Article — Marc, Institutiones Morales
ARTICLE III: On the Unjust Cooperator
¶976.
- NOTIONS. 1. Cooperator is taken here in a broader sense for every one who, besides the executor, has influenced the damage inflicted on one's neighbor, whether he did this by moving the executor to inflict damage, which we have said is scandal, or by furnishing him aid in the execution, which we have marked as cooperation in the stricter sense.
Cooperators, accepted in this sense, St. Thomas (2. 2, q. 62, a. 7) enumerates in the following little verses:
Command, counsel, consent, flatterer, recourse,
Participant, mute, not resisting, not manifesting.
- Of these cooperators: a) the first six concur positively and directly, insofar as by mandate, counsel, vote, etc., they morally move the executor to inflict damage, or insofar as they physically participate with him; b) the three later are said to concur negatively and indirectly, insofar as they do not impede the damage which they can impede and which they are held from justice to impede.
Note. In France, by occasion of the unjust laws which were trying to overturn the Church and Religious Orders, there was no small labor of experts, so that for the different cooperators the degree of fault and the obligation of restitution might be established. Concerning this matter there exist grave responses of the Sacred Penitentiary, which above, in n. 526, II, we reported.