ABSTRACT
Unlike dispensation, economy, from the Greek term oikonomia, is not known in the statute law or canons of the Church of England. In the 1944 report of the Archbishop’s Commission on Dispensation (the Palmer Report) an instant link is made between the eastern concept of economy and the western canonical concept of dispensation. ‘Dispensation is the English form of the Latin word dispensatio, which is the usual translation, in the Latin New Testament, of the Greek word oikonomia’.1 Whilst there are similarities in the eastern use of economy as a ‘suspension of the strict enforcement of Canon Law in cases of urgent need’2 and the western concept of dispensation as ‘the relaxation of a merely ecclesiastical law in a particular case’3 the two have been applied very differently in the eastern and western Churches over the centuries.
