ECCLESIASTICAL CORPORATIONS.
Such corporations as are composed of per sons who take a lively interest in the ad vancement of religion, and who are associ ated and incorporated for that purpose. Ang. & A. Corp. § 36.
Corporations whose members are spiritual persons are distinguished from lay corpora tions; 1 Bla. Com. 470.
They are generally called religious corpo rations in the United States. 2 Kent 274; Ang. & A. Corp. § 37.
In the earlier times, the church became a large property owner. Before the device of a corporation eole was known to the law, there was the greatest uncertainty as to who the owner of church property really was. Property given to the church was given to the patron saint—the gift was in the first place to God and the saint, and only in the second place to the ecclesiastic in charge of it. But it was man aged by a group of persons and they were per petual because their numbers were always being renewed. Gradually the theory that they were per sonce fictx was evolved by the Canoniets. They
became persons created by law—distinct from their members, and perpetual. The change was grad ually accepted by the common-law lawyers and was extended to other groups which had nothing to do with the church. The growing definiteness of the conception of the corporation had reacted upon those ecclesiastical corporations which had originally in troduced the idea of persona ficta. The corporation was a person. Gifts were made to a parson for the benefit of the church no longer to a saint. The Parson became a corporation sole and gradually that theory obtained recognition at the common law; 3 Holdsw. Hist. E. L. 367; see 16 L. Q. R. 336, where Prof. Maitland suggests that "corpora tion sole" was first applied to a parson by Brooke, author of the Abridgment, who died in 1558. See, as to corporations sole, CORPORATION.
See ASSOCIATION; RELIGIOUS SOCIETIES,; Cnusca. ' •