THE PRIVY COUNCIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL JURISDICTION.

Evening Star, Issue 3771, 25 March 1875, Page 3

THE PRIVY COUNCIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL JURISDICTION.

A case, affecting the doctrine of “ Spiritual independence,” as existing in churches separate from the State, was decided tho >;(h«r day by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and is thus narrated by a London correspondent:— A*French Catholic Canadian’incurred the censure of a Roman Catholic Bishop because as the member of a Literay Institute he refused to submit to eccelesiasiical dictation. When he died, the Bishop, treating him as an excommunicated person, refused to allow him to be buried in the consecrated part of the Roman Catholic cemetery, and his widow thereupon brought an action to compel the authoi ities to admit her late husband to sepulture in the place where othodox Catholics usually are buried. He was in the meantime interred in a Protestant cemetery, 1 and the case went from the Primary Court through two intermediate courts to the Privy The"plea''that the Bishop’s act being “ sp’ritual ’’ in its character, could not b3 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 ecclesiastipal jurisdiction, or whether he had exceeded the powers which he possessed. The Judicial Committee decided that he had exceeded his powers, and that the deceased Canadian was not duly and formally excom municated, and it has ordered his remains to be interred iu the Catholic cemetery. Strangely enough, the decision of the Privy Council is based on the “liberties of tbe Gallican Church,” which the French emigrants carried with them to Canada, and which they still retain. It is not a little remarkable that the French Catholics in Canada should still possess those Gallican liberties which Frenchmen themselves have long lost. Anyone who reads >ir R. Oollier’s decision in this case will not fail to see that he holds precisely the same principles on which the Scotch 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 net violated to the injury of any member who may appeal to them for protection.