Folia Canonica 4. (2001)
STUDIES - George Nedungatt: Who is to Administer Church Property? - The Answer of the Ecumenical Councils
126 GEORGE NEDUNGATT rank as a complementary ecumenical council, wholly devoted to Church discipline, is secure in the East. Not in the West. However, the first canon of Nicea II (quoted above) sanctioned again the canons of “the six holy and universal synods,” whereby the ecumenical rank of the Trullan Council (Quinisext) is implicitly affirmed, seeing that the fifth and the sixth ecumenical councils did not issue any canons. In fact, the ecumenicity of the Trullan legislation is being increasingly recognised also in the West, as it used to be till the sixteenth century. The council forbade plunder by the metropolitans of the goods belonging to a deceased suffragan bishop or to his diocese: No metropolitan shall take away or appropriate the personal belongings or those of the Church of a deceased bishop who is under the jurisdiction of his see; rather, they shall remain in the safekeeping of the clergy of the Church whose bishop has died until the promotion of a new bishop; unless there are no clerics left in this same Church, in which case the metropolitan shall keep them intact and give them to the bishop who shall be ordained.* 23 All these canons presuppose that it is the bishop or the metropolitan who, in spite of some occasional abuse, is entrusted with the administration of the temporal goods of the Church. The ecumenical Council of Nicea II (787), which, as we saw, in its first canon sanctioned and sealed with its authority all the foregoing canons, enacted as follows in canon 11. Since we are obliged to observe all the sacred canons, we ought also to maintain in all its integrity the one that says that there should be administrators in each Church. Therefore if each metropolitan bishop installs an administrator in his own Church, that is well and good; but if not, the bishop of Constantinople on his own authority has the right to appoint one over the other’s Church; and similarly with metropolitan bishops, if the bishops under them do not choose administrators to hold these posts in their own Churches. The same rule is also to be observed with respect to monasteries 24 Note that Nicea II dropped the Chalcedonian restriction that the administrator had to be a cleric. In practice there were already lay administrators, and Nicea II implicitly recognised and sanctioned it through silence. And the practice continued and was commonly regarded as lawful, though the canonist Balsamon commented that the Chalcedonian norm was not abrogated. But custom prevailed over canonical comment. Here we have an example of a contrary universal custom abrogating a canon. Hall in which it convened. Excluding a few “anti-Roman” canons, all the others were later approved also by the bishop of Rome, a condition for the ecumenicity of a council... For recent studies on this council by several scholars, and for the text of its canons newly translated into English, see G. Nedungatt- M. Featherstone (eds.), The Council in Trullo Revisited (Kanonika 6), Rome 1995. 23 Ibid., 113. 24 Tanner (ed.), Decrees (nt. 3), 147; cf. Joannou, Discipline (nt. 21), 265-266.
