Title XXVI: Of Other Non-Collegial Ecclesiastical Institutes

§ 1. Hospitals, orphanages, and other similar institutes destined for works of religion or of charity, whether spiritual or temporal, can be erected by the local Ordinary and constituted as a juridic person in the Church by his decree.

§ 2. The local Ordinary is not to approve these institutes unless the end of the foundation is truly useful, and such an endowment has been constituted as, all things considered, suffices or is prudently foreseen to be sufficient for attaining that end.

§ 3. It belongs to the rector of each institute to administer the goods of the same, according to the norms of the document of foundation; he, moreover, is held by the same obligations and enjoys the same rights as administrators of other ecclesiastical goods.

§ 1. In the documents of foundation the pious founder is accurately to describe the whole constitution of the institute, its end, endowment, administration and governance, the use of revenues, and the succession to the goods in the case of extinction of the institute itself.

§ 2. Documents of this kind must be made in two copies, of which one is to be placed in the archive of the institute, the other in the archive of the Curia.

§ 1. The local Ordinary can and must visit all institutes of this kind, even those erected as a moral person and exempt in any way.

§ 2. Indeed, although they have not been erected as a moral person and have been entrusted to a religious house, if there is question of a religious house of diocesan right, they are wholly subject to the jurisdiction of the local Ordinary; if of a religious house of pontifical right, they are subject to episcopal vigilance as regards religious instruction, uprightness of morals, exercises of piety, and the administration of sacred things.

§ 1. Even if by foundation, prescription, or apostolic privilege a pious institute has been exempted from the jurisdiction and visitation of the local Ordinary, nevertheless the Ordinary has the right of requiring the rendering of accounts, any contrary custom being reprobated.

§ 2. If the founder wishes the administrators not to be held to render an account to the local Ordinary, the foundation is not to be accepted.

The local Ordinary is to watch that the pious wills of the faithful, expressed in the foundation of these institutes, are fully observed.

Without permission of the Apostolic See, these institutes cannot be suppressed, united, or converted to uses foreign to the foundation, unless another thing is provided in the documents of foundation.