Abstract

This chapter investigates the legal origins of the prohibition against impaired clerics. Petitions and letters helped to define ‘invalidity’ as a legal category, since they contributed directly to medieval canon law's statutes regarding so-called ‘defects’ of body and mind. This institutional construction of disability allowed the Apostolic See to set a standard for bodies and minds, in order to distinguish the normatively able-bodied from those deemed ‘abnormal’, impaired. The Papal Chancery thus defined a physical standard in which a body diverging from the norm was considered ‘defective’, and thereby unfit for clerical office, according to two criteria: its capacity and its image. They were only two mitigating factors for disabled clerics: their innocence and their ‘ignorance’ (i.e., their lack of ‘culpability’) in relation to the existence of their impairment.

Keywords: Canon Law; Default; Irregularity; Normality; Circumstances

The prospect of a wholly undesirable – an impaired – cleric serving in their midst was simply too much for the Augustinian community of Saint-Saturnin (Toulouse) to countenance. They were compelled to appeal to the very top of the Church hierarchy, the Pope himself. With this letter to Saint-Saturnin's abbot, Pope John XXII acceded to the wider community's wishes and recalled the prohibition of such improper clerical appointments, presumably much to their relief. So doing, John lent papal authority to the characterization of impaired men as unfit for clerical office, further concretizing statutes set out in canon law. Physical, sensory, and/or intellectual ‘defects’ disqualified men from clerical office, not the least because such impairments were often, though not always, considered to reflect the individual's moral defect. Alongside stipulating specific impairments, the Chancery's response is productively expansive, with an effusive prohibition on any condition, physical or mental, which rendered a cleric ‘in any other way unfit’ for the role. In canon law, such conditions were grouped similarly broadly under the categories of ‘defects of body’ (defectus corporis) or ‘defects of mind’ (defectus mentis).