Article I: Who Can Be Witnesses

All can be witnesses, unless they are expressly repelled by law, either wholly or in part.

§ 1. Impubescent persons and the weak of mind are repelled as not suitable for giving testimony.

§ 2. As suspect:

1° Excommunicated persons, perjurers, and infamous persons, after a declaratory or condemnatory sentence.

2° Those who are so low in morals that they are not held worthy of faith.

3° Public and grave enemies of a party.

§ 3. As incapable:

1° Those who are parties in the cause, or act in place of the parties, such as a tutor in the cause of a ward, a Superior or administrator in the cause of his community or pious cause, in whose name he stands in judgment, the judge or his assistants, an advocate, and others who assist or have assisted the parties in the same cause.

2° Priests, as regards all those things which have become known to them from sacramental confession, even if they have been released from the bond of the seal; indeed things heard by anyone and in any way on the occasion of confession cannot be received even as an indication of truth.

3° A spouse in the cause of his or her spouse, a blood relative and affine in the cause of a blood relative or affine, in any degree of the direct line and in the first degree of the collateral line, unless there is question of causes which regard the civil or religious status of a person, knowledge of which cannot be had from elsewhere, and the public good requires that it be had.

Those not suitable and suspect can be heard by decree of the judge, by which it is declared expedient; but their testimony will have value only as an indication and aid of proof, and generally they are to be heard without oath.