Immunity

IMMUNITY: In the stricter sense, the freedom of certain persons or property from public duties and taxes. The word is Sometimes, however, used in a wider sense, to include especially the right of Asylum (q.v.). . After Christianity was recognized by the Roman Empire, the Church acquired for its possessions immunity from the class of imposts known in Roman law as munera aordida, and at the end of the fourth century also from extraordinary land taxes. The clergy, like the heathen priests before them, were free from all public service, and from inheritance taxes up to a certain point, though complete freedom from personal taxation can not be demonstrated. While these immunities were maintained in the Eastern Empire and in the Code of Justinian, they led, in the West to difficulties which brought about their almost total abolition by Valentinian III. Nor is there any thing like a general immunity of church property in the Frankish kingdom. The clergy were exempt from military service, and apparently from the poll tax where it was levied; but land taxes and feudal services resting upon property belonging to the Church or the clergy were not remitted. Under the Merovingians and Carolingians first certain churches and then whole dioceses and greater monasteries gained immunity by special privilege, as the temporal magnates also often did: From the sixth to the tenth century these privileges, based in their conception on the old immunity of the royal domain, remained essentially the same. Public officials were forbidden to visit the immune territory for the collection of taxes from its possessor or his subjects, or to use any force against the latter,; where these taxes were still due to the king, they were to be paid through the landlord. Moreover, besides the collection of fines and similar payments, he enjoyed the right of jurisdiction in minor matters, though in those involving life or liberty he was still bound to defer to the regular courts. After the tenth century the greater landowners, temporal and spiritual, began to acquire the higher jurisdiction also over the people on their estates. In the Carolingian period church property was pro tected by a heavy fine (600 soldi) against any one who violated it. This did not last long as applied to the whole estate, but was continued for the churches, cemeteries, and dwellings of the clergy. Freedom from military service continued as long as the old methods of raising an army were in force; but bishops and abbots were early summoned to the field, and when the feudal system was devel oped the duty of supplying men-at-arms rested equally on spiritual and temporal lords. The most determined opposition to any infringement on ecclesiastical immunities was not made against arbitrary royal imposts so much as against regular

municipal taxation such as came into vogue in the German and Italian towns in the twelfth century.

The decrees of the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils (1179, 1215) mark the beginning of efforts to secure complete immunity for the Church, which has been demanded constantly ever since. The Council of Trent asserted this claim, though in rather general terms; the bull In cwnd Domini (q.v.) threatened the violators of immunities with excommunication; and a special " Congregation of Jurisdiction and Immunity " has been in existence at Rome since 1626, though it is without significance to-day. The Syllabus of 1864 decisively main tained the essential right of the Church to immunity, although modern Roman Catholic writers generally leave the question open as to its derivation trom divine right, or even frequently deny it. Since the Reformation, however, the personal immunity of the clergy and the real immunity of property not serving directly for religious purposes have tended to disappear; and even in the European countries where the Roman Catholic Church has a history of special privilege, they are usually conceded, so far as they exist at all, to all organized religious bodies.

(Siegfried Rietschel.)

Bibliography: Bingham, Origines, V., HL; L. Thomassin, Vetus et nova ecclesix diecipiina, vol. iii., lib. i., chaps. :exin.-alvid., Paris, 1728; P. Hinsohius, Kirdenrech4 i. 123 sqq., Berlin,' 1869; E. Friedberg, Die Grsnsen twdschen Stoat and Kirche, Tübingen, 1872; idem, Lehrbuch des . . . Birchenrechts, pp. 142 sqq., 474 sqq., Leipsic, 1895; A. L. Richter, Lshrbuch dea . . . Kirchenrechts, ed. W. Kahl, pp. 374 sqq., 1293 sqq., ib.. 1886; F. Chemed, De l'immunitb eaWastique et monastique, Paris, 1878; W. E. Addis and T. Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, pp. 474-478, London, 1903; KL, s. 443-448; and the literature cited under Asylum, Right of.