Folia Canonica 4. (2001)
STUDIES - George Nedungatt: Who is to Administer Church Property? - The Answer of the Ecumenical Councils
124 GEORGE NEDUNGATT de proprio clero ad regendas ecclesias habere oportet” (all the bishops are to have economi appointed from among their own clergy). The decree of the Fourth Council of Rome (502) even claimed that it was on the authority of divine law that the laity was excluded from the administration of church property. “It is not to remain as a pattern for the laypeople to presume, however religious or powerful they be, and in whatever city and in whatever manner it be, to dispose of ecclesiastical property. It is a divine teaching that only priests are entrusted with the power to administer them.”18 This appeal to “a divine teaching” that excludes the laity from the administration of the temporal property of the Church, is intriguing. The reference is probably to the seven Hellenists “ordained” (as deacons) by the Apostles to be in charge of the distribution of food to the Hellenist widows (Acts 6:1-6). Though it constitutes an Apostolic example and authoritative precedent for church law and practice that the administration of the temporalities of the Church should be under the authority of the bishops as successors of the Apostles, that is not necessarily to exclude non-ordained economi by divine law. It is not rare for priestdom to present its teaching and decisions under the aura of an arcane divine sanction, seemingly as a compensation for the consciousness of the want of otherwise convincing reasons. While lay people are thus excluded from the administration of Church property both in the East and in the West, in certain places like North Africa till the invasion of the Vandals (439) they are particularly prominent as seniores laid or seniores ecclesiae, a council or group of elders, namely the influential lay people who help the bishop in supervising the treasury and in the maintenance of the buildings.19 That the exclusion of the laity was not universal is clear also from the fact that in the Meravingian period laymen are called (advocati) to represent bishops and abbots in secular affairs as procurators, handle their cause in tribunals and even defend monastic property with arms.20 In the Thomaschristian Church of India, the laity had a preponderant role in the administration of Church temporalities during the East Syrian period. This tradition, however, needs to be viewed in its historical context and appraised in relation to the disciplinary tradition of the universal Church. The seventh ecumenical council (Nicea II) dropped the Chalcedonian restriction that the administrator of Church property had to be a cleric, a silence that both opened the door to a new interpretation and let stay the contrary practice of lay administration under the authority of the bishop, as we shall see. 18 P. G. Caron, I poteri giuridici del laicato nella Chiesa primitiva, Milano 21975, 230. 19 W. H. C. Frend, The seniores laici and the Origins of the Church in North Africa, Journal of Theological Studies 12 (1961) 280-284 20 Gaudemet, Église (nt. 16), 252,577-578.
