Page:Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent Buckley.djvu/415

382 any other title of ordination than the deputation to some special minister, such as is prescribed in the Council of Chalcedon, adding (§ 6) as long as the Church conformed to these principles in the selection of sacred ministers, that the ecclesastical order flourished, but that those happy days had passed away, and that new principles were introduced from time to time, by which discipline was vitiated in the selection of the ministers of the sanctuary,

LIII. Likewise that it reckons among these very beginnings of corruption, that a departure was made from the ancient usage, by which, as it says (§ 5), the Church, treading in the footsteps of the apostle, determined that no one should be admitted to the priesthood, unless he who had preserved his baptismal innocence,—inasmuch as it intimates that discipline had been corrupted by decrees and institutes, (1) whether those by which ordinations per saltum were forbidden,, (2) or those by which, according to the necessity and convenience of the churches, ordinations were approved of without a title of special duty, as specially by the Council of Trent ordination to the title of a patrimony, saying the obedience by which those so ordained are obliged to attend to the necessities of the churches, by executing those offices to which they were attached by the bishop for the place and time, as was wont to be done in the primitive Church from the apostolic times, (3) or those by which a distinction of crimes was made by canon law, which render delinquents irregular—as if by this distinction the Church receded from the spirit of the apostle, not by excluding generally and promiscuously from the ecclesiastical ministry all persons whatsoever, who should not have retained their baptismal innocence: A doctrine in each of its parts false rash, calculated to disturb the order introduced for the necessity and convenience of the churches, injurious to the discipline approved by the canons and especially by the decrees of Trent.

LIV. Likewise, that which marks as a shameful abuse ever to give alms for celebrating masses and administering sacraments, as also to receive any profit said to be that of the stole, and generally whatever stipend and fee, which might