ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the legal systems of various Christian traditions worldwide, and how they reflect, but indicate substantially deeper agreement beyond, these Common Vision propositions about the faithful and the communion they share. The canon law of the Roman Catholic Church provides that Christ’s faithful are ‘incorporated into the Church of Christ through baptism’. In turn, the churches make provision for the imposition of sanctions, including exclusion from the spiritual benefits of church membership. There is remarkable juridical unity between the Christian traditions studied as to the ecclesiastical offences and sanctions which lie at the heart of church discipline. However, by ‘divine institution, among Christ’s faithful there are in the Church sacred ministers, who are in law also called clerics; the others are called lay people’. Roman Catholic canon law distinguishes the duties and rights of all the faithful, lay and ordained, as well as those specifically applicable to the laity.