ARTICLE III: ON CONDITIONS APPENDED TO A CONTRACT

869. • A condition is a quality adjoined to a contract, which for the most part suspends it until it is fulfilled. It is usually expressed by the particle: if, unless, provided ... etc.

Manifold is the condition which can be appended to contracts, namely 1° express or tacit; - 2° concerning the present or the future; - 3° possible or impossible; - 4° necessary or merely contingent; - 5° honorable or dishonorable; - 6° potestative or casual, according as it is in the power of the contracting party or is not; - 7° positive or negative; - contrary to the substance of the contract, or not.

870. Resolutions. - 1° All conditions must be fulfilled in that sense in which the contracting parties are prudently judged to have willed to obligate themselves.

2° A condition concerning a base or impossible thing renders a contract null both by natural and by civil right. The reason is that no one can obligate himself to something base or prohibited. Yet donations inter vivos and through testaments are excepted in Civil Law, in which base conditions are held as not adjoined. - The same must be said concerning a base or impossible condition adjoined to matrimony, provided it is not contrary to the substance of the contract. - Thus from Canon Law. Hence, if someone should leave money or fields to someone on the condition that he profess heresy, or imbue his children with heresy, the legacy will be valid, although he does not wish to fulfill that impious condition. Moreover civil tribunals for the most part hold the will of the testator ratified.¹

3° A condition concerning the present or past does not suspend the obligation, but at once either brings it in or does not induce it, because it either exists or does not; therefore here and now the contract is either valid or null.

4° A condition ought to be fulfilled not only equivalently, but in its proper form. Some except the condition, if you marry, which they say is fulfilled by entrance into Religion; for otherwise the condition would be base. St. Alphonsus² admits this if it is a question of a legacy left to a determined person and it is not established that the testator had another mind, as would be established if the condition was determined to some person, for example, if you marry Paul; because then a just and honorable reason can be present. But if it is a question of a legacy left to indeterminate persons, certainly the more probable opinion for him is the one denying this, and that on account of the disposition of Civil Law.³ Yet our tribunals will command the condition in each case to be fulfilled in its proper form.

5° Potestative conditions, or those which depend on the will of one of the contracting parties, are judged fulfilled not only when that is furnished which was enjoined as the condition, concerning which there can be no controversy, but also even if it is not furnished in reality, namely when the one who obligated himself either 1° impeded the condition from being fulfilled; or 2° was impeded by another from satisfying the condition.