honour of God, to whose service they are dedicated. If, however, the matter be trivial, as, for example, some slight irreverence to the Blessed Sacrament, sacrilege will only be a venial sin.
3. Personal sacrilege is committed in three ways:
(a) By violating the privilege of the canon, by which it is forbidden under pain of excommunication to lay violent hands on the clergy or on religious (Can. 2343).
(b) By violating the privilege of the immunity of the clergy from civil jurisdiction, as far as this is still in force (Can. 120).
(c) When persons consecrated to God by the vow of chastity violate their vows. Such persons are all those who are in sacred orders, and all religious who take public vows even though they be simple and not solemn. All sins, therefore, against purity, whether internal or external, which these persons commit, or which others commit with them, are sacrileges. It is a disputed point among theologians whether a private vow of chastity makes the person sacred, so that sins committed against the vow are sacrilegious. Both opinions are extrinsically probable, though the negative view seems more in accordance with what was said above, in keeping with the common teaching of divines. The question is not of great practical importance, since sins committed against chastity by those who are under a private vow have certainly a twofold malice, one against chastity, and the other against religion; and sins against religion are called sacrileges in a wide sense.
4. Local sacrilege is also committed in three ways:
(a) By violating the immunity of sacred places as far as this is still in force.
(b) By committing certain crimes in a church or public oratory, which has been consecrated or at any rate blessed, by which crimes they are polluted according to canon law. Those crimes are homicide, suicide, any shedding of blood by violence which constitutes a mortal sin, the putting of the church to impious and base uses, and the burial within a church or oratory of an unbaptized person, or of one who has been excommunicated after a condemnatory or declaratory sentence (Can. 1172).
(c) By performing certain actions and by committing certain sins which of their nature or by special disposition of law are especially repugnant to the reverence due to holy places. Sacrilege is thus committed by holding a public
