|
MONASTERIES, which have once been consecrated with the
consent of the bishop, shall remain monasteries for ever, and the property
belonging to them shall be preserved, and they shall never again become secular
dwellings.And they who shall permit this to be done shall be liable to
ecclesiastical penalties.
NOTES.
ANCIENT EPITOME OF CANON XXIV.
A monastery erected with the
consent of the bishop shall be immovable. And whatever pertains to it shall not
be alienated. Whoever shall take upon him to do otherwise, shall not be held
guiltless.
Joseph AEgyptius, in turning this
into Arabic, reads: "And whoever shall turn any monastery into a dwelling
house for himself
... let him be cursed and
anathema." The curious reader is referred on this whole subject to Sir
Henry Spelman's History and Fate of Sacrilege, or to the more handy book on the
subject by James Wayland Joyce, The Doom of Sacrilege.(2)
BRIGHT.
The secularization of monasteries
was an evil which grew with their wealth and influence. At a Council held by
the patriarch Photius in the Apostles' church at Constantinople, it is complained
that some persons attach the name of "monastery" to property of their
own, and while professing to dedicate it to God, write themselves down as lords
of what has been thus consecrated, and are not ashamed to claim after such
consecration the same power over it which they had before. In the West, we find
this abuse attracting the attention of Gregory the Great, who writes to a
bishop that "rationalis ordo" would not allow a layman to pervert a
monastic foundation at will to his own uses (Epist. viii., 31). In ancient
Scotland, the occasional dispersion of religious communities, and, still more,
the clan-principle which assigned chieftain-rights over monasteries to the
descendants of the founder, left at Dunkeld, Brechin, Abernethy, and elsewhere,
"nothing but the mere name of abbacy applied to the lands, and of abbot
borne by the secular lord for the time" (Skene's Celtic Scotland, ii.,
365; cf. Anderson's Scotland in Early Christian Times, p. 235). So, after the
great Irish monastery of Bangor in Down was destroyed by the Northmen,
"non defuit,"says St. Bernard, "qui illud teneret cure
possessionibus suis; ham et constituebantur per electionem etiam, et abbates
appellabantur, servantes nomine, etsi non re, quod olim exstiterat" (De
Vita S. Malachioe, vj.). So in 1188 Giraldus Cambrensis found a lay abbot in
possession of the venerable church of Llanbadarn Vawr; a "bad
custom,"
285
he says, "had grown up,
whereby powerful laymen, at first chosen by the clergy to be
"oeconomi" or "patroni et defensores," had usurped
"forum jus," appropriated the lands, and left to the clergy nothing
but the altars, with tithes and offerings (Itin. Camb. ii., 4). This abuse must
be distinguished from the corrupt device whereby, in Bede's later years, Northumbrian
nobles contrived to gain for their estates the immunities of abbey-lands by
professing to found monasteries, which they filled with disorderly monks, who
lived there in contempt of all rule (Bede, Ep. to Egbert, vij.). In the year of
his birth, the first English synod had forbidden bishops to despoil consecrated
monasteries (Bede, iv., 5).
This canon is found in the Corpus
Juris Canonici, Gratian's Decretum, Pars II., Causa XIX., Quaest. III., canon iv.
|