A Critique Of Francis G. Morrisey's Approach To Alienation Of Church Property
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Church administrators are often faced with highly complex financial decisions in today's world. Many of these decisions involve substantial amounts of money and risk. One key area where this has been evident is the alienation of church property. In today's litigious society, many religious institutes and diocese have sought to protect their assets by civilly incorporating their apostolates such as nursing homes, senior citizen's residences, hospitals and schools as legal entities separate from the sponsoring institute or diocese. Often, this involves a transfer of the title of ownership of the building or property where the apostolate is located from the sponsoring unit to the new civil corporation. Older or no longer used seminaries, religious houses and other properties are being sold to get out from under the burden of heavy maintenance costs and civil taxes. The responsibility of church administrators is not only to be in compliance with the civil laws regulating these transaction, but also, the canonical norms regulating them. In 1995, Rev. Francis G. Morrisey, O.M.I., of the Faculty of Canon Law at St. Paul's University in Ottawa, Ontario Canada, published an article entitled "The Alienation of Temporal Goods in Contemporary Practice,"1 in which he tackled the complex problem of understanding the Church's norms on alienation. What is alienation? What is subject to these regulations? Who is subject to these regulations? When must permission be sought for alienation? These are the fundamental questions that Morrisey addressed in his article. It is Morrisey's answers to these questions that will be the focus of this paper. The following pages will identify and explain the key concepts which are essential for an understanding of canonical alienation. Following a brief historical overview, they will examine the Church's legislation on alienation in the 1917 and 1983 Codes of Canon Law. Finally, the thesis will analyze Morrisey's treatment of alienation in the light of the research done in chapters one and two. It is my hope that this critical analysis of Morrisey's understanding of alienation will afford the reader a clearer understanding of this complex canonical area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.028 | 0.033 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".