Folia Canonica 4. (2001)

STUDIES - George Nedungatt: Who is to Administer Church Property? - The Answer of the Ecumenical Councils

WHO IS TO ADMINISTER CHURCH PROPERTY?

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IV. Restraining the Mismanagement of Temporalities

The ecumenical councils were realistic about human beings. If they were cautious about the laity, they did not blindly trust the clerics either. The lay-clerical divide was not a sinner-saint divide, a distinction between black and white, but a matter of more or less as regards honesty and reliability. The choice was not between good and bad but between better and worse. The councils had to curb (prevent and restrain) abuses lest “God’s property” should be put into the service of Mammon.

The Council of Chalcedon knew of individual clerics who had got entangled in the business affairs of some third party and condemned the driving force of avarice behind such immersion in secular affairs (canon 3). It is different when a bishop or cleric or monk is obliged by the State law to assume charge of minors or when “one’s bishop enjoins to assume charge of the goods of the Chiirch” or when the law of charity urges the care of the orphans, the widows, and the needy.

We have seen the canons against the clerics plundering the belongings of a deceased bishop. The following canon 26 of the Council of Chalcedon was a response to real cases of mismanagement of Church property by bishops, however rare they might have been. The council decreed that the bishops were no longer to administer Church property single-handed: they were enjoined to have a cleric as administrator who would not only be a helper but a witness, making for transparency.

According to our information, in some churches the bishops manage church property without administrators. So it has been decided that every church having a bishop is also to have an administrator, belonging to its own clergy, to administer the goods of the church according to the mind of the bishop concerned, so that the church ’s administration may not remain clandestine with the risk of the church ’s property getting dispersed and the episcopate exposed to reproach. If he does not comply with this, he is to be subject to the divine canons.21

Thus, according to this Chalcedonian norm, the bishop is to be flanked by a clerical administrator. The norm excluded the laity from being economus. The Council in Trullo (692)22 went a step further in its thirty-fifth canon. Trullo’s

21 Tanner (ed.), Decrees (nt. 3), vol. 1, 99. I have slightly adapted the English version:

e.g. “unaudited” forápáprupov (“without witness”, hence “clandestine”) is forcedly modern; “church business” is too general, in the context, for 7tpáypaxa (“property,” as at the end of the canon). Cf. P-P. Joannou, Discipline générale antique, tome 1,1. Les canons des conciles oecuméniques (Pontificia Commissione per la Redazione dei Codice di Diritto Canonico Orientale, Fonti, fase. IX), Rome 1962, 89-90.

22 The Council that met in Constantinople in 692 issued 102 canons making good the legislative void left by the fifth (553) and the sixth (680-681) ecumenical councils. Hence it is called the Quinisext (nevtetcGf]) Council or the “Council in Trullo” after the Domed