Question IV

GRATIAN. It has been shown when a church can prescribe against a church. Now it is to be seen whether a monastery has power to prescribe against a church. Urban II forbade this, saying:

We forbid in every way that abbots or monks have possessions of churches and bishops by thirty-year prescription. GRATIAN. But if thirty-year possession is taken away from them, prescription of forty years is conceded to them by blessed Gregory. For he says to Peter the Subdeacon, [book I, c. 9]:

We will that, when you arrive at the city of Palermo, you examine the question itself by this reasoning—with ownership of the property meanwhile remaining with the possessor, just as it has been possessed until now—so that, if you shall find that the aforesaid monastery of Saint Theodore possessed without disturbance for forty years the boundaries concerning which the claim was initiated, you are thereafter to permit it to sustain no calumny, even if something could have belonged to the holy Roman Church, but procure their undisturbed peace in every way. But if the agents of the church shall show that they did not possess them for forty years with undisturbed right, but that some question concerning those boundaries was at some time initiated within that period, let it be quietly and lawfully settled by chosen arbiters.

Likewise from the Novels of Justinian, [Novel CXXXI]. Let neither prescription of ten, twenty, or thirty years, but only courses of forty years, be pleaded against religious houses, not only in other property but also in legacies and inheritances. GRATIAN. Therefore, just as by law only a forty-year prescription is to be pleaded against religious houses, so also by Gregory’s authority they can prescribe against other churches by the same span of time.