Article II: Of Irregularities and Other Impediments

No perpetual impediment which comes under the name of irregularity, whether from defect or from delict, is contracted except that which has been expressed in the canons which follow.

The following are irregular from defect:

1° The illegitimate, whether the illegitimacy is public or occult, unless they have been legitimated or have professed solemn vows.

2° Those defective in body who, because of weakness, cannot safely, or because of deformity, cannot decently, perform the ministry of the altar. Nevertheless, for impeding the exercise of an order legitimately received, a graver defect is required, nor on account of this defect are acts prohibited which can rightly be placed.

3° Those who are or have been epileptic, insane, or possessed by a demon; but if after orders received they have become such and it is certainly established that they are now free, the Ordinary can again permit his subjects the exercise of the orders received.

4° Bigamists, namely those who have contracted two or more valid marriages successively.

5° Those who are marked by infamy of law.

6° A judge who has passed a sentence of death.

7° Those who have taken up the office of executioner and their voluntary and immediate ministers in the execution of a capital sentence.

The following are irregular from delict:

1° Apostates from the faith, heretics, schismatics.

2° Those who, except in a case of extreme necessity, have allowed baptism to be conferred on themselves in any way by non-Catholics.

3° Those who have dared to attempt marriage or to place only the civil act, either while they themselves were bound by a matrimonial bond or sacred order or religious vows, even simple and temporary, or with a woman bound by the same vows or joined in a valid marriage.

4° Those who have perpetrated voluntary homicide or procured the abortion of a human fetus, the effect having followed, and all cooperators.

5° Those who have mutilated themselves or others, or have attempted to take their own life.

6° Clerics exercising the medical or surgical art forbidden to them, if death follows from it.

7° Those who place an act of order reserved to clerics constituted in sacred order, either lacking that order, or prohibited from its exercise by a canonical penalty, whether personal, medicinal or vindicative, or local.

These delicts do not produce irregularity unless they were grave sins, perpetrated after baptism, with the prescription of can. 985, n. 2 preserved, and likewise external, whether public or occult.

The following are simply impeded:

1° Children of non-Catholics, so long as the parents remain in their error.

2° Men having a wife.

3° Those who hold an office or administration forbidden to clerics, of which they must render accounts, until, the office and administration having been laid down and the accounts rendered, they have been made free.

4° Slaves in servitude properly so called, before liberty has been received.

5° Those who are bound by civil law to ordinary military service before they have completed it.

6° Neophytes, until, in the judgment of the Ordinary, they have been sufficiently tested.

7° Those who labor under infamy of fact, while it endures, in the judgment of the Ordinary.

Ignorance of irregularities, whether from delict or from defect, and of impediments does not excuse from the same.

Irregularities and impediments are multiplied from diverse causes of the same, but not from repetition of the same cause, unless there is question of irregularity from voluntary homicide.

§ 1. It is permitted to Ordinaries, by themselves or through another, to dispense their subjects from all irregularities arising from occult delict, except that of which in can. 985, n. 4, or another brought to the judicial forum.

§ 2. The same faculty belongs to any confessor in more urgent occult cases in which the Ordinary cannot be approached and danger of grave harm or infamy threatens, but only for this: that the penitent may licitly exercise orders already received.

§ 1. In petitions for dispensation from irregularities and impediments, all irregularities and impediments are to be indicated; otherwise a general dispensation will indeed be valid even for those withheld in good faith, except those which are excepted in can. 990, Sec. 1, but not for those withheld in bad faith.

§ 2. If there is question of irregularity from voluntary homicide, the number of delicts also must be expressed under penalty of nullity of the dispensation to be granted.

§ 3. A general dispensation for orders is valid also for major orders; and the person dispensed can obtain non-consistorial benefices, even those with care of souls, but he cannot be named a Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, Bishop, Abbot or Prelate nullius, or major Superior in an exempt clerical religious institute.

§ 4. A dispensation granted in the non-sacramental internal forum is to be put in writing; and it must be recorded in the secret book of the Curia.