Page:Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent Buckley.djvu/187

Rh CHAPTER XI.

Usurpers of the Property of any Church or pious Place soever are punished.

If any clerk, or layman, by what dignity soever, even that of emperor or king, pre-eminent, should be so greatly possessed by covetousness, the root of all evils, as to presume to convert unto his own use, and to usurp, by himself or by others, by force, or fear excited, or even by means of any supposititious persons, whether lay or clerical, or by any artifice, or under any sought-for colourable pretext soever, the jurisdictions, goods, incomes, and rights, even those held in fee or under lease, the fruits, emoluments, or any revenues soever, belonging to any church, or to any benefice, whether secular or regular, monts-de-piété, or to any other pious places, which ought to be employed for the necessities of the ministers and the poor; or [shall presume] to hinder them from being received by those unto whom they by right belong; he shall so long lie under an anathema, until he shall have entirely restored to the Church, and to the administrator or beneficiary thereof, the jurisdictions, goods, effects, rights, fruits, and revenues which he has seized upon, or in what manner soever they have come to him, even by way of gift from a supposititious person; and, until he shall, furthermore, have obtained absolution from the Roman Pontiff. But if he be the patron of the said church, he shall, besides the aforesaid penalties, be by the very act deprived of the right of patronage. And the clerk, who shall be the author of, or shall consent to, any wicked fraud and usurpation of this kind, shall be subjected to the same penalties; as also he shall be deprived of all benefices soever, and be rendered incapable of any others soever; and even after entire satisfaction and absolution, he shall be suspended from the exercise of his orders, at the discretion of his ordinary.  

Yet, further, whereas the same sacred and holy synod, in the preceding session, reserved until another time, for an opportunity that might occur, two articles to be examined and defined, which had been proposed on another occasion, but had not then as yet been discussed, to wit, whether the 