Faculty (canon law)
legal instrument in canon law
A faculty is a legal instrument or warrant in canon law, usually an authorisation to do something.
Catholic Church
In the canon law of the Catholic Church, a faculty is "the authority, privilege, or permission, to perform an act or function. In a broad sense, a faculty is a certain power, whether based on one's own right, or received as a favour from another, of validly or lawfully doing some action".
Church of England
In the Church of England (whose canons have the status of national law) the "faculty jurisdiction" is set out in the Care of Churches and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure 1991, and the Faculty Jurisdiction Rules 2015. A faculty is the required permission to carry out works on the church and its curtilage; in most cases this is required instead of planning permission, although both are required for major external work. The parish has to prepare a petition for the faculty and the chancellor of the diocese may grant the faculty after due consideration. Where the work is listed on Schedule 1 List A, no faculty is required and where it is on List B the faculty may be granted by the archdeacon rather than the chancellor.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Faculty (canon law)” as legal instrument in canon law. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as legal instrument in canon law. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1393839. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1991 and 2015.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Faculty (canon law)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.