Talk:Priest–penitent privilege in England

Current law comes from Halsbury's Laws of England/ CRIMINAL LAW, EVIDENCE AND PROCEDURE /13. EVIDENCE /(5) PRIVILEGE/ (iii) Legal Professional Privilege /1163. Legal professional privilege - but this is not such a good source for the general reader so I will try to find something in a modern Exidence text.

The body of "History" is from the Catholic Encyclopedia. I am now going to try to align the contents therein with the citations in Halsbury which are:


 * 1) Eleventh Report of the Criminal Law Revision Committee, Evidence (General) 1972 (Cmnd 4991) para 272.
 * 2) 2 Co Inst 629
 * 3) Du Barre v Livette (1791) Peake 77
 * 4) Butler v Moore (1802) McNally, Evidence 253
 * 5) Broad v Pitt (1828) 3 C & P 518
 * 6) R v Gilham (1828) 1 Mood CC 186, CCR
 * 7) R v Griffin (1853) 6 Cox CC 219
 * 8) R v Hay (1860) 2 F & F 4
 * 9) Pais v Pais [1971] P 119, [1970] 2 All ER 491 - this is about priests acting as marriage guidance counsellors/divorce proceedings so not quite to our point.

I will do some more later this week. Cutler 19:59, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Seal in Anglicanism
I have removed the sentence: In general, the Church of England does not regard confession as a sacrament, its exercise being optional so there is no doctrine of the Seal of the Confessional as it appears to be untrue - see Anglican sacraments. Cutler 13:30, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

This article is a bit racist and offensive. I was redirected from "Priest-penitent privilege in the UK". England and the UK are different things. Please account for this, especially considering growing tensions regarding independence. Violence may ensue. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.246.255.252 (talk) 22:17, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

Overly specialist language
Clearly it is necessary for this article to be precise, legally speaking. However, it should also be easily readable by laypeople. Some parts are written in very legalistic language: for example

"The reason for this is that though canons, in order to be valid must, as these did, receive the royal sanction, they are made in convocation, and, thus, without representation of the laity. Accordingly, if this canon infringed a right enjoyed by the lay subjects of the realm it would, seemingly, in as far as it did so, not be valid against them."

I struggled to follow this, not knowing the jargon. Could a plain English version of this and other similar passages be written, please? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.189.50.143 (talk) 23:24, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Update
Sometimes I come across Wikpedia articles that are up to about ten years out of date, but in this case the state of the art is the beginning of the 20th century! It seems inconceivable that this topic hasn't come up in the late 20th and early 21st century given the scale of child sexual abuse in the Catholic and other churches, and the move across law and society to much higher prioritisation of safeguarding. I hope someone can update the article with the latest legal thinking. Beorhtwulf (talk) 18:33, 4 February 2019 (UTC)