L'Église catholique face aux états. Deux siècles de pratique concordataire 1801-2010 by Roland Minnerath (review)

Roland Minnerath, currently the Archbishop of Dijon in France, is an expert on Church-State relations. He published earlier on concordats (especially his book L'Église et les États concordataires (1846-1981). La souveraineté spirituelle in 1983). His experience is both practical and academic: after serving in the diplomatic service of the Holy See, he taught for years at the University of Strasbourg (France) in the faculté de théologie and the Institut de droit canonique.

His newest book is quite impressive and voluminous. The objects of his research are international treaties (in the form of a concordat, convention, agreement, modus vivendi) concluded between the Holy See and a State, covering a period from 1801 to 2010.

The book is divided into three parts with fifteen chapters in total. The author examines said international treaties signed between 1801 and 2010 to discover the doctrinal foundations on which the status and the liberty of the Church are based. This liberty of the Church vis-à-vis the State is the leading theme of the book. However, the author does not neglect to also deal with concordats and other international treaties concluded by the Holy See, and to offer some insights into the distinction between the Holy See and Vatican City.

In a first part, entitled 'Two centuries of concordats', the author basically analyses in five chapters the concordats and other agreements between the Holy See and States. A primarily chronological approach has been chosen for the chapters of this part.

The second part focuses on the juridical status of the Church in the legal system of the State. In again five chapters the author successively deals with the Church as a sovereign society, the right to religious liberty, independence and autonomy, common law and immunities, and finally various means of liberty, such as the right to own goods or the right to receive contributions.

The third and last part of the book is devoted to the collective liberties of the Church and has again five chapters, dealing with internal autonomy, the right to assistance, the appointment of bishops, the canonical and civil marriage, and finally the right to educate.

The period covered by the book can be divided in three general eras. Each of them corresponds with a teaching on the relations between the Catholic Church and States: the period of jurisdictionalism, the time of the two perfect societies, and finally the common law on religious liberty.

The author has done a marvelous job in not only bringing all this information together, but especially and above all in organizing the materials in a logical and comprehensible way, offering at the same time a framework to understand. We can only highly recommend this work for everyone who is interested in relations between Church and State and especially in the technique of concordats and other international instruments.