§ 162. The Use of Church Property

[…] and the prescriptions of Greco-Roman legislation forbid the sale and, in general, the dissipation of church property.

The canons threaten deposition against clergy entrusted with the care of the respective part of church property, should they sell or make it over to others.[1] The 12th canon of the Seventh Ecumenical Council says on this: ‘Should any bishop or abbot be found making over to the secular authority, or handing over to some other person, lands belonging to the bishopric or the monastery, let such an act be void, in accordance with the canon of the holy apostles, which says: “Let the bishop take care of all church matters, and administer them, remembering that God oversees him; nor may he appropriate anything of them to himself, or give as gifts to his relatives what is God’s: if they are poor, let him help them as the poor, but let him not, on their pretext, sell what belongs to the church.” If it is objected that the land causes loss and yields no benefit, even in that case the lands ought not to be made over to the local authorities, but rather to clerics or to farmers. And if crafty deceit is employed here, and a landowner buys up the land from a cleric or a farmer, let the sale be void in that case too, but everything must be restored to the bishopric or the monastery; and let the bishop or abbot who does this be removed—the bishop from the bishopric, the abbot from the monastery—as persons who mercilessly squander what they did not themselves acquire.’[2] Similar to this are the laws of the Greco-Roman emperors,[3] and the ordinances of the patriarchal synods of the Middle Ages,[4] which forbid not only the formal sale of anything that is church property, but also every other contract that could be to the detriment of church property, and every application of it to any other purpose.[5] Church law permits an exception to these general prescriptions only when a fully justified reason for it exists—namely, when it is shown that a sale is necessary in order thereby to meet some urgent need of the church,[6] when it is necessary to help some impoverished church or the poor,[7] and when by the sale of something a higher benefit can be secured for the church.[8] Every sale of a piece of church property that cannot be justified by one of these reasons is void.[9]