The aim of the paper is to briefly characterize the visits ad limina of the Olomouc Bishop Charles II. of Liechtenstein-Castelcorno and the contents of his reports on the state of the diocese, conserved in the Secret Vatican Archive. The Bishop executed seven visits ad limina during his long episcopate (1664–1695), in the years 1667, 1672, 1675, 1682, 1685, 1689 and 1693, always through the mediation of a procurator. After describing the visits and the reports conserved in the archives, the author analyses the structure and the content of the text of the conserved reports. The final part of the article is focused on three issues of violation of ecclesiastical immunity, evaluated by the Bishop himself as the principal obstacles of his pastoral activity in the diocese of Olomouc. The first one was the exclusion of the competency of ecclesiastical law courts in the cases of tithes by Emperor Ferdinand III, the second one the breaking of episcopal jurisdiction from the part of exempt religious orders (Benedictines, Cistercians and the Knights of Malta) during the procedure of nomination of parish priests in exempt parishes; the third great problem was the massive violation of freedom when contracting marriages of serfs by the proprietaries of the domains, which rejected the manumission of serfs and their transfers to the domain of an another proprietary.
New instructions on proceedings in case of requests on leaving the Church were promulgated on 15 November 2013 for the Diocese of Brno. They contained, apart from the theological bases and procedural-law regulations, the specification of the relevant institutions of substantive law. This was a reaction to the growing number of requests of such a character in the Czech Republic which were otherwise very wide-spread in the countries with the Church tax. The uncertainty and cautiousness of the lawgiver and the need for eventually making provision for a still developing dispute in this actual issue in the future, is primarily evident from its publication ten years after the date of its signature. This document is characterized by several theological-legal aspects, particularly within the context of the abrogated institution of defection from the communion with the Catholic Church by formal act which was part of universal canon law in the years 1983 to 2010. The main goal of this article is to point out the theological, as well as legal, bases of this instruction which lay in particular in universal penal and marriage canon law and its valuation after three years of practical application.
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