ABOUT THE CONFERENCE PROGRAMME SPEAKERS
Ecclesiastical and Canon Law from the Point of View of the Public Education in Slovenia
Presentation by Assist. Prof. Sebastijan Valentan, PhD
Religious freedoms, which guarantee the right of private or public exercising of their faith to individuals or groups, is still in many places an insufficiently regulated area because the state does not pay enough detailed attention to it. Among academic legal professionals, it is manifested as a lack of necessary seminars and consultations dedicated to the issues of the relationship between the state and the Church and religious communities. In the professional and scientific legal literature, that relationship is not examined systematically, neither is there a single name for the branch of law containing rules that govern the relationship between the state and religious communities. However, there is an objective need for such a thing. That area of the legal science is frequently described only as a relationship between the Church and the state, or the state and religious communities.
Dr Drenikova and Dr Šturm call the right relating to the Church appropriately state ecclesiastical law. That category of law (German: Staatkirchenrecht) relates to the set of legal rules whereby a state governs the institutional organisation and activities of religious organisations, including the right of individual to freedom of religion, on its territory. It is particularly necessary to differentiate the autonomous internal right of individual religious organisations that enable them to govern their internal legal organisation and activities (e.g. canon law of the Catholic Church).
In the wider Slovenian public, there are strongly generalised opinions on the matter of the relationship between the State and the Church, indicating lack of in-depth legal knowledge of the matter. It is a fact that the State and the Church cooperate, connect, but still maintain the constitutionally set boundary that must not be crossed. The regulator of any violations is the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia as the highest guardian of constitutionality. There are other regular courts and laws that govern that area.
Canon law, which is completely autonomous within the Catholic Church, has became increasingly more like an independent science since Gratian’s Decree, and its study has become a part of the academic programme of all major universities. The study programme at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, modelled after the system in Austria, consisted of two parts. Among the subjects in the first part, which had an introductory character and ended with a state examination in historical law, apart from Roman law, there was also canon law, which contained a lot of historical materials. There are famous writings by Professor Radoslav Kušej dating back to 1927, titled “Ecclesiastical Law”. Along with other legal historians, Kušej was a regular member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts as well as a professor at the Faculty of Law of the University in Ljubljana. In Slovenia, canon law is today taught at the Faculty of Theology in Ljubljana and in the Maribor unit as well as at the Faculty of European Law in Koper. Many universities on different continents have faculties of canon law (the Saint Paul University in Canada, the Catholic University of America in the United States of America, the Catholic University in Congo, the La Sagesse University in Lebanon, and numerous universities in Europe)., while canon law or ecclesiastical law are taught at many state faculties and academies of law (Bologna, Madrid, Zagreb, Vienna and elsewhere).
Some consider canon law to be the first modern legal system in Europe, proving that complex and coherent legal systems can be composed from a mix of often contradictory laws, traditions and local customs that both the Church and the State encountered in the Middle Ages.
Key words: ecclesiastical law, canon law, State-Church, state law, religion, state, the Constitution
