Section VI. Privileges

A privilege is, as it were, a private law which grants a special favour to some person.

It is a law, because although as a general rule no one is bound to use a privilege, since what is granted as a favour should not become a burden and a restriction to liberty, yet it lays on all the obligation of respecting the privilege, and of doing nothing contrary to it. Moreover, those privileges which are granted not to individuals, but to bodies of men like clerics and religious, cannot be dispensed with or used at the good pleasure of members of the privileged bodies.

Individuals cannot renounce the privileges of their order, but they are bound to act in accordance with them.

A privilege is against the law if it derogates from the law in favour of the privileged person; it is beside the law if there be no law from which it derogates.

The lawgiver to whom the law is subject can alone grant a privilege against the law, and within the territory subject to his jurisdiction. Within that territory all, whether subjects or strangers, may enjoy the privilege; no one may enjoy it outside the territory of the grantor, unless it be in the nature of a personal dispensation from the law. A privilege which is against no law may be granted to anyone.

A personal privilege is directly and immediately granted to a physical or moral person; a real privilege is granted directly and immediately to a place, office, dignity, or thing, and mediately to persons with respect to the place, office, dignity, or thing.

Privileges are to be interpreted according to the terms in which they are granted. And thus if a privilege is granted by the Pope to a confessor by which he may absolve from "cases reserved to the Holy See, he cannot thereby absolve from specially reserved cases, much less from the cases most specially reserved to the Holy See, and which can only be absolved by faculties specially delegated by the Holy See.

Privileges granted to corporate bodies, such as Religious Orders, inasmuch as they are rewards for services rendered to the Church, and are for the common good, admit a wide and favourable interpretation. Even privileges granted to individuals, if they cause no prejudice to others, such as leave to eat meat on days of abstinence, receive a wide interpretation. Personal privileges, however, which benefit the privileged while curtailing the rights of others, as exemption from paying tithes, are regarded as a wound inflicted on the law which should be equally observed by all, and so they receive a strict interpretation.

Although privileges are in general granted in perpetuity, yet they cease in many ways: by revocation of the competent superior, by renunciation accepted by the competent superior, by such change in circumstances that in the judgement of the superior they have become harmful; a personal privilege is extinguished by the death of the privileged person, real privileges cease by the total destruction of the thing or place, but the latter revive if the place be restored within fifty years; they cease also by the lapse of the time or the completion of the number of cases for which the privilege was given (Can. 72-77).

On the privileges of the clergy see the Code of Canon Law, Canon 118 ff.

Religious Orders have at different times received very ample privileges from the Holy See, so as to enable them to work for God and the Church with the greater freedom and fruit according to their Institute. These privileges are granted immediately to the religious superiors, and are by them communicated as occasion requires to their subjects. The regular or mendicant Orders, who take solemn vows, are exempt from the jurisdiction of the Ordinaries, and subjected immediately to the Holy See. Exemption, however, and many other privileges of religious have been largely curtailed, especially since the time of the Council of Trent, and now, as far as their work among the faithful is concerned, and their public conduct, regulars are to a great extent subject to the authority and correction of the Ordinary.