Case 1. A Mistake in the Man

Caius, a missionary priest, gravely offended Titius, a parishioner, by reproving his vices. Afterwards, while drinking with companions, Titius repeated to them the insulting words of Caius and affirmed that he would pay the penalty. While returning home at night, he met a priest whom he thought was Caius and, placing his foot between the priest’s legs, threw him down in the public street with a thrust of his shoulder. On the next day he read in the newspaper that Paul, a priest and Caius’s assistant, had broken his arm by falling in the place where Titius met the priest; he was afterwards informed that no harm had happened to Caius, who remained at home. In the following week, repenting of the deed, Titius approached a confessor and confessed with great shame what he had done. Hence it is asked:

1. What is the privilege of the canon, and is the law penal or prohibitory?

2. What is the purpose of this privilege, and how must it be interpreted?

3. Does error concerning the person to whom an injury is inflicted prevent it from being a formal injury and a voluntary act?

4. What is to be said of the case?

1. What is the privilege of the Canon and is it a penal or prohibitory law?

The privilege of the Canon grants to all ranks of the clergy and to religious Orders personal inviolability, so that any one who unlawfully uses violence against them incurs excommunication, the absolution of which is reserved to the Pope. It is a law which both prohibits and penalizes such violence.¹

1 Manual of Moral Theology, vol. i, 130.

2. What is the object of this privilege and how is it to be interpreted?

The object is to safeguard the dignity and honor of the clerical state. In accordance with this object it must be interpreted favorably, and as widely as possible.

3. Does a mistake about the person injured prevent the injury being formal and the act voluntary?

Many teach that it does on the ground that there was no intention to injure this person, and so the act is casual, not voluntary, with respect to him.²

2 St. Alphonsus, lib. iii, n. 628.

4. The case. Titius certainly committed a grave sin by his unwarranted and malicious act. The excommunication, however, inflicted now by the second of the censures reserved to the Pope by the Constitution of Pius IX, Apostolicae Sedis, must be interpreted strictly with regard to the conditions which are necessary that it may be incurred. As many authorities of weight deny that an injury inflicted by mistake on the wrong person is voluntary, and an action which is involuntary is not punished by censure, therefore Titius did not incur the excommunication.