The State's Authority in Religious Rights

Legal analysis of church-state relations in European countries presupposes a concept or at least a notion of the state. The concept is largely avoided in contemporary legal and political theory. Nonetheless, Western and Central European Continental legal systems, including the Croatian Draft Law on the Legal Position of Religious Communities of April 2002, tacitly presuppose the idea that the state is omnipotent in regulation of religious matters. An adequate analysis of a Central European ex-communist social system will probably find within it the following four layers of social interaction: the state, society, civil society and various communities ranging from families to religious communities. The state, far from being omnipotent, has by its nature very limited powers to regulate religious matters. When the state is dealing with religious rights it is not dealing with Truth and Transcendence; rather is it allocating its own terrestrial resources that include money, i.e. public assistance to religious communities, and access of religious communities to channels of public influence such as public schools and public media.