Abstract
This chapter deals with the formation of the Utraquist Church as an institution. It mentions the university's role in the Utraquists taking over some functions of the Church organization (the university as doctrinal arbiter and court of appeal).
It presents the administrative bodies which preceded the formation of the Utraquist Church and subsequently describes the functioning of the Utraquist Church organization itself. With regard to how fragmentarily the sources are preserved, some topics - such as the existence of a Spiritual Law Office or the so-called Lower Consistory - were only sketched.
The chapter deals also with the person of John Rokycana as the main representative and administrator of the Utraquist clergy, whose preaching and literary activities were treated in other chapters. Then the author mentions the congregations of the Utraquist clergy and their rulings and resolutions which dealt with doctrinal, inter-confessional and political matters.
Further the chapter looks for continuities of Church administration under Utraquism, especially Utraquist attitudes toward parish organization. The specificity of Taborite teaching and the alterity of Church administration in Tábor's domain was also accounted for.
On the lower level of the administrative hierarchy, the process of involving parochial communities and lay believers in the administration of parishes was examined. The legality of the Utraquist Church should have been warranted by the Compactata, but its position remained equivocal: it never gave up its links to the Roman Church (the problem of clerical ordination), but it was no ordinary provincial component of the Catholic Church either.
This fact was responsible for its weakness and it also predetermined how the European Reformation was received in Bohemia in the following century.