THE UNSUSTAINABLE LIGHTNESS OF THOSE MONASTIC PRIVILEGES

The exemption enjoyed by certain abbeys and abbots should be brought back to its exact extent, that of the dog. 593, that is, internal government and discipline, without any de facto extension to the pastoral ministry, who must answer to the diocesan bishop like that of any other religious priest who operates in his territory. None of this would damage the monastic charism, which has never needed mitres and croziers to safeguard the Rule of Saint Benedict. It would only undermine privileges.

– Theology and canon law –

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With this article I intend to follow up and further commentary on that of Father Ariel (cf.. who), who retraced fifteen centuries of monastic history and wondered how it is conceivable that in the same ecclesiastical province in which a suffragan bishop is subjected to the supervision of his own metropolitan, an abbot instead depends directly on the Holy See.

I will try to answer the question as a canonist, limiting myself to just one topic: what are territorial abbeys and exempt abbeys, where they come from and why today, in light of the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council and the current Code of Canon Law, they represent an anomaly that no longer finds any justification.

First of all, it is necessary to clear up a misunderstanding, because under the same label of "monastic privilege" three distinct legal realities are often confused. The first is the territorial abbey, once said an abbey of no diocese, that is, "of no diocese": a territory with its faithful, its parishes and its clergy, taken away from the bishop and entrusted to the abbot as his own shepherd. The second is the exemption, by which a religious institute is removed from the government of the local bishop and subjected to the Roman Pontiff alone. The third does not have a name in law, but it has a formula in practice: «immediately subject to the Holy See», expression that, born to indicate a legal dependence, has in fact become a sort of general safe conduct.

None of these realities arose on a whim. The exemption was born as a defense. The first papal privilege of which we have certain information is that granted on 11 June 628 from Honorius I to the monastery of Bobbio, founded a few years earlier by San Colombano. The bishop of Tortona, I will prove it, he contested the election of the new abbot Bertulf and claimed to submit the monastery to his jurisdiction, coming to procure — according to Jonah's story, biographer of Colombanus - the support of other bishops and dignitaries of the Lombard court at the expense of corruption. King Arioald declared himself incompetent, «it is not mine to discern the motives of the priests» (It is not my job to judge disputes between priests), but he paid Bertulfo's journey to Rome, where the Pope removed Bobbio from the jurisdiction of the bishop of Tortona. In the following centuries, when bishops were often feudal lords and abbeys coveted their assets, placing a monastery under the direct protection of Peter meant saving it from the robberies of those who should have guarded it. Cluny was born in 910 That's right, entrusted by its founder to the Apostles Peter and Paul; he then obtained full exemption from the bishop of Mâcon between the end of the 10th and the beginning of the 11th century, with the privileges of Gregory V in 998 and of John XIX in 1024. Likewise the large territorial abbeys, like the Land of San Benedetto around Montecassino, they were for centuries the only structure capable of administering, defend and evangelize vast rural territories. The Pio-Benedictine Code of 1917 he still regulated them as «abbeys and prelatures no one» (cann. 319-328).

The problem is therefore not the origin of these institutes, but their survival when the reasons that had generated them have disappeared. And they failed not because of an opinion, but for a precise development of doctrine.

The Second Vatican Council he taught that «with episcopal consecration the fullness of the sacrament of orders is conferred» and that individual bishops «are the visible principle and foundation of unity in their particular Churches»[1]. He added that "every legitimate celebration of the Eucharist is directed by the bishop"[2]. The Code of 1983 translated this doctrine into law, defining the diocese as the portion of the people of God entrusted to the pastoral care of the bishop "with the cooperation of the presbytery", so that, adhering to her pastor and reunited by him "through the Gospel and the Eucharist", constitutes a particular Church (can. 369). The particular Church, in other words, it is not an administrative district: it is a sacramental reality that is constituted around the one who possesses the fullness of the priesthood.

Now look at the can. 370, which defines the territorial abbey as a portion of God's people whose care is entrusted, "for special circumstances", to an abbot who governs it "in the manner of a diocesan bishop". E al can. 381 §2, which equates those who preside over these communities in law to the diocesan bishop, "unless the nature of the matter shows otherwise". Well, by the nature of the thing, turns out differently. The territorial abbot, who is not a bishop, he cannot ordain the presbyters of the Church he governs, because the minister of sacred ordination is only the consecrated bishop (can. 1012); he cannot consecrate the chrism with which confirmation is administered in his own abbey, because this too is reserved for the bishop (can. 880 §2). To generate their own ministers and to have the holy oil, this "particular Church" must depend on another bishop, that is, precisely from that figure from whose jurisdiction he claims to be exempt. We are faced with the paradox of a Church that is unable to generate its own sacramental life on its own, led by a shepherd, l’abate, who in law is equivalent to the bishop but in the sacrament remains only a presbyter, an «aesthetic-liturgical parody of a bishop», as my brother wrote ironically in his article (cf.. who). Irony, come to think, anything but out of place and not at all excessive, because legal equality, in this case, it is nothing more than a fiction placed to cover a sacramental void of which certain abbots are the emblem. And the law of the Church, which must follow the sacrament and not precede it, it cannot stand on a fiction.

