Ecclesiastical Office Quotes
New York State was so concerned about the separation of church and state that they would not allow any religious cleric or official, to serve in any position of the state militia or government. Delaware had earlier placed the same prohibition against clerics serving in any branch of the government. See {621428} The Bill of Rights did not go that far, but there are a few religions that also support this notion. Perhaps the most dramatic example was Pope John Paul’s prohibition of Priests running for elective office.
For those who doubt that there was intended a rigid separation between church and state, they have but to contemplate this passage. However, at about the same time, the State of South Carolina moved in its constitution in an opposite direction. See {612573}. When the framers of the Constitution met in 1787 in Philadelphia the separation of church and state issue was not really resolved and awaited the Bill of Rights where the separatists won out.
i.e., a clergyman representing a congregation The theory of this particular expulsion applied not to clergy in general, but to clergy who represented a Congregation. In the absence of strict separation of church and state, clergy representing congregations had representative and legal roles in other aspects of the government and therefore represented a problem of separation of powers within the government. The same logic, for example prohibited Sheriffs and Tax Officials from the House of Commons as well as Judges sitting in the Lords. With strict separation of church and state however, the separation of powers argument does not hold, and hence there is no such current prohibition. However, at the end of the 20th century, the Roman Catholic and some other religious institutions had reached the conclusion that clerics serving as elected representatives to various civil legislative bodies potentially had an inherent conflict of interest and divided loyalty and banned the practice from the religious end although the civil laws did not preclude it.
