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Re St Leonard, Hythe

Canterbury Commissary Court: Hopkins CG, 26 April 2023[2023] ECC Can 2Restoration order – temporary minor re-ordering licence – abuse of process

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2024

David Willink
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Case Notes
Information
Ecclesiastical Law Journal , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , January 2024 , pp. 119 - 120
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Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical Law Society 2024

The petitioner sought an order requiring the PCC and churchwardens to remove a moveable altar and associated furniture from the nave, and that they be returned to a side chapel, thereby restoring full use of the high altar. In his application, he asserted that the altar had been introduced without faculty in the first decade of the present century, and that since the end of 2016, it had been used at the chancel steps without lawful authority. Apparently in response to the application, the incumbent sought and obtained a Temporary Minor Re-Ordering licence from the Archdeacon, permitting the occasional use of the moveable altar in the nave for a period of two years (the Archdeacon noting that in his view, a TMRO was not needed as the furniture in question was moveable in any event).

The petitioner argued: that the TMRO was an abuse of process, given that it was made after the present application; that even if the TMRO was not in itself abusive, it could not authorise the temporary use of furniture that had been introduced without lawful authority; and that the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved should sit to consider the damaging departure from Anglican tradition of kneeling for Holy Communion and having a railed-off sacrarium around the altar.

The court found nothing abusive in seeking to obtain a secure basis in law for the temporary use of the moveable altar once that basis had been questioned. The fact that the TMRO had the effect of frustrating the petitioner's application was of little substance. On the petitioner's second point, the court noted that the petitioner sought the return of the moveable altar to ‘its correct location’, and did not seek its removal from the church. More broadly, an application for a restoration order should not become a forum for a wide-ranging audit of the lawfulness of furnishings in the church. Any petition for a faculty after the TMRO period can encompass any outstanding questions about the retention of particular items. Finally, the court did not accept that the application engaged any matters of doctrine; in reality it was simply a matter of the occasional use of portable furnishings for a limited period. The application for a restoration order was dismissed.