Exclusion and resignation from the religious community

The balancing exercise, although it seems to lean towards a greater guarantee of confessional identity at the expense of individual identity, in reality denotes the indispensable correlation between the reasons and rights of the parties for the purposes of a broader guarantee of intra-confessional freedoms. The legal freedom of the religious community to take care to safeguard doctrinal uniformity within itself and the right to impose discipline and rules appropriate to that end is an essential condition for the realisation of freedom in and of the religious community. The task of state jurisdiction could, if anything, be that of verifying, if the disciplinary decision produces effects on the exercise and enjoyment of civil rights, the conformity of the religious community's exit mechanisms to the norms of due process; a verification that does not constitute interference in the internal affairs of religious denominations and that is precisely aimed at demonstrating the correct operation of the group's organs and the non-conformity with the individual believer's right to defence.