Mullen v. Commissioners of Erie County

• Decision Date: 07 November 1877
• Citation: 85 Pa. 288
• Parties: Right Rev. T. Mullen <I>versus</I> Commissioners of Erie County.
• Court: Pennsylvania Supreme Court

85 Pa. 288

Right Rev. T. Mullen versus Commissioners of Erie County.

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

October 18, 1877.

November 7, 1877.

October 18th 1877.

Before AGNEW, C. J., MERCUR, GORDON, PAXSON, WOODWARD and STERRETT, JJ. SHARSWOOD, J., absent

Error to the Court of Common Pleas of Erie county: Of October and November Term 1877, No. 251.

Davenport & Griffith for plaintiff in error.—The design of the Act of 1874 was clearly to exempt from taxation public property used for public purposes, places of religious worship and of burial, not held for profit, and institutions of public charity. This act is a virtual re-enactment of the Act of April 16th 1838, Pamph. L. 525. Sect. 1, art. 9, of the constitution, expressly provides that "public property used for public purposes" shall be exempt from taxation. Within this class are embraced courthouses, jails and school-houses, which sometimes take years to erect. Can it be claimed that the land on which they are being erected, can be taxed until the buildings are occupied or in actual use?

"When particular terms are used to describe the objects of taxation, they should be construed according to their popular acceptation, not by any refined or strained analogies, and especially when that acceptation corresponds with the use of those terms, in recent legislative enactments:" Deitz v. Beard, 2 Watts 172.

In a broad and comprehensive manner, the act clearly states that all buildings known as places of worship shall be exempt from taxation. And the same reason which exempts an unfinished courthouse from taxation should apply to and exempt an unfinished church.

D. B. McCreary and Frank Gunnison, for defendants in error.— Both the constitutional provisions and the legislative enactments were intended to diminish, not increase the subjects of exemption from taxation. "Actual places of religious worship," or "regular places of stated worship," mean places now used for religious worship where regular church services are held, and to insist that the beginning of work on a church, with the intention of making it a place of stated worship in the future, constitutes it an actual place of religious worship, would open the door for flagrant abuse. Laws exempting property from taxation should be strictly construed, and no surrender of the general power of taxation can be implied: Hammett v. Phila., 15 P. F. Smith 146.

Chief Justice AGNEW delivered the opinion of the court, November 7th 1877.

If anything be plain in the constitution, and the law passed to carry out the second clause of the first section of the eighth article relating to exemptions of churches from taxation, it is that a place of actual religious worship only can be exempted. A marked feature of this clause, which controls its interpretation, is, that no such words were used as churches, meeting-houses, or others, to designate the buildings themselves; but to prevent all doubt, the convention used the words "actual places of religious worship." In so doing, that body confined the scope of legislative power to the very use itself; thus taking away all excuse for loose interpretation as to the character of the building. It must be a place of religious worship. What more definite, to describe the use made of the place — a place, be it church, chapel, meeting-house, or cathedral? The word place expresses simply locality, not kind, and hence qualifying words were necessary to denote the kind of place; therefore the convention said, "of religious worship." And not content with a single qualifying expression, it prefixed the word actual — "an actual place of religious...