Chapter II: Of the Reservation of Sins

§ 1. Those who by ordinary law can grant the power of hearing confessions or impose censures can also, except the Vicar Capitular and the Vicar General without a special mandate, call back some cases to their own judgment, limiting the power of absolving for inferiors.

§ 2. This calling back is called reservation of cases.

§ 3. As regards the reservation of censures, the prescription of can. 2246, 2247 is to be observed.

The only sin reserved to the Holy See by reason of itself is false denunciation, by which an innocent priest is accused of the crime of solicitation before ecclesiastical judges.

Local Ordinaries are not to reserve sins unless, the matter having been discussed in the diocesan Synod, or outside the Synod after the cathedral Chapter and some of the more prudent and more approved curators of souls of their diocese have been heard, the true necessity or utility of the reservation has been proved.

Among Superiors of an exempt clerical religious institute, one Superior general, and in monasteries sui iuris the Abbot, with the proper Council of each, can reserve sins of subjects as above, with the prescription of can. 518, Sec. 1, 519 remaining firm.

Cases to be reserved are to be altogether few, namely three or, at most, four, only from the graver and more atrocious external crimes specifically determined; and the reservation itself is not to remain in force longer than is necessary for rooting out some public ingrained vice and perhaps restoring collapsed Christian discipline.

Let all abstain entirely from reserving to themselves those sins which already are reserved to the Apostolic See even by reason of censure, and regularly also those to which a censure has been imposed by law, even if reserved to no one.

§ 1. Once reservations have been established which they have judged truly necessary or useful, local Ordinaries are to take care that these be brought to the knowledge of subjects in the manner which seems better to them, and they are not to impart to anyone whatever and indiscriminately the faculty of absolving from reserved cases.

§ 2. But a faculty of absolving of this kind belongs by the law itself to the canon penitentiary according to the norm of can. 401, Sec. 1, and is to be imparted habitually at least to vicars forane, with added, especially in places of the diocese more remote from the episcopal see, the faculty of subdelegating, as often as necessary, the confessors of their district, if and when for some more urgent determined case they have recourse to them.

§ 3. By the law itself pastors, and others who in law are considered under the name of pastors, can absolve from cases which the Ordinaries have reserved to themselves in any way whatever, during the whole time useful for fulfilling the paschal precept; so also can individual missionaries at the time when missions to the people happen to be held.

Any reservation lacks all force:

1° When a confession is made either by the sick who cannot leave home, or by those betrothed for the sake of entering marriage.

2° As often as either the legitimate Superior has denied the faculty of absolving sought for some determined case, or, in the prudent judgment of the confessor, the faculty of absolving cannot be sought from the legitimate Superior without grave inconvenience of the penitent or without danger of violation of the sacramental seal.

3° Outside the territory of the one reserving, even if the penitent has departed from it only for the purpose of obtaining absolution.