The House of Clergy is the middle house in the tricameral Church of England General Synod legislature. It consists of representatives of the ordained clergy of the Church of England.
The House of Clergy is the middle house in the tricameral Church of England General Synod legislature. It consists of representatives of the ordained clergy of the Church of England.
The House of Clergy comprises ordained members of the Church of England below the rank of bishop. Members are elected by their fellow clergy to represent their individual Dioceses at their regional Diocesan Synod. [1] Members are obliged to retire when they reach 70. [2] The House of Clergy, like the House of Bishops and House of Laity, hold veto power over all proposed Church of England Measures and reports. An example of this was when the House of Clergy vetoed a report on homosexuals and same-sex unions. [3] It comprises the Lower Houses of the Convocations of Canterbury and York. [4]
Elections to the House of Clergy take place every five years with by-elections held to fill any vacancies that may arise between elections. [5] In practice the members of the House of Clergy are identical to the members elected to the Convocations of Canterbury and York. [5] In order to be elected to the House of Clergy, the person must be an ordained member of the Church of England. A clergyman or women must be elected by the Deanery Synod of the area which includes the parish that they are licensed to work in, to the Diocesan Synod. From there, they must be elected by the members of the Diocesan Synod to the House of Clergy. [6] In 1987, following the decision to allow ordination of women as Deacons in the Church of England, women became eligible for election to the House of Clergy for the first time. [6] Members can also be co-opted and with a limited number being appointed. [7]
Membership consists of three elected representatives by each Diocese in the Province of Canterbury and the Province of York including the extraprovincial Diocese of Gibraltar in Europe and the Diocese of Sodor and Man (which only elects one member). [8] Other members elected include one for the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and London, one jointly for the Universities of Durham and Newcastle, four elected by the other Universities split between Canterbury and York and six Deans elected from Cathedrals, plus either the Dean of Jersey or the Dean of Guernsey. The appointed ex officio members are the three senior Chaplains of the British Armed Forces, the Chaplain-General of Prisons and two members selected by the Anglican religious orders. [8]
The Church of England is the established Christian church in England. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain by the 3rd century and to the 6th-century Gregorian mission to Kent led by Augustine of Canterbury. Its adherents are called Anglicans.
An ecclesiastical court, also called court Christian or court spiritual, is any of certain courts having jurisdiction mainly in spiritual or religious matters. In the Middle Ages, these courts had much wider powers in many areas of Europe than before the development of nation states. They were experts in interpreting canon law, a basis of which was the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian, which is considered the source of the civil law legal tradition.
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The General Synod is the tricameral deliberative and legislative organ of the Church of England. The synod was instituted in 1970, replacing the Church Assembly, and is the culmination of a process of rediscovering self-government for the Church of England that had started in the 1850s.
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The Convocations of Canterbury and York are the synodical assemblies of the bishops and clergy of each of the two provinces which comprise the Church of England. Their origins go back to the ecclesiastical reorganisation carried out under Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury (668–690) and the establishment of a separate northern province in 733. Until 1225 the synods were composed entirely of bishops, but during the thirteenth century more and more clergy were cited until by 1283 the membership was established as the bishops, deans, archdeacons and abbots of each province together with one proctor (representative) from each cathedral chapter and two proctors elected by the clergy of each diocese. The main purpose of the convocations was to take counsel for the well-being of the church and to approve canonical legislation, but in practice much time was spent in discussing the amount of tax to be paid to the Crown since the clergy were a separate estate of the realm and refused to be taxed in or through Parliament. Before the end of the nineteenth century, the Convocation of Canterbury, which was numerically very much larger, played the major role and the activity of the Convocation of York was often little more than giving formal approval to the decisions taken by the southern province.
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