RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Jurisdiction, Ecclesiastical
cuser, the obligation to prove the charge, and the lex talionis, instead of which excommunication was frequently the penalty for accusers who failed to follow up or to prove their charges. Under the influence of Germanic ideas, the Church further adopted the oath of purgation, especially in the case of clergy who had been tried and not convicted, when some suspicion still remained. The compurgators were dropped, and the process was regarded less as a privilege of the accused than as his duty, to clear himself from suspicion. In the Carolingian period the Frankish Church employed still more of the Germanic procedure; the accused had the right to clear himself by an oath, and if it was made with compurgators he went free of either the charge or the suspicion (in case of ex officio proceedings). Under the joint influence of the Roman and Germanic systems, by the end of the eleventh century this had become the common law of the Church, except that the accuser in the case of clerics was always required to prove his charge. The purgatio canonica was opposed to the purgatio vulgaris or Wager of Battle (q.v.), which the popes were endeavoring to suppress. The objection to the use of this method in ex officio proceedings, that it allowed no objective investigation of the offenses suspected to have been committed, and the need of stricter dfscipline for the clergy, especially in view of the increasing accusations brought against them by the heretical sects, caused Innocent III. to reform the procedure in ex officio cases, distinguishing two courses, per inquisitionem and per denunciationem. The former was rather a disciplinary than a criminal process, and permitted purgation by oath when no positive result had been reached by the investigation, or when the preliminary proceedings had raised a strong presumption in favor of innocence. The other process required the denunciatio evangelica to precede further action, which followed the course of criminal procedure in case of recalcitrancy. But this method gradually disappeared from the practise of the Church in consequence of the limitation of its power over the laity in criminal cases. There was the less need for it when, as was frequently the case from the fifteenth century, special officials (called promotores or procuratores fiscales) were appointed as assessors to the ecclesiastical courts, to investigate suspected crimes or disciplinary offenses, bring them before the courts, and represent the public interests at the trial. By the seventeenth century, when the denunciatio evangelica had ceased to be practical in view^ of the office of these promotores, and when the requirement of an insinuatio clamosa or infamia for the opening of a process per inquisitionem had lost its significance, the place of both methods was taken by a modified form of the latter, the purpose of which was to establish the facts, whether they pointed to the guilt or the innocence of the accused. The purgatio canonica, for which in any case it was increasingly difficult to find compurgators, was out of place in this form of procedure, and disappeared with the seventeenth century. Since papal legislation had made no attempt at a universal reconstruction of the penal and disciplinary procedure from the pontificate of Innocent III. until the be-
ginning of the nineteenth century, the newer system developed variously in different places; but there was a general tendency, caused by the limitation of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and by the diminution of the revenues which had formerly supported the courts, to dispense with all but the essential forms. A similar tendency is displayed in the instructions of the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars issued in 1880, which sets forth an improved and simplified form of procedure, to take place privately and in writing, and allows the bishops to use it when the older form is impossible or inexpedient.
2. Administrative and Civil Jurisdiction: The development of the civil jurisdiction of the Church is described under Audientia Episcopalis. Besides this, the imperial legislation expressly recognized the competence of the bishops de religione, i.e., in controversies to be decided according to ecclesiastical rules, concerning, for example, the right to the incumbency of Church offices. In Gaul also such matters were under the jurisdiction of the bishops and synods; but since there was a difference of law between Church and State, and the State did not undertake to execute the ecclesiastical decisions, those matters which required state action (matrimonial causes, questions of church property, etc.) came before the secular courts. In 614 the Church succeeded in getting all cases de possessions (questions of property, to be settled by award, not by public penalty) in which the clergy were concerned before its courts. In the Carolingian period the claims of the Church were recognized by the ordinance that disputes between clerics should be settled by the bishop, and that the bishop should sit with the court in any question de possessions between clerics and laymen. In the Middle Ages the Church succeeded to a great extent in enforcing its contention that the laity had no competence in ecclesiastical matters, helped by the contrast between the confusion or weakness of secular courts and its own prompt and thorough execution of its decisions, with the power of excommunication to back them. According to the canon law, the spiritual courts took cognizance of all causae incidentes spirituales (those which touched the sacraments or offices of the Church, especially marriage); the causae spiritualibus annexae (such as the right of patronage, tithes, betrothals, wills, and agreements ratified by oath); causae civiles ecclesiasticis accessoriae (questions of dowry, legitimacy, etc.). Further, all civil proceedings, in so far as the injustice of one party could be construed as sin, might be brought into the church courts; and so might the cases of personae miserabiles (widows, orphans, paupers, pilgrims), as well as those in which secular judges denied justice. Clergy, monks and nuns, all ecclesiastical institutions, crusaders belonged in any case to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, except in cases of feudal rights. Here also the Roman Catholic Church still clings to these claims in theory, although they have long ceased to be practical in most countries. (P, HiNSCHiusf.)
II. The Protestant Churches: The jurisdiction exercised at the present time by the churches of western Europe and the United States differs
Jurisdiction, Ecclesiastical