The case of the exemption of religious institutes is different, that the Code preserves and that, within its limits, it is completely legitimate. The can. 591 allows the Supreme Pontiff, "due to his primacy over the universal Church", to exempt institutes of consecrated life from the government of the local Ordinaries; the dog. 593 establishes that the institutes of pontifical right are subject to the Apostolic See in an immediate and exclusive manner «as regards the internal regime and discipline». The point lies in this last clarification. The Council had already clarified this: the exemption "mainly concerns the internal order of the institutes" and does not prevent the subjection of religious people "to the jurisdiction of the bishops, in accordance with the law"; rather, «all religious people, the exempt and the non-exempt", they are subject to the authority of the bishop in matters of public worship, care of souls, preaching, catechesis and apostolic works[3]. The Code reiterates this unambiguously:

«Religious are subject to the power of the Bishops […] in what concerns the care of souls, the public exercise of divine worship and other apostolic works" (can. 678 § 1).

The exemption, so, protects the choir timetable, the training of novices, the election of the abbot, the administration of the monastery's assets. It doesn't protect, nor could it protect, the priestly ministry exercised towards the faithful, which remains under the inalienable power of the diocesan bishop. When, however, the formula "immediately subject to the Holy See" is read as if it removed the abbey from any supervision of the local bishop, also in what the law expressly reserves for him, we are no longer faced with an exemption, but to an abuse of the exemption. And an abuse that has lasted for centuries ends up being perceived as a right.

The Church itself, the rest, has already indicated the direction. In 1968 Paul VI regulated and restricted the use of pontifical insignia by prelates without episcopal character[4]. In 1976 the Pontiff himself established that no more new territorial abbeys would be erected, unless for very special reasons[5]. In the following decades the territories of several abbeys were returned to the surrounding dioceses; the same happened on 23 October 2014 per Montecassino, when the Holy Father Francis, with bubble favoring contemplation, has transferred its fifty-three parishes and approximately eighty thousand faithful to the diocese of Sora-Aquino-Pontecorvo, today renamed Sora-Cassino-Aquino-Pontecorvo, reducing the territorial abbey to just the abbey church and the monastery with its immediate appurtenances. They remain today, in Italy, the territorial abbeys of Montecassino, Subiaco, Cava de' Tirreni, Montevergine, Monte Oliveto Maggiore and Grottaferrata; outside Italy those of Einsiedeln, Saint-Maurice d’Agaune, Pannon pile, Wettingen-Mehrerau and Tokwon.

The case of Montecassino is particularly eloquent, even if the modesty and sense of shame that the case arouses in us would lead us to remain silent. The can. 370 speaks of a «portion of the people of God, territorially limited": but which people of God is entrusted today to an abbot whose territory coincides with the walls of his own monastery? The most recent official statistics attribute to this "particular Church" only one parish and nineteen baptized faithful. The juridical framework of a particular Church is preserved after removing its content. And when a huge scandal took place in that context (cf.. who) which we wrote about in these columns in an editorial of 2023 (cf.. who), the concrete cost of this architecture clearly emerged: no nearby bishop legitimized to intervene, no metropolitan with supervisory power, a chain of control that, by virtue of the immediate dependence of the abbey on the Holy See, it passes only through Rome and that, as experience teaches without fear of contradiction, always arrives late.

The direction undertaken by Paul VI must therefore be brought to completion. The surviving territorial abbeys and their territories should be abolished, where they still exist, returned to the dioceses from which they were taken. The abbots should be stripped of those insignia that make them, in the eyes of the faithful, of bishops who in fact are not. The exemption enjoyed by certain abbeys and abbots should be brought back to its exact extent, that of the dog. 593, that is, internal government and discipline, without any de facto extension to the pastoral ministry, who must answer to the diocesan bishop like that of any other religious priest who operates in his territory. None of this would damage the monastic charism, which has never needed mitres and croziers to safeguard the Rule of Saint Benedict. It would only undermine privileges.

And this is where the unbearable lightness is captured of these privileges: they weigh nothing on the sacramental level, because they do not add a single degree of Holy Order to the abbot - who remains nothing more than a presbyter; they weigh heavily on the level of ecclesial communion, because they steal men, places and sometimes entire territories to that figure that the Council indicated as the visible principle of unity of the particular Church. A law that preserves what its own ecclesiology is no longer able to justify is not tradition: it's just inertia.

Velletri of Rome, 29 September 2026

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[1] Vatican Council II, Dogmatic constitution The light, NN. 21 e 23.

[2] Vatican Council II, Dogmatic constitution The light, n. 26.

[3] Vatican Council II, Decree Christ the Lord, n. 35, 3-4.

[4] Paul VI, Motu proprio Pontifical insignia, 21 June 1968.

[5] Paul VI, Motu proprio Catholic Church, 23 October 1976.

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