THE PRIVY COUNCIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL JURISDICTION.

Western Star, Issue 73, 3 April 1875, Page 3

THE PRIVY COUNCIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL JURISDICTION.

A case affecting the doctrines of '*Spiritual Independence,’’ as existing in churches separate from the State, was decided the other day by the Judicial Council, and is thus related by a Loudon correspondent : “ A French Catholic Canadian incurred the censure of a Roman Catholic Bislop, because, as a member of a Literary Institute, he refused to submit to Ecclesiastical dictation. When he died, the Bishop, treating him as an excommunicated person, refused to allow him to be buried iu the consecrated part of the Roman Catholic Cemetery, and his widow thereupon brought an action to compel the authorities to admit her husband to sepulture in the place w'here orthodox Catholics usually are buried. He was, in the meantime buried iu a Protestant cemetery, and the case went from the Primary Court through two intermediate Courts to the Privy Council. The plea that the Bishop’s act being ‘spiritual’ in its character, could not be reviewed by a civil tribunal, was contemptuously brushed aside. The Court asserted its rights to examine whether the Bishop had acted in the due exercise of his ecclesiastical jurisdiction, or whether he had exceeded

the powers which ho possessed. The Judicial Committee decided that he had exceeded his powers, and that the deceased Canadian was not duly and formally excommunicated, and it has ordered his remains to be interred in the Catholic Cemetery. Strangely enough, the decision of Privy Council is based on the ‘ liberties of the Galilean Church,’ which the Trench emigrants carried with them to Canada, and which they still retain. It is not a little remarkable that the French Catho’ics in t auada shauld still possess those Galilean liberties which Frenchmen, themselves have long lost. Anyone who reads Sir K. Collier’s decision in this case will not fail to see that he holds precisely the same principles on which the Scutch Judges acted in the Cardross case. He maintains, not that the Civil Courts have any right to interfere with the rules by which members of a religious body may agree to bind themselves ; but that they have a right to see that these rules are not violated to the injury of any member who may appeal to them for protection.”