Thomas Jefferson once described America's new religious freedom guarantees as a ‘fair’ and ‘novel experiment’.1 These guarantees, set out in the new American state and federal constitutions of 1776 to 1791, defied the millennium-old assumptions inherited from Western Europe: that one form of Christianity must be established in a community and that the state must protect and support it against all other forms of faith. America would no longer suffer such governmental prescriptions and proscriptions of religion, Jefferson declared. All forms of Christianity had to stand on their own feet and on an equal footing with all other religions. Their survival and growth had to turn on the cogency of their word, not the coercion of the sword, and on the faith of their members, not the force of the law.

This study, which focuses on the Roman Catholic Church, explores the concepts of confidentiality and the right to privacy in contemporary moral and legal thought. The management of church personnel files presents the challenge of observing and maintaining confidentiality and privacy. In most cases, the information contained in personnel files of the clergy, members of religious institutes, and others holding ecclesiastical offices is confidential, which should safeguard the reputation of all persons involved. From a juridical viewpoint, the Church's innate duty to respect the dignity of the person, as well as the natural right of privacy and good name, forms the foundation of this study. Certain practices in the Church entail the collection, use, or retention of confidential information about individuals for internal purposes, the administration of justice, and the management of archives and documents in the diocesan curia. In the final analysis, the Church has the responsibility to both protect the privacy of all the faithful and to transmit the Gospel message transparently.

The Enabling Act 1919 provided for a new National Church Assembly able to make Measures with the same force and effect as an Act of Parliament. The 1919 Act was without question a constitutional moment with far-reaching effects; and it was about law, not morals: legalists triumphed over moralists. However, it was just one stage in a much longer trajectory of thinking about the constitution of the Church of England. This article, which started life as a lecture to the Ecclesiastical Law Society's day conference on 2 April 2022, takes the story further back – and widens it. It presents the key elements of thinking about the constitution – accidents, continuity, change – in the works of English ecclesiastical lawyers – civilians, common lawyers and clerical jurists – from the Reformation to the Act of 1919. To what extent, if at all, in their understandings of the church constitution, were our historic ecclesiastical lawyers legalists, or moralists, or both? Was the ecclesiastical constitution itself simply a legal category, or did it, and its basics, also have a moral quality? This article explores these questions in relation to: (1) the nature, sources, and purposes of the constitution of the Church of England; (2) legislative, administrative and judicial power; and (3) the rights of the individual enforceable against the decisions of ecclesiastical government. This article is based on a paper delivered to the Ecclesiastical Law Society's 2022 day conference.

It is a great challenge to respond as a theologian to Professor Doe's magisterial survey in the article published in the previous pages of this Journal.I was asked to respond to the paper upon which that article is based from a theological perspective as part of the Ecclesiastical Law Society's 2022 day conference. Professor Doe demonstrates how, in the years between Hooker and the Church Assembly, ecclesiastical lawyers had recourse to both ethical, natural law arguments and those purely from legal or even positivistic ones. It is significant to see how frequently the Anglican theorist, Richard Hooker, is invoked throughout the article. He dates, of course, from the Reformation period when, as Harold Berman points out, a pre-Enlightenment jurisprudence still obtained which combined all three dimensions of law – the political, the moral, and the historical. In my view, what is important about Hooker is that he makes no separation between the legal and the ethical because law is divine in origin and even in God himself there is a law of his being: ‘the being of God is a kind of law to his working’ in giving his perfection to what he makes and ‘God is a law both to himself and to all other things beside’. Moreover, the ethical is only realised in what we decide to do and the laws we make. Law in Hooker is even Christological because, just as the Father begets the Logos (the Son), so the law proceeds as his continuing work in creation and history. To walk in God's ways and obey his laws is to be in union with Christ. Hooker was, of course, working out the meaning of the emerging Church of England in the Reformation Settlement, but even the pragmatic is itself participatory in the divine law and he appeals back to the natural law tradition for that reason.

The theologian Paul Avis, in his handbook for those becoming bishops in the Anglican Communion, makes scarcely any reference throughout the course of the treatise to any distinction between a diocesan and a non-diocesan bishop. At one level this is refreshing, eschewing as it does any notion of a hierarchy within the order of bishops. However, on another level it is somewhat odd, for so much of the episcopal polity and praxis articulated throughout assumes the reader is ‘becoming’ a diocesan bishop, and is, consequently, at times irrelevant to those who are ‘becoming’ a bishop in an assisting role.

On 21 April, Dominic Raab resigned as Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, to be replaced by Alex Chalk KC. On 8 May, The Times reported that the Bill of Rights Bill was to be dropped and that the Ministry of Justice had told its reporters that the new Justice Secretary had been ‘looking carefully’ at the Bill, while another Government source had described the Bill as a ‘complete mess’.