FORUM ECCLESIASTICUM, a church ribunal or court. It is either internal or ex ernal — Forum Internum, Forum Externum. ['lie Forum Internum is what is known as the ribunal of penance, the confessional, where the renitent is both accuser and accused; and the confessor is the judge who condemns or ac quits or pardons and exacts satisfaction for wrongs and reparation of injury done to oth ers whether in reputation or property. The Forum Exiernum is any ecclesiastical tribunal outside of the sacrament of penance that is concerned with Church government. What are the sanctions by which the judgment of the Church's tribunals are enforced? Has the Church the right to inflict temporal pains and penalties on offenders against her laws? That the Church does possess such power is the teaching of the Church herself : the doc trine which declares she does not possess it has been explicitly condemned. The proposition that °the Pope or the whole Church collec tively cannot punish any man, however wicked he may be, with a coercive penalty° unless the civil power gives them authority to do so, is condemned by Pope John XXII and a similar proposition was condemned by Pope Pius VII in the bull Auctorem Fidei: one of the proposi tions condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Sylla bus (1864) declared that uthe Church has no power to employ force? In proof of the neces sity of such power in the Church, the case of a bishop is cited who teaches heretical doctrine: has not the Church, it is asked, power to depose him; or must the matter go before a tribunal of the civil power? It is held that to make such resort to the secular courts necessary is to render the Church powerless to execute her divine commission and to make a civil judge the judge of a purely ecclesiastical cause.
On the ground of the canon law the Church has the right in herself uto inflict stripes, to impose fines, to imprison in a monastery' offenders against her laws; in short, to impose all pen alties short of the effusion of blood, citra san guinis effusionem, or its equivalent. Practi cally, the power of the Church at present is confined to the infliction only of her spiritual penalties, and these only when they do not in any' degree directly or indirectly impair the civil rights of the person who incurs the spiritual censures; when they do so trench his civil rights, the person has recourse to the secular courts. Thus in this country cases are often brought into the civil tribunals of rectors of parishes or pastors of churches who have been deposed by bishops or other ecclesiastical su periors; and courts find it within their compe tence to decide whether the act of the superiors has been done in entire conformity with the constitution and laws of the religious body con cerned, and the civil and contractual rights of the complainant.