Chapter IV: On Ecclesiastical Offices and Benefices

Order of Speaking. - In the very section in which it proposes the law of clerics in general, the Code assigns the three later titles to ecclesiastical offices, ordinary and delegated power, and the reduction of clerics to the lay state: which titles are thus placed between clerics in general and clerics in species. But it reserves the title concerning benefices to the fifth Part of the third book.

Omitting here the notions concerning ordinary and delegated power, which generally in moral theology have been accustomed to be suggested rather than formally handed down, and also passing over the canonical argument concerning reduction to the lay state, it has seemed to us, on account of the connection of the matters, to treat conjointly of offices and benefices insofar as will be sufficient for our end.