696 Opinion of the Court The constitutional provisions of the American-Canadian Diocese were not so express that the civil courts could enforce them without engaging in a searching and therefore impermissible inquiry into church polity. See Md. & Va. Churches v. Sharpsburg Church, 396 U. S., at 368-370 (BRENNAN, J., concurring). 15 The control of Diocesan property may be little affected by the changes; respondents' allegation that the reorganization was a fraudulent subterfuge to divert Diocesan property from its intended beneficiaries has been rejected by the Illinois courts. Formal title to the property remains in respondent property-holding corporations, to be held in trust for all members of the new Dioceses. The boundaries of the reorganized Dioceses generally conform to the episcopal districts which the AmericanCanadian Diocese had already employed for its internal government, and the appointed administrators of the new Dioceses were the same individuals nominated by Dionisije as assistant bishops to govern similar divisions under him. Indeed, even the Illinois courts' rationale that the reorganization would effectuate an abrogation of the Diocesan constitution has no support in the record, which establishes rather that the details of the reorganization and any decisions pertaining to a distribution of to administration of property within the Diocese, and as not restricting alterations in the Diocese itself. 15 No claim is made that the "formal title" doctrine by which church property disputes may be decided in civil courts is to be applied in this case. See Md. & Va. Churches v. Sharpsburg Church, 396 U. S., at 370 (BRENNAN, J., concurring). Indeed, the Mother Church decisions defrocking Dionisije and reorganizing the Diocese in no way change formal title to all Diocesan property, which continues to be in the respondent property-holding corporations in trust for all members of the reorganized Dioceses; only the identity of the trustees is altered by the Mother Church's ecclesiastical determinations. the property among the three Dioceses were expressly left for the Diocesan National Assembly to determine. In response to inquiries from the Diocese, the Holy Assembly assured Bishop Firmilian: "1. That all the rights of the former AmericanCanadian Diocese, as they relate to the autonomy in the administrative sense, remain unchanged. The only exception is the forming of three dioceses and "2. That the Constitution of the former AmericanCanadian Diocese remains the same and that the Dioceses in America and Canada will not, in an administrative sense (the management (or direction) of the properties) be managed (or directed) in the same manner as those in Yugoslavia." App. 1446. As a practical matter the effect of the reorganization is a tripling of the Diocesan representational strength in the Holy Assembly and a decentralization of hierarchical authority to permit closer attention to the needs of individual congregations within each of the new Dioceses, a result which Dionisije and Diocesan representatives had already concluded was necessary. Whether corporate bylaws or other documents governing the individual property-holding corporations may affect any desired disposition of the Diocesan property is a question not before us. IV In short, the First and Fourteenth Amendments permit hierarchical religious organizations to establish their own rules and regulations for internal discipline and government, and to create tribunals for adjudicating disputes over these matters. When this choice is exercised and ecclesiastical tribunals are created to decide disputes over 696 REHNQUIST, J., dissenting the government and direction of subordinate bodies, the Constitution requires that civil courts accept their decisions as binding upon them. Reversed. THE CHIEF JUSTICE Concurs in the judgment. MR. JUSTICE WHITE, concurring. Major predicates for the Court's opinion are that the Serbian Orthodox Church is a hierarchical church and the American-Canadian Diocese, involved here, is part of that Church. These basic issues are for the courts' ultimate decision, and the fact that church authorities may render their opinions on them does not foreclose the courts from coming to their independent judgment. I do not understand the Court's opinion to suggest otherwise and join the views expressed therein. MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST, with whom MR. JUSTICE STEVENS joins, dissenting. The Court's opinion, while long on the ecclesiastical history of the Serbian Orthodox Church, is somewhat short on the procedural history of this case. A casual reader of some of the passages in the Court's opinion could easily gain the impression that the State of Illinois had commenced a proceeding designed to brand Bishop Dionisije as a heretic, with appropriate pains and penalties. But the state trial judge in the Circuit Court of Lake County was not the Bishop of Beauvais, trying Joan of Arc for heresy; the jurisdiction of his court was invoked by petitioners themselves, who sought an injunction establishing their control over property of the American-Canadian Diocese of the church located in Lake County. The jurisdiction of that court having been invoked REHNQUIST, J., dissenting 426 U. S. for such a purpose by both petitioners and respondents, contesting claimants to Diocesan authority, it was entitled to ask if the real Bishop of the AmericanCanadian Diocese would please stand up. The protracted proceedings in the Illinois courts were devoted to the ascertainment of who that individual was, a question which the Illinois courts sought to answer by application of the canon law of the church, just as they would have attempted to decide a similar dispute among the members of any other voluntary association. The Illinois courts did not in the remotest sense inject their doctrinal preference into the dispute. They were forced to decide between two competing sets of claimants to church office in order that they might resolve a dispute over real property located within the State. Each of the claimants had requested them to decide the issue. Unless the First Amendment requires control of disputed church property to be awarded solely on the basis of ecclesiastical paper title, I can find no constitutional infirmity in the judgment of the Supreme Court of Illinois. Unless civil courts are to be wholly divested of authority to resolve conflicting claims to real property owned by a hierarchical church, and such claims are to be resolved by brute force, civil courts must of necessity make some factual inquiry even under the rules the Court purports to apply in this case. We are told that "a civil court must accept the ecclesiastical decisions of church tribunals as it finds them," ante, at 713. But even this rule requires that proof be made as to what these decisions are, and if proofs on that issue conflict the civil court will inevitably have to choose one over the other. In so choosing, if the choice is to be a rational one, reasons must be adduced as to why one proffered decision is to prevail over another. Such reasons will 696 REHNQUIST, J., dissenting obviously be based on the canon law by which the disputants have agreed to bind themselves, but they must also represent a preference for one view of that law over another. If civil courts, consistently with the First Amendment, may do that much, the question arises why they may not do what the Illinois courts did here regarding the defrockment of Bishop Dionisije, and conclude, on the basis of testimony from experts on the canon law at issue, that the decision of the religious tribunal involved was rendered in violation of its own stated rules of procedure. Suppose the Holy Assembly in this case had a membership of 100; its rules provided that a bishop could be defrocked by a majority vote of any session at which a quorum was present, and also provided that a quorum was not to be less than 40. Would a decision of the Holy Assembly attended by 30 members, 16 of whom voted to defrock Bishop Dionisije, be binding on civil courts in a dispute such as this? The hypothetical example is a clearer case than the one involved here, but the principle is the same. If the civil courts are to be bound by any sheet of parchment bearing the ecclesiastical seal and purporting to be a decree of a church court, they can easily be converted into handmaidens of arbitrary lawlessness. The cases upon which the Court relies are not a uniform line of authorities leading inexorably to reversal of the Illinois judgment. On the contrary, they embody two distinct doctrines which have quite separate origins. The first is a common-law doctrine regarding the appropriate roles for civil courts called upon to adjudicate church property disputes a doctrine which found general application in federal courts prior to Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U. S. 64 (1938), but which has never had any application to our review of a state-court |