Lawlor — Calendar of the Liher Ruher of the Diocese of Ossor/j. 171 



that metropolitans should celebrate provincial councils with their suffragan 

 bishops every year, the following ordinances are made by the Archbishop 

 with the consent and assent of his suffragans and the clergy of his diocese 

 and province : — (1) Since some interfere with the ecclesiastics whose office 

 it is to collect tithes, or their proctors or servants, so that the pope's tithes 

 cannot be collected ; while others, because ecclesiastics prosecute their 

 ecclesiastical rights in the ecclesiastical courts, indict them, or cause them 

 to be indicted, or procure their arrest, so that clerks are arrested in the 

 public streets or in their dwellings, and are imprisoned till they pay a 

 fine, and meanwhile are robbed of their goods ; all persons so acting are 

 pronounced excommunicated, and their ' loca ' and lands where clerks shall 

 be imprisoned are to be interdicted, and to be denounced by the ordinaries 

 as interdicted, until the prisoners are set at liberty with their goods, and 

 satisfaction is made for their losses ; and during the interdict their captors 

 and those who dwell on the lands shall be deprived of ecclesiastical burial 

 and other sacraments of the Church, saving only the baptism of infants 

 and penitence of the dying. (2) Since some seeking the refuge of the 

 Church are so closely guarded that they can scarcely be supplied with 

 food, and some are violently removed from the churches and cemeteries 

 or the public road ' post abjurationem terre ' and slain, all who take part in 

 such deeds ijjso facto incur sentence of greater excommunication. (3) All 

 persons who remove or destroy the goods of ecclesiastical persons or churches 

 against the will of the guardians, or who consent to or procure such acts, 

 are declared to be violators of the immunity of the Church, and therefore 

 to incur i2Jso facto sentence of greater excommunication, the King and 

 Queen and their children only excepted. (4) Since it is a matter of 

 ascertained lav.' that religious men of whatever degree are inhibited from 

 inducing any to vow or promise to select their churches as their place of 

 burial, or not to depart from such selection already made, and from 

 administering extreme unction or the eucharist or solemnizing matrimony 

 for laics, without special licence from the rector, vicar, or parish priest, 

 and that those who (except in cases allowed by law, or through privileges 

 of the Apostolic See, or by provincial or synodal statutes) absolve persons 

 excommunicated by canon, or, in their own words, ' a pena at a culpa,' 

 ijjso facto incur sentence of excommunication only to be absolved by the 

 Apostolic See — and yet some disregard these prohibitions ; it is ordered 

 that every diocesan shall yearly make inquisition, and if he find such 

 transgressors of the canons, shall pronounce them by name to have incurred 

 the censures by law appointed, and shall cause all such to be publicly 

 denounced as a class four times a year Ijy the parochial priests. (5) No 



