National Church
As a national church are Christian churches referred to their organization refers to a single state and limited and under are not a supranational authority.
There are national church tendencies and splits in the Roman Catholic , Orthodox and Protestant areas, each with different causes and accents.
In the early modern period, the Catholic Church in France and the Anglican Church saw themselves as national churches to different degrees.
According to the Roman Catholic understanding, national churches are branches of the church that are subject to a national jurisdiction only and do not recognize the universal primacy of jurisdiction of the papacy . Until the Second Vatican Council , this term was sometimes used to describe those Catholic churches that differed from the Roman Catholic Church mainly in the use of the respective national language in the liturgy (instead of Latin ).
Today the word is used - sometimes inappropriately - as a generic term for those churches that see themselves as part of the Catholic Church , but show significant differences in church life from the Roman Catholic Church (for example Old Catholics , Anglicans , Catholic Apostolic Church in Brazil or the Independent Philippine Church ).
In the second half of the church struggle at the time of National Socialism , there was a national church movement, German Christians, as a continuation of the “German Christians” .
literature
- Kjell Bluckert: The Church As Nation. A Study in Ecclesiology and Nationhood. 2000.
Web links
- Grigorios D. Papathomas: Face au concept d '“Église nationale”, la réponse canonique orthodoxe: l'Église autocéphale. (PDF; 118 kB) Accessed December 3, 2016 (French).