himself of his master after thirty years, Aleman law forbade this, just as the idea that ecclesiastical property was regarded as inalienable spoke against the application of the thirty-years rule to the detriment of the church. Responding to ecclesiastical networks supporting his rule, Conrad thus had the Roman legal rule of prescription branded as a »bad custom« (mala consuetudo). As is finally argued in a more general perspective, in historical situations of political transition legal pluralism and legal change could lead to a new qualification of what had formerly been seen in more positive terms as »custom«.

The Wittenberg Concord: Creating Space for Dialogue by Gordon A. Jensen

Reviewed by: The Wittenberg Concord: Creating Space for Dialogue by Gordon A. Jensen Adam Koontz Gordon A. Jensen, The Wittenberg Concord: Creating Space for Dialogue. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2018. Pp. 235. $34.00. Most histories of Protestant denominations will include a chart of the permutations of formation, fissure, and union. Disagreement or agreement can be tracked through lines plunging away from or toward one another. This may appear normal now, but in sixteenth-century Europe, fissure seemed unnatural to most. Jensen’s book chronicles the efforts of many, especially the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer, to unite the already diverging streams of the Lutheran reformation in Saxony from the different theological tendencies of southern Germany and Switzerland. The discussions at Wittenberg in 1536 that led to the Saxons’ signing a statement on the controverted articles of the Lord’s Supper, baptism, and absolution with various southern Germans did not arise in a political vacuum. The imperial cities of southern Germany were militarily vulnerable within an increasingly politically hostile Holy Roman Empire, and they needed to affirm the 1530 Augsburg Confession to join the Smalcaldic League anchored by the larger powers of Electoral Saxony and Hesse. Political and military urgency was behind this burst of ecumenical dialogue. Jensen very thoroughly covers the theological background to the Concord, including the failures to put forward a common Protestant witness at the 1529 Marburg Colloquy and the 1530 imperial Diet at Augsburg, where [End Page 294] three separate Protestant parties each made separate confessions of faith to a finally unreceptive Charles V. Their disagreements about the nature of the sacraments and about how lay rulers ought to go about reformation of church property, among many things, could not be resolved before 1536. The Concord signed just after Ascension Day in 1536 did not attempt to resolve all issues. Jensen is clear that the Concord was not a new confession but a southern German interpretation of the Augsburg Confession. The Wittenberg Concord was sufficient in its sacramental statements for the southern Germans to celebrate the Lord’s Supper with the Saxons on Ascension Day. The document carefully avoided larger theological issues behind sacramental statements such as how Christ’s ascended human nature relates to the divine nature, and the dialogues at Wittenberg failed to produce a joint statement on how lay authorities should confiscate ecclesiastical property—due to great differences between Saxony and southern Germany on the theology of church-state relations. Jensen wants to apply the Wittenberg Concord’s successes to contemporary ecumenical dialogue, but at least two things make this more difficult than he allows. First, the necessity for dialogue was existential for the militarily beleaguered southern Germans, making potential military conquest the stimulus to discussion. Second, the implosion of Lutheran-Reformed dialogue later in the century may not have been a “hardening” of positions that could have been softer with a better approach to dialogue. Instead, posterity had to deal with the deeper christological and linguistic positions that the Concord glossed over, and the children could not fix what the forebears would not touch. Adam Koontz Temple University, Philadelphia, PA Copyright © 2019 Journal of Ecumenical Studies

A Shared Space and Shared Functions: From a Latin Catholic Church to an Islamic Vakıf in Ottoman Galata

In May 1696, a devastating conflagration spread through Galata causing great damage to Latin Catholic ecclesiastical properties, and most significantly the destruction of the Conventual Franciscan church complex of St. Francis. The land was subsequently seized by the Ottoman state and the remaining structure was converted into the imperial mosque of Galata Yeni Cāmiʿ by the reigning sultan’s mother. This study examines the history and shared functions of these two places of worship through the mosque’s endowment deed (vaḳfiye) and additional Ottoman and European contemporary sources. Moreover, local and regional historical contextualisation provides an insight into how both European-Ottoman political relations and internal socioreligious tendencies influenced Ottoman policy towards Galata’s most prominent Latin Catholic church during the late seventeenth century.

La societá ecclesiastica nell’Italia del VI secolo: <em>clericalis ordo e scrinia apostolica</em> attraverso l’Epistolario di papa Gregorio Magno

La sociedad eclesiástica en la Italia del siglo VI: clericalis ordo e scrinia apostolica a través del Epistolario del Papa Gregorio Magno. Análisis de la sociedad eclesiástica italiana de finales del siglo VI y principios del VII por medio del Epistolario del Papa Gregorio Magno, en el que se pone el acento en la labor reformadora del pontífice sobre el aparato burocrático administrativo y la centralización de la gestión de los bienes eclesiásticos y la organización de la ecclesia en ordines.