Article V: Concerning Carnal Sacrilege

I. Sacrilege is the violation of the sacred; hence carnal sacrilege in a more general sense is the violation of the sacred by a venereal act (heiligschende onkuischheid). But as a person, or place, or thing can be sacred, so a threefold sacrilege, distinct in species, is enumerated: personal, local, and real. It is so much graver as the person, place, or thing is more sacred, and as the profanation is graver. Hence a threefold species of carnal sacrilege is also distinguished, just as of sacrilege in general.

The personal alone is, in the stricter sense, a species of lust and carnal sacrilege (vleeschelijke heiligschennis), since it has the notion of sacrilege from its very object, the person carnally violated; in the others, the violation of the sacred bears itself rather as a certain circumstance changing the species and acceding to the object.

II. Personal carnal sacrilege, as a sin consummated according to nature, is copulation with a person consecrated to God by a vow of chastity. It is sacrilege strictly so called if the vow is public, because by a public vow alone, emitted before the Church, some person is made sacred; otherwise, if the vow is private, there is at least complicity in the violation of a vow, which nevertheless pertains reductively to sacrilege, because it has a certain analogy with sacrilege.

Hence carnal sacrilege is committed not only when a sacred person acts luxuriously in himself or herself, whether externally or even internally, because thus that person violates himself or herself insofar as sacred; but also:

1. when a non-sacred person acts luxuriously upon a sacred person even resisting, because by the act he violates a sacred person;

2. a fortiori when a sacred person acts luxuriously upon a non-sacred person, who, if he or she voluntarily suffers this, cooperates at least in that person's sacrilege;

3. most of all when each person, as accomplice, is sacred; for then there is a twofold sacrilege. Yet one who is held to chastity by a twofold title, for example by priesthood and by religion, does not commit a twofold sacrilege, but one graver sacrilege, because he is obligated by one and the same formal motive.

III. Local carnal sacrilege (vleeschelijke kerk- of tempelontheiliging) is a completed act of lust, or one which proximately disposes to this, exercised in a sacred place, that is, a church or public oratory; for in such a base act of lust there is present a special repugnance to a sacred place.

IV. Real carnal sacrilege (vleeschelijke kelk-vaat-sacrament-enz. ontheiliging) is the use of a sacred thing for lust, for example to employ linens or sacred vessels for this, to promise a Mass as the price of a carnal act, and so forth. A special real sacrilege is the sin of solicitation, by which a confessor abuses the sacrament of penance for a base sin.

V. Observation. He who induces a sacred person to a sin of lust contracts the malice of sacrilege by reason of the object; on the contrary, this is not so of a sacred person who, without his own pleasure, induces another to some sin of lust not to be exercised with a sacred person.