Word Finder - convocations

definition

The act of calling or assembling by summons.

definition

An assembly or meeting.

definition

An assembly of the clergy, by their representatives, to consult on ecclesiastical affairs.

definition

An academic assembly, in which the business of the university is transacted.

In the year 1907 letters of business were issued by the Crown to the Convocations inviting and enabling them to make alterations in the Prayer Book (afterwards to be embodied in an act of parliament).

On the 4th of November 1555 Pole opened, in the chapel royal at Westminster, a legatine synod, consisting of the united convocations of the two provinces, for the purpose of laying the foundations of wise and solid reforms. In the Reformatio Angliae which he brought out in 1556, based on his Legatine Constitutions of 1555, he ordered that every cathedral church should have its seminary, and the very words he uses on this subject seem to have been copied by the Council of Trent in the twenty-third session (1563).

Characteristic of the priestly calendar are (1) the enumeration of " holy convocations," (2) the prohibition of all work, (3) the careful determination of the date by the day and month, (4) the mention of " the offerings made by fire to Yahweh," and (5) the stereotyped form of the regulations.

In 1846 he established the western and north-eastern convocations of priests in his diocese; from 1850 to 1860, when its corner-stone was laid, he laboured for the "Hospital of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia"; and in 1861 he established the Philadelphia Divinity School.

The frequent convocations of military assemblies, far from testifying to political liberty, was simply a means of communicating the emperors commands to the various feudal groups.

Every archdeacon is entitled to appoint an official to preside over his archidiaconal court, from which there is an appeal to the consistory court of the bishop. The archdeacons are ex officio members of the convocations of their respective provinces.

Before the reign of Edward I., when convocation assumed substantially its present form (see Convocation), there were convened in London various diocesan, provincial, national and legatine synods; during the past six centuries, however, the chief ecclesiastical assemblies held there have been convocations of the province of Canterbury.

The convocations were required to abjure the papal supremacy by declaring " that the bishop of Rome has not in Scripture any greater jurisdiction in the kingdom of England than any other foreign bishop."

As even the extent of the jurisdiction of the bailliages was unknown, convocations were made at haphazard, according to the good pleasure of influential persons, and in these assemblies decisions were arrived at by a process that confused every variety of rights and powers, and was governed by no logical principle; and in this extreme confusion terms and affairs were alike involved.

No substantial alteration has been made in the Prayer Book since 1662, but two alterations must be chronicled as having obtained the sanction of the Convocations of Canterbury and York, and also legal force by act of parliament.