No regular minister, priest, rabbi, or accredited practitioner over the age of eighteen years, of any religious organization or denomination usually referred to as a church, shall be required to give testimony as a witness or to relinquish notes, records or any written documentation made by such person, or disclose the contents of any such notes, records or written documentation, in discovery proceedings in any civil action which would disclose any information communicated to him in a confidential manner, properly entrusted to him in his professional capacity and necessary to enable him to discharge the functions of his office according to the usual course of his practice or discipline, wherein such person so communicating such information about himself or another is seeking spiritual counsel and advice relative to and growing out of the information so imparted.
Va. Code Ann. § 8.01-400
Communications between ministers of religion and persons they counsel or advise (Supreme Court Rule 2:503 derived in part from this section)
Applied in 6 court decisions — leading case State v. Szemple (1994)
Most recently applied in Madison v. Riter (December 2003)
Code 1950, § 8-289.2; 1962, c. 466; 1977, c. 617; 1979, c. 3; 1994, c. 198.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: Virginia Law Portal (LIS). Reproduced from public-domain Virginia statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.