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Ecclesiastical law is a set of laws, rules, and regulations that a church codifies to administer its operations. It originated from religious councils in the 1st century BC and developed in England during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Ecclesiastical law regulates the behavior and practices of clergy and high ecclesiastical offices with internal matters of policy and process. The Roman Catholic Church established one of the largest and most complex sets of church law in recorded history. In the 19th century, the Roman Catholic Church instituted a single volume of canon law free from error, obsolescence, and contradiction.
In contemporary terms, ecclesiastical law is the internal set of laws, rules, regulations, and statutes that a church codifies to administer its operations. These laws are permutations of the original ecclesiastical law – also called English law or canon law – which once governed much of the Roman Catholic empire when the Church was the arbiter of judicial decree. In much the same way that today’s civil and criminal laws are derived from government, ecclesiastical law originated from the dictates of religious councils, beginning in the 1st century BC and developed in England during the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
In the first century, council-based systems for many of the world’s major religions began to establish the sets of canonical rules and laws that would form the basis for numerous rites and doctrines. Of course, this does not mean that ecclesiastical law should be confused or confused with religious doctrines, such as the Torah, the Bible, the Koran or others. Those religious codes are intended for parishes and practitioners. Canon and ecclesiastical law are intended to regulate the behavior and practices of clergy and high ecclesiastical offices with internal matters of policy and process.
The Roman Catholic Church established one of the largest and most complex sets of church law in recorded history. With the establishment of the Latin Rite – and later of the churches that would make up the Eastern Orthodox bloc – leading Church scholars and administrators wrote decrees regulating all kinds of religious practice, priestly behavior and a range of internal matters. In 17th-century England, rising tensions between Catholic and Anglican forces spilled onto the streets, sparking the English Civil War. As a result of this conflict, many of the elements of ecclesiastical law were appropriated by Anglican leaders during their period of government, which were then incorporated into the secular development of English common law which arbitrated civil and criminal matters.
In the 19th century, there were more than 19 decrees and rules in various manifestos and compendia that made up the Roman Catholic corpus juris – canon law. This corpus of codes and laws covered nearly every topical issue the Church had encountered during a millennium of jurisprudence. It soon became apparent that many of the rules and decrees comprising ecclesiastical law were of a directly contradictory nature. This fact led the Roman Catholic Church to institute a single volume of canon law free from error, obsolescence and contradiction, which still exists today.
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