Administering ecclesiastial justice - an introduction to the archives of the episcopal courts in Malta

Abstract

Omnis potestas a Deo—in the Latin West, the Catholic Church has long stressed that it enjoys power directly from God, without intermediaries. In a certain sense, two millenia of the Church’s presence in the world, can be read through Church–State relations. In essence, this constitutes the Church’s and State’s respective search for the source of their authority, their sphere of jurisdiction, that is their claim over man in so far as he found himself to be, at least for a long stretch of his history, a religious being trying to navigate through this earthly existence. In exerting this claim over man, as well as in its attempt at self underact least in recent centuries the Church defined itself a ‘perfect society’, that is one which has within it all the means necessary for the achievement of its end—ultimately the eternal salvation of mankind.

Most importantly, the concept of perfect (meaning complete) society serves the Church as a juridical instrument to defend its rights in its relations with the only other ‘perfect society’, that is the State.1 The Holy See had to negotiate through troubled waters to reclaim a certain freedom of action for the Church, with regimes denying the Church the very freedom they so loudly professed.